Some writers seem to inhale and exhale poetry, but I am not one of them. I struggle to write vivid imagery and sometimes envy the poets who so easily compose winding verse about all the little, easily overlooked details that give a poem life: things like the precise smell of tangerine peels or the way a patch of sunlight lands on the carpet. I do not bleed metaphors so easily. The sound of distant birds chirping in the afternoon while leaves outside my window rustle softly in the wind―this creates some traces of an undefinable feeling, but I have not the words to write a poem to explain.
When I describe imagery―such as peach blossoms as the color of cheeks―some small, ashamed part of me has labored for several moments to find a suitably poetic comparison that seems effortless enough to blend in with contemporary poetry (fruit usually works well). Secretly, I wonder if that makes me a fraud. Do other poets think this way without having to twist and turn? Am I missing some special, poetic gene that grants the gift to see the world as a flock of starlings or a school of fish? Perhaps I am not built right to be a poet because I look at the sky and see only the color blue, not the hue of thistles and anemones.
I try to think of poetry as a puzzle to assemble or a message to decode. As much as I prefer the humanities, I can’t help but find math easier to reckon with. I like having a convergent solution. It’s simpler. Less messy. But there is no algorithm to demystify poetry―as far as I have found―and I am left feeling like a traveler in the desert in search of an oasis of meaning. This is why poetry is frustrating. Books about poetry have shown me how skilled analysis looks to the outsider: the reader peels back the soft layers of the poem’s form and structure, gently touches words and rhythms, unfolds meaning like the fronds of a fern. These books have described the process, but magic can never be fully explained. So sometimes I feel like a muggle bouncing off of Station 9¾.
Yet perhaps the near inscrutability of poetry is what draws me to it. Poetry is nebulous, elusive, frustrating. I write poetry and call myself a poet, but I feel more like a child writing her alphabet by imitating the shapes of the letters than a writer who knows the intimate nuances of language and sound. Part of me is afraid I am alone in these feelings, but I think a part of writing poetry is baring our human frailties to the world. I would rather be transparent than fabricated; I would rather be honest than artificial.