I have an intuitive aversion to formal poetry. Perhaps it is an insecurity around the concept of poetic craft, an impression that I will descend into the oceanic trench of existing work and neither explore new depths nor resurface. Every so often I try my hand, but (for example) I only succeeded in writing an honest Sonnet once, two years ago; the end result was trite and meaningless. I was fighting myself the entire way. The rhyme in my work tends to accumulate a weedlike structure, particular sounds sprouting in clumps, bleeding across lines, disappearing and then reappearing in the middles of things at inopportune times. They push through entire poems, making stanzas crack, inflate, explode. The only way to rescue the structure is to abandon everything else.

Both my successes and frustrations revolve around this sort of creeping (or rushing) inevitability. The poems of mine I am most satisfied with are the ones which felt, while I was writing, entirely choiceless; ideas which coagulated from the ambient buzz and then unfurled themselves, fell from my brain onto the page, or rather, fell through my brain from somewhere else. It’s not that these poems are perfect or faultless; I simply have the impression that they could not have turned out differently than they did. 

Unfortunately, the magnetism these choiceless poems hold for me does not dissipate upon their completion. In brief: writing a given poem once feels nice, but writing more-or-less the same poem again, without intending to, is highly demoralizing. Am I a hack? A pretender? Have I expended my reserves of creativity? Will this be the last idea I ever have? Then begins a deliberate process of poetic failure in which I painstakingly avoid a single whiff of my previous work. This is not an exaggeration; at the time of writing, I have been refusing to use the word “light” in my drafts, and abandoning them if the lines are the wrong length or contain too many instances of the letter ‘y’. Over time, this pattern has put me in the odd position of having written dozens of poems I am proud of, while seemingly learning nothing and developing no skill which I did not have to begin with. 

This impression of getting nowhere cannot be accurate to reality, however. Poems don’t simply appear out of the ether—one of mine in this issue takes obvious inspiration from a favorite film—and the usage of written language at all is fundamentally a learned act. Each choiceless poem of mine must, in fact, have been one I was trained to write, through both my own efforts and the generous aid of other people’s art and experience. Even given all that, though, how can I trust myself as a poet when my emotional experience of writing is still helpless, gravitational? I am trying to figure that out.