Poetry, Prose, & Peonies

The Power of Writing Unfiltered, Uncomfortable, and Unapologetically Raw Poetry

Happy National Poetry Month to all who celebrate!

I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately. For me, it’s the most emotional and raw state of my mind. Poetry is one of those forms that allows me to tap into the least logical part of my brain and unleash the art inside. I thought I’d share this process in case there’s a poet out there who can find inspiration in it. 

In conversation with a dear friend of mine, I uncovered a bit of an ethos around poetry. She’s an artist, a Trinidadian painter and sculptor, and we were talking about the post-university burnout we both experienced. In September of last year, I posted an article talking about my own experience with The Post Graduation Drought, and despite understanding what my issues were, I felt lacklustre in the face of creation. 

My friend, Mary-Rebekah, feels the same. We graduated the same year from the same university and only now, this year, are we both finally recovering from the intensity of our degrees. Mary-Rebekah and I became friends after graduation.

Despite walking through the same halls, we never got a chance to meet while we were students. I met her at a screening for two short films that she produced with her family, and got to know her through the interview process for Short Drop and All Skin No Laugh. She’s a lovely human being who I instantly took a liking to, and within a few months we became good friends. 

We often discuss art, writing, and life in general, and have been talking a lot about creating through the winter. We were discussing human nature and the ways society has forgotten that during the winter, we should be hunkering down to rest with all of nature. It inspired me to write my poem, season.

I often find myself mulling about the ways in which we like to forget our place in the natural cycle. It’s easy to forget how intrinsic our instincts are. We built cities to find refuge from the wild and in our sheltered slumber, we forgot our place in the environment. 

Mary-Rebekah recently went on a self-made retreat to paint in the north of Trinidad’s countryside. She began painting for the sake of it and shared with me the peace, joy, and freedom she felt in that. This resonated with me, and despite not taking a wilderness retreat myself, I have also been trying to reconnect with my craft.

In our conversation about the retreat, I said something to her that resounded in my head. We were discussing the craft of inspired art and how my motivation to write prose has come to a grinding halt. 

“I feel like I’ve been staring at a painting, squinting with my face close to the canvas. I can’t see the whole picture anymore. I’m just trying to walk away for a moment, to look at another painting, so I can return to it with fresh eyes,” I said.

In the tether of a much longer voice note, I began talking about how I’ve been leaning on poetry, which is my most vulnerable form, and the one I tend to the most.

“Poetry is emotional. Poetry is not logical because it doesn’t have to be. Prose is a very logical space, you’re telling a story. With poetry you’re telling a story as well, but you’re using the colours of sadness, and the hues of pain, and you’re putting it together. It doesn’t have to be logical, it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else, it just has to make sense to you.” 

Poetry is not everyone’s favourite and that’s okay. Reading, in general, seems to be on a downtick in the UK. According to the Guardian, nearly half of the UK’s adult population has given up pleasure reading, citing reasons such as lack of time, feeling underrepresented in literature, mental health concerns, and interaction with social media. I was unable to find academic sources discussing poetry as a niche group of readers, nor was I able to find sales statistics in the UK.

According to Emma G Rose, who conducted independent surveys regarding poetry reading habits, 3.5% of participants read poetry everyday and 40% read poetry 1-2 times a year.

Poetry is not the most consumed form of writing and, in my personal experience, not many people enjoy poetry for the sake of it. A lot of my university professors said similar things, complaining about or explaining why poetry isn’t popular.

In my conversation with Mary-Rebekah, I had a realization. It’s not a hard and fast rule, simply a subjective observation, but I think the emotionality that is so key to poetry is the very reason it’s unpopular.

Most people don’t have time to read, they don’t have time to sit with their feelings, they only have time to work and manage the affairs of living. It’s easy to understand why taking time to sit with a poem, to sit with one’s own emotion, might not be a priority when work has deadlines, friends want to see you, family responsibilities pile up, and scrolling on TikTok is easier. 

I’m not an expert on people, in fact, I often find myself baffled when encountering how others think and emote. But I do understand escapism. Poetry doesn’t allow you to escape yourself. The right poems will lance through the mask and beg the questions you’ve avoided for so long. 

In school, we’re fed classic poetry – which is important, yet somewhat dry for most. It can be difficult to find belonging in a person who lived a thousand years ago. It can be frustrating to translate through dialectical gaps between an Elizabethan poet and a 21st century mind. Poetry changed through the ages because society changed. People speak differently today, and it can often feel like work, as if you’re translating a foreign language. 

Then there’s context. Poetry cannot exist outside its context otherwise it doesn’t make sense. In school, they attempt to teach you the contextual importance of poems, but most school-aged kids can’t relate to Lord Byron or William Wordsworth. It’s difficult to resonate with the frills of William Shakespeare, the darkness of Sylvia Plath, or the struggles of Maya Angelou without understanding what their lives looked like.

The study of poetry is a double-edged sword, for some it opens a world of verse so alluring in its rhythm, for others it’s just another boring lesson about some person who said some convoluted thing that doesn’t mean anything. 

I’ve always said there is a poet for every soul, but I think the academic hyper-focus on classic poetry is a mistake that isolates readers from finding their poets. Should we read classics? Yes. But modernizing the poets we read is also essential.

There are so many wonderful modern poets that capture the struggles of the world around us. I’ve read so many contemporary poems that have kept me afloat. 

Rupi Kaur is a world renowned poet and illustrator and fellow Canadian. Kaur is a Toronto girlie who writes about the struggles of womanhood, complex family dynamics, and expresses herself simply. I appreciate how on-the-surface her intentions are and yet admire her beautiful cadences as well.

I have a similar story to Kaur. I was born in Trinidad and Tobago, immigrated to Canada at six-years-old, and grew up in the suburbs of the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). In her poems, I felt centred in something familiar. There is a connection in the sense of place, the closeness in age, the similarities of experience that made me feel seen. But mostly, it just made me feel. 

I had the pleasure of meeting Toronto’s first Youth Poet Laureate, Shahaddah Jack, at a Taylor Swift-themed poetry event in Nathan Phillips Square, and heard her live performance of her spoken-word poem Herstory. I felt seen. I felt heard. I felt known. Because of her poem, we ended up having a deep chat about how embracing curly hair felt like a reclamation of identity.

As a mixed-race Caribbean woman, I struggled with my hair for much of my life, both in terms of knowing how to take care of it, and accepting it as a part of myself. Our interaction was so special to me. She shared her experience and it linked us together in a way that may never have happened had she not. 

One author, who is not a poet by name but certainly by craft, is the award-winning writer Tessa McWatt. I read her memoir, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, and fell in love with her voice. Her prose was indeed poetic, rhythmic, hypnotic. Even prose can be poetry, and Tessa McWatt proves that.

Hers is another story so similar to my own. She’s a Caribbean-born Canadian writer who struggled with identity in a place far removed from her ancestry. She explores themes of belonging, and engages with what Sadiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” as she imagines the lives of her ancestors. Her work feels intrinsic to the human experience and I found myself in her pages. 

The commonality I found among these poets, and the many others I didn’t name, is a rawness. Their stories are unfiltered. Their poems host all the right ingredients for good verse. Their emotions resonated with me in a terrible, beguiling way. Their vulnerability held a mirror to my face.

For the right reader, raw poetry is sought out. Not everyone will understand you. Some readers won’t share your context. But the ones that were bruised in the same shape, the ones who were cut with the same knife, the ones who have tasted the same emotion, they will hear you. These readers will find resonance in your verse, they will find belonging in your experience, and they will appreciate the vulnerability that gave words to their feelings.

When writing poetry, I don’t think about the metre or the rhyme. It flows like the river to an ocean, like the ink from my pen. Poetry lives inside me, bursting from my chest and out my lips. I cannot help myself because these emotions are a part of me. They speak to the very essence of who I am. Sure, that might sound dramatic, but like poetry, it doesn’t need to be logical to anyone else. It just needs to make sense to me. 

Writing poetry doesn’t have to be a daunting task. While I believe that learning the academic ideas of poetry is vital, I also admit, it’s a toolbox. You can dip into it, like a palette of paint, choosing which colours help to render your imaginings. The trick to writing poetry is image. Take your feeling and stretch it into an analogy, like taffy pulled and pulled again.

Sitting with a form can be great fun, it can be an exercise on technique and precision. But the poems I love best aren’t concerned with form, nor obsessed with the tools used to understand poetry. I write the way I read, in scores of emotion. I splatter them messily on the page until it makes sense. 

I leave the editing of rhythm and metre until later. Don’t focus on the “right” way to write poetry. Open your eyes to yourself, take a real deep look at how you’re feeling, and splay it out on the page. It may not come out perfectly, but what in life does?

Poetry is the most underrated and over-looked form. For me, it’s an existence, a lifestyle, an inevitability. I am not a poet, because I do not craft the verse. I am simply a scribe attempting to catch the words out of the ether, unbidden. 

I have a lot of poems that remain in the pages of my journals, either too bad or too personal to be witnessed by others. But I write them anyway. 

Write poetry not because you want to be heard. Write it because you need to be seen by yourself. Write it to step into the shadows of your soul and relish in the tender shades of black, and blue, and grey until you see the allure of your own demons.

These demons are simply the darkest parts of you, the ones you shove so deep down that you nearly forget they’re there. But when you take them out and see them, you finally understand that all you did was keep yourself from revelling in the vastness that you hold. They, in fact, aren’t demons. They are the most wounded parts of you. Those wounds are beautiful too. 

I’d love to hear some of your unfiltered poetry! Please feel free to drop a verse or two in the comments.

Header photo via Unsplash with original edits.