This is not a Poem
Jeremy (2009-05-28)

>>JEREMY: Hi. So, um, I guess I'm going to talk about when I first learned a huge lesson, I guess I would say, as far as poetry goes. I learned a lot about what constitutes a poem in different settings and it really affected the way I read and write poetry and view poetry. I've been writing poems since I was a little kid. I don't know what first drew me to it. I know when I was young my mom, we would get together, or even my sisters, you know, we would get together every night and we'd read like a chapter of a book or different poems or things like that. It was just the way that we kind of kept together and had fun and I really enjoyed the reading time. It was really cool, and at some point in time through all of that practice as I was reading my Judy Blume and reading Stuart Little and The Borrows, I loved The Borrows, and The Boxcar Children, and reading these books with my mom and my sisters, I started writing poetry and I can't even remember how I first started. But everybody seemed to like it. I was praised for the poetry I would write.

I didn't really share it with too many people until I got to sixth grade and I showed one to a teacher that I had, and she loved it. She thought it was awesome, and so I started sharing my poetry more and more and, I mean, these poems were very sing-songy. It was all about rhyme, meter, things like that. Not an image to be found anywhere in the poem or anything like that, so I got to my undergrad and there was a poetry class and I was so excited to take this poetry class, SO excited! I couldn't wait. It was one of the things I had been looking forward to since I first saw that course catalogue before I even signed up for this class. I went and wrote the first poem for the class and turned it in and I couldn't wait to get it back, and I got it back and the professor had written on the top, "This is not a poem." When I read it, I have to admit, when I first read it, it was a shock to the system. I was like, "How can that not be a poem?" It's what I've been writing for - for years! How is that not a poem? People have always called it a poem before, they've always said it was wonderful. It was harsh at first, so I was like, "Okay, maybe it was just that one."

So we got the second assignment and I wrote another one, turned it in, got it back and again, "This is not a poem," and it just crushed my, crashed my system for a little bit because I couldn't understand what exactly a poem was. I didn't get it. If that wasn't a poem, what was a poem? And I really wanted... you know at first I was like, "Okay, do you drop the class? What do you do?" But I really wanted to succeed in this class and I really, really wanted to impress this professor. It became a personal mission to write something that was 'a poem' in his eyes. So I would go through the process and finally towards the end of the term I wrote something that had to do with life and death and playing, and once again, still pretty lyrical, and he wrote on it, "This is not original, but at least it's a poem," and I felt that it was like the skies opened up. It was a wonderful thing, I was so excited. And I don't know that I ever wrote anything that he did classify as a good poem.

I wrote other things throughout my time as an undergrad and occasionally I would take them back and show him. I don't think I ever really wrote a poem that he liked, which was fine. Once I got into my Master's degree, I continued writing poetry and I learned about formalism and learned much more about free-verse poetry. I am still a formalist as far as poetry goes, and my poetry still tends to be very lyrical. I still tend to use a lot of meter. I have a lot of fun with it. It's a lot more imagery and things like that, and I still don't know, to be completely honest if anything I would write today, if he would classify any of those as poetry. But one of the crazy things is, one: I don't care anymore. I mean, I will always hold him up. He will always be an important person in my development and I will never feel bad about what he said because he was right, it wasn't poetry, not in that sense. And it totally did change the way that I read my poetry in that now, the same things that you see in a lot of small town newspapers, poems that people write and put their heart and soul into, sadly sometimes I look at those and say, "That's not a poem." Which is kind of a bummer, really, because it is a poem. It's a beautiful poem. It means something to them. It's not an academic poem, I guess. But anyway, sometimes I'm a little sad that I no longer can look at a poem like that and see it as a beautiful poem. I see it as almost a poem wannabe.

>>INTERVIEWER: Interesting.

>>JEREMY: Kind of no good. Which, also is why you've got to give props to Adrienne Rich. When she did her version of The Best American Poetry, she went out. She searched out that small town newspaper. She searched out the poetry in different places and gave it a place and she got ridiculed by a lot of the people in the academic community saying, "That's not poetry. That's not the best American poetry," which is too bad, because some of it is. So, I guess my literacy narrative, that's how I learned to view poetry differently. I guess that's how I learned to write poetry differently. Because my poetry now, though it's lyrical and though it's metric, is not nearly the same as what it was. It's had a huge effect on me and be it good or bad, it totally and completely changed a writing and reading practice for me.