the things we leave behind

I got a facebook message today from a guy I knew tangentially in college saying that he was going through old issues of the poetry magazine and one of my poems really struck him. Aside from totally making my night (I mean, this is probably up there for top facebook messages I've ever gotten...with the propositioning for friendship and the "lets hook up" ones rounding out the top, of course), it really made me think about what I've given up creatively and the ways in which my mind works now versus how it worked in the past.

I haven't written a poem or seriously attempted to do so since I took the advanced poetry workshop my junior year. Even when I feel compelled to express something (which happens sometimes, late at night, when it is quiet, or when I am very, very sad), I feel paralyzed by the pressure of having to produce something. I'm my own worst critic...I've spent far too much time reading and loving poetry, as well as judging other peoples' work, to let myself just explode words on a page and work around that inspiration. I immediately second-guess things, or hate a turn of phrase, or again, get totally overwhelmed by the thought of having to write something that I deem worthwhile.

It doesn't help that I was never a "real" poet in my process...most of my best poems just came out similar to their final versions, pretty fully formed and without the need for many edits. I never learned to refine something until it worked; the poem either came out working or I would scrap it entirely while I was writing it. I never developed the right kind of work ethic to rethink or repolish a poem. I don't know how to take a few stellar lines in a bad piece of work and just make something entirely new from it.

Most critically, though, is the fact that I don't really feel as deeply and intensely as I did before. In high school, I wrote poems about emotions that I had never felt, experiences I had never had. I could write because my mind could explore anything and link it to whatever I wanted...I hadn't lived enough to be limited by what something "really felt like." In college, I was pretty intensely depressed at points. For the three years that I was writing, I either wrote about my father leaving or else about failed relationships (the first year) and intensely missing my partner (yeah, long distance relationships). I could write because I was living through things I could document, because I actually was going into the woods at night and sitting on the same rock to smoke and cry. This made for a bunch of self-indulgent poems, but I (like to think I) wrote some rather beautiful things and painted some interesting images. Even if they were true to life.

These days, bogged down by fear of writing shit and lack of inspiration, I just feel like those kinds of poems are too obnoxious and self-indulgent. I've grown up. I'm pretty much over my father's absence, and I'm far too emotionally stunted/burned out from my last relationship (two and a half years, mind you) to care about the little flings I have here and there to break up the monotony. I don't think I feel anything too much anymore, which is why there's nothing for me to channel into writing. How can you express something in words when there's nothing to express? Or it feels compeletely trivial to express anything at all?

Maybe I just need for things to marinate, for more life experience to acculumate, and then I can start writing again in a way that feels right to me. All I know is that I feel a little sad now when I think about poetry and what it used to mean to me back then and the huge role it played in my life. It doesn't anymore. And maybe that's okay. And maybe that will change.

Also, to keep this post from being totally whiny and self-absorbed, here's a hilarious link about the different types of hookups that occur at academic conferences. Oh la la!