Why I Started Publishing So Much Poetry

A Heart Can Only Hold So Much

Do you know the feeling when you have so many words inside of you that it starts to seep out in untoward ways? What’s inside of you is so good, but as you try to restrict it from public view, it gets coagulated and becomes diseased. Your words become darts instead of beauty. They smack of self-indulgence rather than a gift. This was me.

I was scared to let my poetry out of the notebooks it lived in for so long. I was scared I wasn’t doing it right or that I would get shunned for miscalculated line structure. But that’s the thing about poetry. It lives because of us. And the only way it can continue to live is to give it our breath. To let it out. And once we do, we realize a heart can only hold so much. It was time.

In my first run on Medium, I posted three poems, all in my first couple of months. All terrible. And then I stopped. Because I thought no one cared. But it was I who didn’t care. They were flat. Instead, I turned to everything else, thinking poetry and fiction were so undervalued on the platform that I could never grow if that’s what I wrote. That was my first mistake.

Growth comes from within and by stagnating my insatiable need to write poetry, I was only halting my own personal growth as a writer. I never wanted to write a book about dating or parenting or marketing so why was I writing so many stories about those topics? Because people would read them. That was my second mistake.

I wrote a lot growing up, but my poems were forced iambic pentameter type of deals that I paid little mind to. I was more interested in rhyming than content. It’s what I was taught because poetry wasn’t valued the way it should have been.

But at my second college, I took a poetry class as a way to deal with the death of my mother and it knocked my socks off. Other students were writing iambic pentameter bullsh*t, but I started to experiment with my deepest feelings. My teacher was responsive. I don’t remember anything else.

When I came back to Medium, I almost started in with the same cycle. But before I could squeeze out a contemporary and well-nuanced listicle that is not a listicle, I stopped myself. I asked myself what makes me feel good. And poetry (and fiction) makes me feel good. It makes me feel alive. It makes me feel like the most creative person on the planet, even when it’s not good.

Words flow out of me instinctively and find their place on the screen. They tell a story without telling the whole story. And that’s one reason poetry is so beautiful and built for curious minds. You have to work to read poetry. It’s not as simple as 14 Reasons I Quit Drinking. It’s so much more.

As I’ve sent off multiple poems a day into the ether, I realized one beautiful thing about publishing poems online. Poems are untrollable. When I swashbuckle my opinion pieces all over the Internet, there are always going to be trolls waiting to pounce. Someone with something to say. But poetry is not a troll’s game.

How would you even troll a poem? How would you argue with the efficacy of placed words? When you write poetry, eager readers and fellow poets are reading. Those curious minds. There is no anti-poetry. It’s a collective of wordsmiths always looking to read something beautiful.

This is why I started publishing so much poetry. It’s pure. It’s what makes me happy. And a heart can only hold so much.

If you liked this, you might like to see all of my poems in one place: