Nothing Is Beneath Poetry
Updated: Sep 30
with James King
"The art of the poem is to open a door to allow them to care, to open their eyes to a particular truth as you see it."
Not too long ago, I was a member of a writing group dedicated to writing a poem a day during Poetry Month. On Day 7, one of the more active members of the group shared his poem in our online chat with the caveat that he “promised not to write about the weather this month, but couldn’t help it!” To be fair, we’d had a particularly vicious April so far, and the poem was beautiful. His comment got me wondering, though. He talked about writing about the weather as if it were some dirty thing, but what was so wrong about that? Moreover, who had he promised not to write about the weather?
Poetry is an ancient art form, and sometimes the weight of that millenia-old tradition can be a burden. Especially in this moment of constant turmoil, it feels like we poets must constantly write about/for/against “The Big Thing Happening Right Now” in order to properly do our jobs as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” re: Shelley. That’s a lot of responsibility! Sometimes, when I sit at my desk, I’m paralyzed by ideas of what I should write, as a poet who has an awareness of the world and empathy for the suffering of others. I come to the page in that state of mind, and sometimes it works, but more often than not, I fail. I bash my head against the blank screen again and again and step away from those fretful hours with a page or two of stiff, didactic verse, more suited for a history textbook than a poetry collection. I think that the issue here is approaching the writing with too much concern for “subject” and not enough about the art of it. Too often we say “I want to write a poem about such-and-such” and not “I want to write a poem that does or feels like this.” Having read poetry submissions for literary journals for well over a decade, I encounter many poems about quote-unquote “important subjects” which nonetheless fall flat in the actual reading.
The antidote for this is a slower writing process. Pay attention. Your notebook or Notes App is your best friend. Collect observations and phrases as they occur to you: your loves and the little things they do, people you see whose lives trail in front and behind them like exhaust from a car in the cold, the trash they leave in their wake, the food you eat that makes you grateful to have a mouth, any kind of animal, and especially any kind of confusion or places where the seams of the world don’t quite stitch closed. Your questioning is proof of your learning. As the poet Carl Phillips writes in his book Coin of the Realm, “the proof of the gesture of inquiry is the poem itself. The poem is evidence that I have moved from the self I was to the different self I am now…” When such material reaches critical mass and you feel no choice but to write, then write into the heat that you find there. By doing so, you will most likely reach what subject or issue you originally intended to reach, whether directly or indirectly.
Your hopes and anxieties and understandings of the world will manifest in the way you pay attention. As the poet Matthew Olzmann, a mentor of mine, once said, a poem is always about two things. Extended further, it doesn’t necessarily matter what that first thing is—what in semantics we call the vehicle that carries the tenor, or substance, of the underlying metaphor. In what is probably his most famous poem, “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem,” Olzmann couches an extraordinarily deep love inside the mundane, encapsulated in a simple act of service—“a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, / which you paid for with your last damn dime / because you once overheard me say I liked it.” In writing this poem, which on its surface is about soda, Olzmann tangles complicated themes of marriage (and the failures thereof), gender roles, consumerism, and poverty.
"Poetry is an ancient art form, and sometimes the weight of that millenia-old tradition can be a burden. Especially in this moment of constant turmoil, it feels like we poets must constantly write about/for/against “The Big Thing Happening Right Now” in order to properly do our jobs as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world....'"
For the poem to be complete, the emotional “lens,” as it were, must be zoomed all the way out, capturing everything, the good and the bad. In fact, putting the two in the same frame dissolves the binary between “good” and “bad,” between “important” and “trivial” experiences—each is colored by the other. This is a humbling act—noticing, combining, reserving judgement. On the other hand, vagaries are useless: specifics are valuable, anchors to the experience. You are allowed to pursue beauty. Sure, as poet Noor Hindi writes in her poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” “colonizers write about flowers.” I think it can also be said: “colonizers write about only flowers.”
Write into what stimulates your intellectual and emotional wonder. Science and history are great launching points in this regard—history in particular is very fruitful, as its loudest echoes are always in current events. You can write a poem about doing laundry with your partner and somewhere in there, Donald Trump will launch the Iran War. You can write a poem about a snowstorm on April 7th and realize that this is a consequence of the ongoing climate crisis, which is linked to the crisis of capitalism, etc. etc. Or you do not have to do any of these things. It’s your poem.
The difficulty is in silencing that inner critic, which so often is overly attuned to ideas of the audience and the “shoulds” of writing. Thoughts swirl in the poet’s mind: They won’t care about this. They won’t know what this is. Perhaps not. But the art of the poem is to open a door to allow them to care, to open their eyes to a particular truth as you see it. Additionally, who is “they,” anyway? Especially in mainstream poetry publishing, we imagine our audience to be hypercritical fellow poets, constantly comparing our work to the work of other poets and their own, and that sometimes is the case. However, plenty of poems reach other audiences—family, friends, coworkers, social media acquaintances—intentionally or by accident, and still others reach none at all except the poet themselves. 99% of my drafts never see the light of day, and that’s okay. That’s part of the process.
"Write into what stimulates your intellectual and emotional wonder."
Image: Vihma eel by Mikkelsaar, Hilda (autor) - Art Museum of Estonia, Estonia - CC0.
Despite all our preconceptions about it and the storied tradition we work in, poetry is not snobbish. Nothing is beneath poetry. It’s promiscuous. It’ll take anything you give it, and give it right back. Figuring out what to write about is less important than figuring out the way you want to write.
James King holds an MFA from UNCW and serves as co-Poetry Editor at Bear Review. His work has received support from GrubStreet, Chautauqua, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Individual poems have appeared in The Boiler, ONE ART, Passages North, and others, and have been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. He lives in New Hamps
hire with his partner. You can find him online at jamesedwardking.net