I’ve been a writer since childhood, but only in the past few years have I discovered that my truest love is poetry. I adore line breaks, rhythm and intricate word play, but poetry, as a genre, can be a hard medium to share.
People like stories. If you have friends who read, convincing someone to read a story requires persuasion, but nothing more than a well-placed please. With poetry, people often treat your art like a burden.
When I manage to convince friends to indulge me and read my work, they treat it like a test. They desperately search for the specific meanings rather than allowing themselves to feel the poem, regardless of my original intent. As a writer, my primary goal is to cultivate emotions. To be cliché, I aim to make the new familiar and the familiar new. When people get caught up in defining metaphors and narrative arcs, they ignore the emotions I worked so hard to create.
People make poetry harder than it has to be. Poetry becomes less like art and more like homework, and the cognitive paths for poetry become academic scar tissue rather than pathways for beauty. It’s a tragedy we don’t discuss because when the average person ignores poetry, he doesn’t feel the loss. Unlike novels and paintings, people allow poetry to become irrelevant in their lives.
This fall, I applied for six Master of Fine Arts programs for creative writing—focusing on poetry. Thus far, I’ve heard one answer: a rousing “No” from Boise State University. I’m aching for an acceptance. I so desperately want to have the privilege to spend two to three years focusing exclusively on my poetry.
I’ve had a lot of luck with my writing in recent years. I’ve been featured regularly on the religious blog website “Patheos,” I’ve won awards for my writing with the Daily Mississippian and my poetry is being published in a collection by Kingston University Press in London. I’ve been more fortunate than most when it comes to having my writing proliferated.
Selfishly, it doesn’t feel like enough, but I don’t know where the line is. I grew up in the generation that was told we were exceptional in all ways. Although my writing career has been exceptional on most fronts, it isn’t some extraordinary life-shaking change, despite how well I’ve done.
If I could accomplish one goal in my writing career, I wish I could make good poetry accessible and desired by the general public. I’d like the world to fall in love with poetry like they’ve fallen in love with novel series and other authors.
That likely won’t happen— but I can dream, anyway.
Holly Baer is a senior religious studies major from Flowood.
