My name is Jessie, and I’m a poet.

...

A reader commented on my last poem here, and I’ve been thinking for days about how–and, yes, whether–to respond.

First, a confession: I have a hard time claiming poetry. “I write poetry.” “I wrote a poem.” These statements make me think first of sad, florid lines laid down by depressed teenagers wearing too much eyeliner. They make me think next of poetry readings I’ve been to where the reader
uses her best
Maya. Angelou. Voice.
reads in a stately
tempo
and really
emphasizes
line breaks
as if
PAUSE
were
an emotion.

(You’ve been to those readings, right? Ugh.)

Yes, it’s unfair. Yes, it’s not entirely accurate. But it is, nevertheless, my enduring prejudice. And so it’s hard for me to really even talk about the poetry that I write without experiencing some sheepish reflex.

But my hesitancy to answer a direct question is rooted in more than this vestigial gag order on my own creative voice. What made me uncomfortable about the question, I realized, was that it felt too much like a criticism. And I’m not talking issues of taste or preference here–it wasn’t that the question slyly called my poem bad. It called it ineffectual. I had failed to communicate the basic message of the piece, and being found inept is far more damning than being found unbeautiful.

I’m not from the Gertrude Stein school of poetry. I want to play with the language in my poems, but I also want them to communicate some essential core of meaning. Sometimes that’s a story; sometimes it’s something more indeterminate but just as important. Kernals, fully formed.

Is it enough for me to be satisfied with the product of my work?

It’s like the tree/forest question: Is a poem good if it’s not understood by anyone but the author? Is good an absolute? A consensus? An isolate?

I’m not sure these are questions I can answer. But in the interest of being understood and of appreciating my reader’s time in coming here, I’ll answer this much:

Yes, she has. Google the title of the poem.

Her work? Well, that’s the crux, isn’t it? She was at work, in the sense that she was on the clock in an office building when the bullets came. She was hard at work in her time with me, processing the truth of the hole in her flesh. And I could imagine the work to come after, once the body count was final, and names and faces assigned to the statistics.

A poem can tell you about a feeling. A poem can tell you about a moment in time, a thing that happened, the person who was there. But so can a story, a novel, a newspaper article. The poem is all this, distilled. Something sharp and fine, beautiful in its simplicity, its accuracy, its wholeness.

If I can capture that, then I’ve done my job.