Alarie Tennille's Blog: Alarie's Poetry and Point of View - Posts Tagged "vocation"

Thanks to The Last Brahmin for posing two challenging questions.

(A) What does poetry mean to you?
and
(B) Why do you write poetry?

I found I couldn't really separate the answers. What poetry means to me ties so closely into why I write it. Getting from A to B was a long journey for me, so my answer will wander a bit, too.

My parents were readers. My mother read to me before I could talk, so I was reading on my own as soon as I possibly could. I was also grateful that she continued to read to me after I could read – always something a bit more advanced that she wanted to share like Louisa May Alcott's novels. My mother grew up in the Great Depression generation, when children were required to memorize a lot of poetry (cheap entertainment). She used to recite long humorous poems from memory and taught me scansion of meter long before we touched on that in school, which we barely did.

In other words, literature was in my blood. Poetry is a subset of that. For most of my life, it was a small subset. At 17 I decided I wanted to be a writer, but didn't envision myself as a poet. After about a dozen poetry workshops, I got the wake up call. I've only been publishing poems for the last 10 years and simultaneously reading it by the truckload. You can't write what you don't read.

Mama's scansion lessons paid off. Being able to write rhymed, metered verse paid my living for many years as a greeting card writer. My employer paid for those poetry workshops as a way to reward and improve my writing. It worked, and I certainly feel rewarded! (I learned from Jane Hirshfield, Ed Hirsch, Ted Kooser, and Bob Hicok, just to name a few).

For me, writing poetry is my creative expression, my pleasure, and my vocation. It suits me because my thoughts and interests flutter about. I can write about my childhood in one poem, Monet in the next, followed by vampires. I couldn't face months of writing a long manuscript that required more cohesion. I love the brevity and concision of poetry, both as a writer and reader.

I was interested in art before writing and see poetry as painting with words.

As you can see, there's no stopping me when I launch into chatty writing like this, but I write short poems and put a lot of attention into weeding them.

I might even say that novels and plays are my outer world and sense of adventure. Poetry is my inner sanctum, where I discover and share more about who I am and what it means to be human.