Poetry & Me

Hi!

Welcome back! How are you? How was your day? Feel free to talk to me in the comments! (I'll reply back, I promise)

OK! So, in today's post, I thought it would be cool to talk about poetry and me, how I started, and why I am still hesitant to call myself a poet and my work as poetry.

So it begins, really, when I started to really read books. I was in the third grade and apparently was not doing so well in the book-reading department. I remember I used to take those A.R reading tests for class and absolutely FAIL hardcore. I would see the low scores on the computer screen and my cheeks would turn the same red as my infamous OLD NAVY jacket that I lived in. But my teacher, bless her, suggested I try reading something different than what I was attempting to read. Something like the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne. You know the one?

I was hooked.

I read and read and read so much that my parents became concerned that reading was going to rot my eyes and brain. They still think I read too much and I am the only one in my family who actually enjoys reading, so what can I do?

"¿Adónde caben todas esas letras en tu cabeza, Sele?"- my parents whenever they see me reading.

Point is, I went down the rabbit hole of reading, and eventually I thought I could try my hand at writing. The magic formula seems to be reading + writing =(eventually) poetry.

For a few years, I would do small writing projects here and there, but often I could never quite finish a story completely. Never did it cross my mind to try and write poetry. In fact, I disliked all the poetry units I ever went through in school.

The funny thing is, that it was precisely a poetry unit in class that started this whole thing.

The first true poem I wrote was for my 9th-grade English class during a poetry unit and I had titled it Goodbye for Now (I still have the original piece of paper I wrote it on secured in a sheet protector— someone, hang it in a museum!) I wrote that piece and I was really proud of it and how it turned out. It felt like I was telling a story that I wanted to tell but in a much shorter form and without the pain and headache of actually trying to write it. It felt really cool, I felt like Jimmy from the gif below when I read it out loud to the class.

At that point, I embarked on a small writing project that incorporated the initial poem and a few other poems but nothing seemed to be working so I dropped it. My writing hit a dry period where I could not really write for long or write poetry that resembled my first one.

The following year along with my English class, one of my electives was a creative writing class, and that was of the best classes I was in during high school (and not just because my best friends were in there with me, that's a bonus). Again, it was my English class during a poetry unit that really got the gears in my brain to turn when we were assigned to write a poem to memorize and present to the class. Mirror was the finishing result — a short and spooky poem of growing older and not realizing it, or if you were my teacher and basically everyone else who reads it, a poem about a possessed mirror. It goes both ways.

After that, it was like the gates of my mind flew open, and all the creative juices came out all at once.

During this time I came up with the hits of This One Girl, Mirror, A Thunderstorm Type of Day, Sometimes Things Aren't What They Appear To Be, and The Flag. Eventually, I decided to start publishing some of these poems on a writing platform known as Wattpad. I titled my book Too Many Thoughts, Too Little Space and from 2015-2016 I wrote the majority of its content. That year I started questioning things about myself and what I wanted to do in the future and how I felt emotionally (sometimes terrible and a lil depressed) and writing poetry was a form of me being able to say what I couldn't really say at the moment. This is still a common thing for my writing.

I didn't consider myself a poet then, just a plain writer who sometimes managed to rhyme things.

So I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote until I couldn't write at all. I burned out and couldn't really write any type of poetry for a long time, just a few pieces here and there that I thought sucked at the time. Like all blocks, I got over it eventually and by late 2018 I wrote the last poem for Too Many Thoughts, Too Little Space and my poetry writing now seems to be more consistent. I still hit blocks every now in then for writing in general, but I find that simply letting it happen and stepping away to explore other things helps overcome it and see things from a new fresh perspective.

I continued to write poetry on Wattpad and later decided to open up an Instagram page sele.writes to share my work with more people. And eventually this blog.

But, I'll be honest, I never liked calling my work as poetry. Why? Because I don't like most poetry. I always find it so hard to read and understand when something is not clear and to the point. I was taught that there was more to poetry than the surface meaning, that perhaps this poem about grass and flowers was not about grass and flowers but about colonialism. To understand a poem I had to understand everything about the poet and their life.

So... if I don't like poetry and reading poetry, how can I call my work poetry and call myself a poet? It is still a constant battle between accepting an identity and feeling as if my work is not truly poetry therefore I cannot call myself a poet. Where is the wordplay? The literary devices? The meter and beat? The stanzas and metaphors? And all those other things I tend to forget. I just write.

That's why I call it bad poetry: a remix of words into weird imaginations. It may not have all the things poet lovers look for, but it may be enough for people like me who don't really like poetry but appreciate the shortness and to the point of mine. My friend Kiarra put it in the way I could only wish to put it

"Selena's work is short enough to capture your attention, easy enough to understand, and real enough that you'll always find something to relate to. "

So there we go! I feel like this was super long and super TMI but I always wanted to explain how I got into poetry in the first place and why I call it bad. It certainly was a rollercoaster for me remembering my journey from its starting point up to now (and there is so much more I didn't write lol). Writing is a continuous journey as we learn and change as writers. And who knows, maybe in the future I drop the Bad from my poetry description.

I want to know from my fellow writers out there, how was your journey into writing/poetry/creative arts in general? What were some bumps along the way and how did you overcome them? Comment below if you feel like sharing!

Thank you for reading, and until next time!

Selena