An Assortment of Not-Rights

Listening to poetry, almost like an affidavit stating I can’t read poetry and I never have, although that’s a highly shortsighted and, frankly, annoying statement to make and what I mean is: all writers have flaws. Some avoid metaphors, others try not to reveal anything about themselves within their writing, in a highly technical display of craft that almost reads like they’re trying very hard to show you their core, down to the bones, but it’s just their teeth bared (paradoxically, they’ve revealed they’re stubborn), and other writers avoid the huffs and grunts of describing every detail of a moment as an entirely volitional act, like it’s not my job to set the mood. 

Yet I get the sense that [my flaw is] poetry- it’s too bare, I’m aware that much of what I write is poetry, except that when I write it within one large chunk like this I can hide behind labels like creative nonfiction & autofictive essays & vignettes or whatever complicated way of avoiding saying yes!!! I’m a Poet!!! And I’m aware when I’m fourty-something I’ll be thinking, how dramatic, but I feel as I’m a grand poser calling myself a “writer,” I mean, it’s not like I’m a creative writing major from the Midwest, some mysterious source of income, and honestly, I never even liked Dear Evan Hansen. Should I move near the Great Lakes? Is that the solution?

And God, I want to do that so badly, that bullshit that doesn’t fly anywhere else: have the words boil up from that pit in the stomach to the throat and let it bounce off your tonsils and let it get stuck against the ridges of the hard palate and it doesn’t even matter if it’s not retrieved, regorged, because everyone will still know what you mean. ex. The river froze over and of course that means you miss your friend. ex. My coffee was slightly more acidic that day. Like yeah, I feel that too. I feel it so much, your chest against mine and we’ve never met. Not like me, I mean, they write it so simply. 

All the great writers are poets – even the ones that don’t write poems, and the ones that don’t write at all, even the ones that walk by me on the street and I think they have to be a poet, they walk in that way where they just know they’re worth it. It’s romantic to say I write poetry, I’m a poet; more drawn out, the underlying is i’ll write poems for you. About you? The former when we’re in love and the latter after you’re gone. I’m a writer? It’s gritty and raw. I do what I want & I don’t have a subdivision. My diary entries and research articles read the same. And frankly I don’t even have enough jurisdiction to be saying there is some disjunction between writing and poetry because we all know they are one and the same, one circle nestled in another. It is my affliction that I heave in the grey area.