Poetry is Every Day

Reflections on being a poet with or without professional validation

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I have been writing poetry since I was about 7 years old. Maybe even before. But I remember really sitting down — for fun — and writing a poem about a ghost in the bathroom towel closet.

In high school friends would ask me to write poems for them. They would randomly give me a subject, I would write something on the spot, they would be amazed and happy. I wonder where those poems are now?

I’ve saved a lot of my notebooks over the years. I have had some mild success at poetry in college. I wrote an amazing poem in the style of Walt Whitman about Walt Whitman at a Gay Pride Parade. And oh how I wish I could find it now.

I have always been told to write, to be a writer. To do something with this. To be something with this.

But at the same time, I would always receive nothing but rejections from any poetry publication I have ever sent submissions too. Every time. So, how could I be a poet if no official poet thing wanted what I had to offer?

I spent a lot of years just giving up. I wasn’t what they wanted. Maybe I wasn’t that good. Maybe I had to be more formal, more focused on punctuation and grammar. Maybe I had to write about things in slow ways slowly like nature poems and nothing too emotional or feminist or current or different.

I didn’t know. All I knew is that to me, I felt like I was doing the Sylvia Plath thing. I felt like I was doing the Denise Duhamel thing. I felt like I was doing the Carrie Fountain thing. When I read their words I felt everything they were feeling with such intensity.

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And to me that was the point of poetry. A form of writing that gets to the deep emotional details of an issue or event in a way that is unavoidably so accessible it is almost tangible and also deeply reflective and profound.

Audre Lorde said,

For women, poetry is not a luxury. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

This is an absolute for me. Every day. I have returned to writing poetry every day, after years of feeling so hurt by the gatekeepers of “what poetry is.”

I may try to submit some work again, I may not. I may self publish again, I may not.

But what I won’t ever do again is to give up on my chosen art, let go over my inner need to express my day to day in words that have rhythm and in designs that feel like flow.

Poetry selected me, somehow, early on. I will honor this passionate gift and continue to grow and evolve and write and share in ways that maybe someday might matter deeply to someone else other than me, or, maybe might not.

So much in life is fleeting. So much in life demands that we measure it in external rewards and punishments. I am not going to let poetry be one of those things, ever again, for me.

Yes writers are known for beating ourselves up, daily. Yes writers are known for facing constant existential dread. This is true here too. However, writers are also known for the profound bravery of keeping at it, pushing through, finding inspiration, overcoming, overcoming, overcoming.

Poetry is not a luxury, indeed. It’s not fancy or for just the elite to consume or judge. It’s not ivory tower and out of reach. It’s not something we can wait for or save up for.

Poetry is an art and a craft. Poetry is a drive and a need that ensures creativity, and thus, the spark of life’s meaning, can stay alive. Every single day.

Jenny Justice is a mom, Sociology instructor, and writer. You can follow her on Medium and at Jenny Justice, Writer, for more insightful articles, essays on empathy and introversion, education, parenting, poetry, equality and social justice. She has been recognized as a top writer on Medium in the categories of parenting, education, reading,racism, poetry and climate change.