Poetry, & most creative writing, for that matter, is really just translation work. Life is always happening, and we need a way to put ours into words, to make events into something more than just events, to make birth more than just the beginning of a strictly chronological list of banalities and to make death more than just a logical conclusion to that list.
Saying poetry is translation is perhaps a bit misleading, because it leaves out the part where everything is translation and poetry is just a pretentious—sometimes slightly more beautiful—way of doing it. I tell my dad we ran out of kiwi and I really mean that I wish he would take care of me. My mum tells me she enjoyed our phone call and she really means that she misses me a lot. These are personal matters, and they are often easier to translate, because we’ve seen them a dozen times, whereas the point of poetry is that you never see it twice. There are concepts many use, sure, and there are words more common than others, and some people use rules, but some don’t, so things end up never being quite the same. Every poem has an audience—even if that audience isn’t physically there, even if never will be—and it knows that audience doesn’t want to hear the same thing said the same way.
When I write, I don’t do it to make things beautiful. I used to think I did, but I was horribly misinformed on what beauty is. In the context of writing, I would now define beauty as a form of good translation. My writing could be beautiful in the same way a child’s eyes lighting up as you help it figure out how kites work is beautiful.
I take that back. Poetry is never written from the perspective of the teacher. If you knew how life worked, you wouldn’t be writing poetry about it, you would be living it to its full extent. In this situation, the poet is the child, and the poet has figured out how kites work, and they are calling for the other kids to look at how good this damn kite flies. Perhaps a teacher would be there, and I reckon they might know how to fly a kite already—though this isn’t guaranteed—yet they are still enamoured by that enthusiasm, by the effort put into crafting an explanation that might at times be clumsy but that is still earnest. This is to say that people who have figured things out may still enjoy poetry. I wouldn’t know, because I’m still not there yet.
My point is: poetry is beautiful when it’s saying something, and the reader knows what that something is, they just never thought of putting the words together in that way. There’s no such thing as new poetry anyway, all poetry is talking about the same things. It’s just that it gets lost to time. For every poem I write, there is an ancient poem that becomes just that: an ancient poem, nothing more than a relic, not something people read in the 21st century, unless they’re a huge nerd. Sure, some figures are timeless, but I believe even that timelessness is limited, and let’s be honest... if you’re reading this, it’s unlikely you’ll be the Shakespeare of our generation. The thing is, you really don’t have to be. People are constantly trying to convince us that the only way to make an impact is to have your name up on the billboard screens, to have it mentioned on the news a comical amount of times, to make a bazillion dollars a year, but trust me on this: none of that matters.
If you want to change the world, you simply need to be in it. Write, paint, play whatever instrument you enjoy the most. Put love in everything you create and it will bounce off the walls of the world until humanity is one big choir, at which point no one will care about who sang the loudest, but rather be mesmerised by the fact this many people did so at all.
As for the present, you mustn’t see poetry as a race or a destination. The best poets I’ve met were always the ones unsure of where they were going. Those best poets were my best poets and someone else’s worst poets. Don’t worry about doing it the right way, because every earnest way is a right way in and of itself. Don’t worry about whatever else it is you’re worrying about right now, unless you think you could make a good poem out of it, in which case put it in quarantine for when you have time to write. Don’t make things difficult for yourself, they are difficult enough already.
As abstract as this is, I’m working with a somewhat restricted definition of poetry. I know not all poetry is poetry and not all poetry is poetry. Some things are poetry and they are never written down. Some things are poetry because they are never written down. I don’t get to decide what poetry is, anyway—I’m just a man with a lot of thoughts, there are many of us out there, and I’d wager very few of us have qualifications. I dislike when people limit poetry to forms, I find it reductive and at times a bit sad. It must be miserable to see beauty only in the way words are aligned, without even stopping to glance at what they evoke in you. So take this not as a limitation of what your writing should look like, but rather as an overly elaborate reflection on what I see in my own work.
Mal Fawzy
