On Poetry
Because poetry is my comfort read
‘Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words’ - Robert Frost
Poetry isn’t something I reach for often. It’s a form of writing that I always pledge to read more of, and then this past voice fades to nothingness, a quiet space that is filled instead with book titles I could read, whole narratives I could consume. Consequently, poetry becomes sidelined in my life a lot. And yet, when my thoughts are racing and my capabilities to process information diminish, I find myself reaching for poetry, finding comfort in its shortness, its compressed nature, its completeness.
As I’m writing this, it is currently nineteen minutes past midnight, and I have been reading some of Nabokov’s collected poems. My day went relatively well, until it didn’t. Sometimes, all it takes is a wrong word, a lack of appreciation, or often nothing specific at all, and the successes of one’s day can become obsolete, superimposed by what is likely one millisecond of the whole day, but one that has the ability to destroy it in its entirety. This happened to me today. Productivity plummeted, inspiration fell short, and I spent a good few hours contemplating just what to do with my evening before I felt like tackling tomorrow. The logical choice would have been to sleep, of course. But when has a reader ever favoured that over the written word?
So, I turned to Nabokov. A collection I’d briefly started a few months back in one of my fervent attempts at consuming poetry, but one that was, like all other times, short-lived and inconsequential. This time, however, the words stuck. It’s no secret to anyone that Nabokov is a master writer - his words dance on the page - elegant, insightful, and, for the first time, personal. Two poems in particular stood out to me this evening: ‘Cubes’ and ‘A Trifle’. The first, because of its obscured, metaphorical, and somewhat tragic nature, the second because it felt like seeing myself penned on the page, evoking my own recent travels between towns and my uncertain, hesitant response to this fact. I never pretend to fully understand poetry, and it is possible that my interpretation of these works is flawed, but I am moved by them nevertheless, and, as a writer, I’d like to hope that Nabokov would have appreciated this sentiment.
There’s a very strong possibility that by the time this gets posted (in approximately three days), I could have read more poems. There may be others that impact me in some manner, and they too could appear here, slotted in amongst those initial readings so seamlessly that you wouldn’t be able to tell which constituted the beginning of my tumultuous day and which heralded its end. Regardless, poetry is healing to me, always patiently awaiting my return, even if this cannot be calendar-marked and is often aligned with negative thought. Poetry is comfort, and I urge all of you to turn to it the next time you find yourself feeling untethered from life.
Lx