thoughts of an ex-poet

A few nights ago, my boyfriend and I drove to a nearby observatory to look at the strawberry moon. For whatever reason, the observatory is currently closed, so we sat beneath an oak tree and watched it in silence. It was the kind of experience I could have written a poem about, but I found my mind as empty as the late-night streets. That is to say: very.

All my life I have been a poet. I seem to have been born with words exploding forth from my lips or my fingers, scribbled on the back of elementary math worksheets or hastily typed into Google Docs. Poetry is the basis of how I articulate my experiences; I think highly abstractly, and the figurative and artistic nature of poems transcribes my thoughts into comprehensiveness.

But for at least the last year--maybe longer--I have struggled with my craft. And I do truly consider it a craft; I have treated poetry as an obsessive compulsion refined over years, my progress evidenced in various prizes and contest awards. But for whatever reason, I no longer find poetry to be an adequate tool for translation. My thoughts, if surfaced, generally remain now only in my mind, soon to be forgotten. I simply do not feel as inspired as I used to. As I was looking at the moon, held in embrace by a boy whom I love, appreciation for nature and present company filled every extremity and body cell. But I did not feel compelled to write about it, at least not through poetry. I was content to let the experience and its feelings pass me by.

Perhaps it is a byproduct of growing up and maturing. Perhaps I feel less of a need to share my thoughts, at least in that form of writing. I am persistently reminded of Plato's allegory of the cave. I wrote most of my poetry in the darkness and those cold stone walls, but sometime between the last few years and now I left in search of the light. It is impossible to write, especially to write poetry, when I am constantly reminded of the inadequacy of my experiences and knowledge. I know that I know nothing, but poems cannot be built off the basis of nothing. What can I offer the world that has not already been written about? What have I discovered? It seems to be nothing. There is so much that I do not know, and so much I know that is wrong.

Moreover, writing poetry is beyond exhausting. It gives me a headache. Thus far, I have not created a poem which produced a creative satisfaction that outweighed my frustration at my feeble mind. Before, this was mediated by my consuming passion to create, my inability to simply not write, my instinctual craving of the pen. I cannot help but wonder whether I have lost that instinct, or spent it all. Lately my poetry feels unbearably forced.

whiskeyding

I feel this deeply. I write, but why? All that could be said or sung has been said or sung, by more eloquent voices than mine.

There is only the animal left, the pure experience of existence. We can try to abstract it and derive some kind of solely 'human' meaning from it, but this starts to seem like a pathetically sad ego-driven exercise. We are just another creature, no more valuable or important than the salmon or the voles that eat the roots of our berry bushes.

I find less solace in words as I get older, and more in simple physicality. Weaving, whittling, butchering animals, planting things in the soil. I am bad at them all, and they remain the only things that matter. Others have written on all this, often movingly, but at the heart there is only the simple doing of the thing. Pick up the stone, make the cut. There is no more.