Lazy Day Cheap Thrills: Rereading My Terrible Poetry

Whether it’s coming across that head-scratching haircut forever memorialized in the high school yearbook, or stumbling upon gushing love letters you passed down the aisle to that special someone in middle school, looking back at your ‘old self’ through words and pictures can be a cringe-inducing ordeal. There’s some kind of innate human tendency to want to reject things from our past that we acknowledge are familiar, but we no longer recognize as being ‘us.’ They seem detached from who we are, somehow alien, even if they are as much a part of our identity as the reflection we just gazed at in the mirror. However, fighting through the discomfort and examining these relics from past iterations of ourselves can be a restorative and revealing experience. If you can come to terms with the way you used to be, you can probably better handle who you are now, right?

Yesterday, I spent far too many hours digging out old notebooks full of poetry I had written dating back to the year 2000—a year which, in case you hadn’t realized, was a long, long, long time ago. The process of looking back on my awkwardly spilt ink, from beginning to end, was not easy. So many of the poems were quite dreadful—not just due to ill-advised word selection or failed attempts at being clever, but because the sentiments they were attempting to capture were frequently muddled and misguided. It sent a chill up my spine realizing that I had actually stood up and read some of this material out loud in front of other human beings at poetry readings in high school. For a great deal of it, perhaps mercifully, I had completely forgotten who or what I was writing about (thanks in large measure to my propensity to obscure meaning miles below the surface). Nevertheless, for some of it, I was able to imagine exactly where I was and what I was thinking when I first wrote them, which unleashed a flood of memories I hadn’t confronted in quite a long time.

After reading through hundreds of poems, it was a fairly simple task to determine that many, if not all of them, could be neatly packed into one of a handful of categories:

• Poems about specific people/events: These were somewhat direct (for me) in subject matter, but because so many were written about some ‘you’ out there, I cannot specifically recall now who this ‘you’ was (or if it was really about anyone at all). The ones about more straightforward topics rendered the most successful recollection while reading, so if I had to save only one set of poems in a fire, it would probably be these.
• The philosophical/symbolic journey: Early on, I was hell-bent on writing lengthy poems about being stuck in bizarre dream-like worlds, heavy on detailed imagery that the protagonist had to wade through in order to come to some revelation (or often to just learn there was no point at all). These works now come off as extremely juvenile, and an obvious sign of someone in the process of growing up and tackling major life questions for the first time (with the help of a high school-level philosophy class).
• Emo Poetry: Writing poems was always a way for me to vent in short spurts that didn’t really require complete thoughts or full sentences, so there was no pressure to make them look good or even make sense. So I would reach for the notebook and pen when I got back from class after some kind of monumental tragedy had befallen me, such as the dining hall running out of chicken fingers or something. Some of these poems ended up being okay, more so by pure chance than anything else (perhaps because there were so many).
• Let’s be funny: In order to counterbalance the emo works (so I wouldn’t look crazy if someone found them), I decided to write odes to toasters, blueberries, horseradish, rubber duckies, etc., to prove that I was not out of my mind (though this strategy probably backfired). Today, these come off as mere filler, but they did make me chuckle a bit simply because they were so ridiculous.  
• Stream of consciousness: These were easily spotted because the handwriting was atrocious and big and off the lines on the page. I would sometimes write these late at night in the dark with my eyes closed, or after I’d had a couple of drinks and just let my mind put words on a page—without thinking about anything in particular. These poems were usually indecipherable in the sense that I have no idea what I was trying to say and they never stayed on topic. Though I may have felt I was channeling some higher power at the time, years later I can safely say they were probably just a waste of perfectly good college ruled notebook paper.
• Messing with Forms: I went through several phases in which the entire point of writing was to create shapes out of the lines on the page, or to incorporate pictures I’d drawn into a set of words. I was a big fan of ee cummings in high school, so I tried to model a lot of what I was doing then after his work.  Some of these were actually interesting and were welcome diversions from the typical straight line form I normally used.

After finally getting through all the notebooks, I realized my choice to read the poems chronologically was the correct decision; I could see how my style mutated over time and how, surprisingly, my handwriting got progressively sloppier between 9^th grade and college. At the beginning, I wrote with a basic repetitive, stanza-based structure that frequently used rhyme, but by the end, there was largely nothing but ‘free form’ poetry; I am not sure if this can be attributed to some type of liberation from the strictures of the past or just because I grew lazy. Even with a great deal of upheaval in my writing, I did develop a ‘style’ that was pretty well-cemented by the end of 10^th grade, one that would continually pop up years later when writing (even now). Perhaps this means I really haven’t changed as much as I thought. Or perhaps I stopped trying.

Now, more than a decade after some of these poems were first put to paper, I can genuinely appreciate them for what they are and were. I don’t envision publishers clamoring for these tattered volumes upon my death, but I can say that some of them weren’t so bad—at least decent enough that I will perhaps try to read them again from time to time, if for no other reason than to bring back memories that would otherwise be lost forever. Otherwise, I’ll just let a lot of those words lie where I left them, knowing that they, at one time, served a purpose for me—to get things from my head to the paper and make them real, and to help me make sense of a world that was constantly shifting below my feet and above my head. They were therapeutic and provided a safe opportunity to experiment with creative forces that had no other outlet. And really, that’s not only the reason I wrote back then, but the reason I write now— to try to figure the world out by way of pen and a paper. No matter how many awful poems are produced as a result, I can’t see anything wrong with that. 

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An example of a regretfully undated, but quite old, poem:

Home

There was no such thing

As death or suffering,

Just runny noses and hiccups.

The green was greener.

The sun was brighter.

The red bricks were a fortress

To shield my eyes 

From the dangers of the world.

They were sturdy and strong

But we outgrew them.

The paths into the woods I take

Are made of red bricks.

I look down on them and

Think of days gone by.

We should have learned to dance sooner

Or continued to paint

But really all that matters

Is the trail through the woods

Leading to some tiny village

Where men make their own

Forts of red brick.

The murky puddle falls victim

To the workings of Nature

And each droplet vanishes into the sky

Leaving behind nothing but

Dry red clay.