When I decided to do this challenge, I hoped that I’d learn how to be consistent and that I’d slowly edge my way towards becoming a “real” or “better” poet. I didn’t quite expect much more than that, certainly not a series of neatly summed up epiphanies. But in the process of putting this post together and thereby placing my attention here, I’ve realized I do have some lessons to share. Maybe they’re not so much lessons as they are reminders.

Poetry rewires us.

I have at one time wondered: does poetry make people sad? One of my poems started with this thought. (I’ve long avoided reading Sylvia Plath for her association with dramatic and tragic exits.) When I started dabbling in creative writing a couple of years ago, I thought I’d be writing about wonder. I named my creative studio Wondermachine, after all. But many of my poems were coming out sad and angry and prickly even though I am not really any of these things in person, at the surface at least. I had a strange sense of imposter syndrome: was I pretending to be someone because I thought that was what poetry was supposed to be? Brief related sidebar: Arrival is one of my favourite films, based on a short story by Ted Chiang called “Story of Your Life”. In it *spoilers*, humans start to be able to see time non-linearly (aka being able to see the future, present, and past at the same time), thanks to aliens who offered not some engineered technological device, but the gift of their language.

Because of the intense and uncharacteristic way of perceiving the world that poetry enables, I feel like I opened up something in my brain and that I can “see” more, sort of in a visual way though not technically—in the same way that nothing about time as a concept changed in Arrival, and yet, its perception, and therefore the reality of it, is fundamentally different. I have not changed as a biological being, my atoms are still where they are supposed to be (for the most part). But I feel different. I feel more alive to the real world, a world in which I am, frankly, sad and angry and prickly sometimes—because I am also more of an entire spectrum of feelings. It’s like I hacked my way back to being human.

There is metaphor, meaning, and magic in everything.

On most days, it’s not like I sat down and immediately knew what my poem was going to be about. So for the sake of completing the challenge, I had to look around me rather than inside me for “inspiration”: buying furniture, going on a walk, smelling a $500 perfume sample that reminded me of the dollar store, reading the news. I started line by line, feeling by feeling, until through twists and turns of attention, the poem was eventually revealed. I didn’t worry about trying to appear deep or smart or creative. Everything revealed itself wherever I placed my attention and was as deep or smart or creative as I was and not more and not less. (Not that it always worked out; I had some false start poems.)

Looking around me didn’t feel like forcing poetry out of “nothing”. It felt like dissolving the boundaries of human experience.

Quantity > quality, most of the time.

Coming back to the beginning where I had mentioned part of the reason I did this in the first place is because I wanted to write more. I know it’s not about choosing quality over quantity (a deterrent for living a creative life for many who are too concerned with perfection and never break past the elusive but comfortable idea of potential). It’s about using quantity to eventually get to a place where the chance of quality becomes much higher.

Could I have spent an entire month workshopping a single poem? Yes. Would that poem be better than any of the poems I’ve written so far? Probably. But I think that I learned a lot more about myself having written 30 poems. And that self-awareness and authenticity is so much of what poetry is, more than the pursuit of a (very subjective) idea of what is good or bad, real vs fake poetry.

There is always more out there.

Die empty. I have this phrase ingrained in my head from the title of the self-help book by Todd Henry, which I read many years ago. If there is even a single poem still in me on my death bed, I would rather it be out of me than inside. But in practice, there’s still anxiety around how creative I really am, how much I really have in me. Having to write a poem every single day, I was worried that I’d use up all my good ideas or lines and that I’d have nothing left. But I suspect the opposite is happening.

It’s like a vacuum. When the vacuum’s full, nothing can get sucked in. You have to empty it out first to make space. Or like the head of the Hydra, for a more visceral analogy. You cut off one head (poem), two more grow in its place. As I emptied myself every day, I felt more inspired, not less. So it’s true: creativity begets more creativity. Now of course I have no objective gauge of this, only how I feel. This is it: I’m so excited to continue poking the threads I evidently gravitate towards while pushing myself in new ways. No more “save for later”.

I write, therefore I am.

I’ve realized, through this process, that it’s less “I think, therefore I am” and more “I write poems, therefore I am”. Insert with whatever art you make. I don’t know, maybe the former used to be true before the age of the internet but I don’t think it is anymore. (I don’t poem it is anymore?) Because what I think is a constant stream of chatter that is influenced so much by the world around me, so much so that I can’t distill the truth. Every side, every argument, every possible angle, all the time. What I write with the specific intentionality of a poem is both filter and truth, excavation and interrogation.

Thoughts are blurs. A poem is crystallization. Writing poems hasn’t just felt like self-expression the way writing in a journal does. Through the intense focus on deconstructing abstraction and defamiliarizing the mundane, it’s a lens that helps me really pay attention to how I feel and therefore who I am.