I started writing poetry relatively late in my writing life. I suppose I tried a few times when I was in high school, but creative writing was not exactly stressed in our school and we never studied poetry at all. Perhaps that’s why I dropped out!
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties and I made a friend who was a poet that I started writing poetry and getting involved in readings. Soon after I started I had my first child. Poetry writing was completely consistent with his presence in my life. I hauled him around to cafes and used evening readings as a way to decompress from a day of motherhood. He was generally not comfortable in social situations as a preschooler, so we spent a lot of quiet time at home.
Enter my daughter. I have written poetry since she arrived — I know I wrote one poem that I remember about her. A friend told me about how she’d been a rebellious child and her father had “broken her spirit.” I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do with my very spirited daughter, and I used the poem to try to find an answer to what I did want to do.
No answer came, that I remember. But I notice that since she was born, my output of poetry has largely dried up. Unlike her brother, she is not happy with the contemplative life. She wants action, and if there is no action, she makes it! So sitting around with me while I scribble in a notebook is, for her, a reason to make excitement.
And I’m so involved with other activities that take me out evenings these days that when a poetry reading that I want to attend comes along, I just don’t seem to get out the door.
Poetry, more than any other art that I’ve practiced, is really context-dependent. There are certain types of experiences that for me really lend themselves to exploration in poetry. Apparently being the mother of my daughter is not one of them!
Another interesting intersection with my writing life has happened recently with my son. At the beginning of third grade, I remember telling his teacher that his weakest area was writing. He hated doing it. If he had to write a description of our house, he’d say something like “Our house is two stories tall and we live in it.” Getting any detail out of him was excruciating. His third grade teacher, in the end, didn’t really have him write that much. He did one longish report on crystals that went quite well.
What a difference a year makes! Recently at a meeting with his teacher, she surprised me by saying, “An area where he really shines is in his writing.”
I did a bit of an aural double-take. Come again?
She showed me a writing sample from the beginning of the year and one from early January. The difference was astounding.
Now his class is doing a newspaper, and I’m going to go in and help them. It’ll be the first time that I’ve specifically helped one of his classes with writing. I realize that he’s finally getting old enough that he can take part in what he used to sit on the sidelines for. He’s getting to an age, in fact, where his interactions with adults can go to a whole new level. It’s pretty exciting. I know that the teenage years can be really hard, but it’s also exciting to see him growing up. I’m looking forward to finding out what else he’ll surprise me with!
Meanwhile, I wonder if my poetry-writing life will come back to me at some point. Perhaps when (if?) my relationship with my daughter isn’t so intense, I’ll be able to focus again on the sort of inner energy that poetry requires. In the meantime, when I walk every morning, I sometimes think of poems to the rhythm of my steps. So far I haven’t gotten a chance to write them down, but at least I’m thinking them.
It’s a start!
