Dear Poets: This Is Your 10-Minute Pep Talk

Dear Poets,

This is your 10-minute pep talk. Why? Because it's common for us to feel like our words mean nothing. It's easy to feel like our passion and pursuits are fruitless. Oh, and half the world seems convinced poetry is frivolous, inaccessible, and not a "real" art form. To everyone and anyone who shares those opinions:

Go away. This pep talk isn't for you. 

This little corner of the Internet is specifically for poets who need a hug. Who have gotten yet another rejection letter. Who haven't worked up the courage to send out work for consideration. Who were told poetry isn't a worthwhile pursuit. We might not be able to sit next to you with a bottle of wine and say these words in person, but we can type them and share it a billion times in hopes that these words ricochet around the Internet enough to find you and create the illusion. Because...we are you. 

The whole reason Floodmark exists is because we wanted to create a space for inspiration, humor, and (most importantly) poets to thrive. We write about art, memes, poetry, culture, humor, life, form, technique, and anything else we can think of to inspire you to sit down at your writing space and do what you do best: create. Because we are you. We feel alone, too. We feel the resounding space between us and the next poet, too. We wonder: when did the idea of a poetic community become confined to a campus? Why should graduation mean isolation for the young poetic community?

Dear Poets, it doesn't have to mean isolation.

Dear Poets, Floodmark wants to create the community we all want---online, where we can reach out to everyone. Exclusivity is for higher education and publishing. Our blog is for everyone who wants to learn, write, read, and connect. Community comes in many shapes, and we're out to prove that we can turn a screen into a window.

But enough about us. Let's talk about you, poets.

You are dreamers. You are students. Or maybe you are Wallace Stevens---insurance agents by day, poets at heart. You are the people-watchers who convert the movements of strangers into imagery. You memorialize the mundane in extraordinary ways. You find surprises in old emotions and shared memories. You write what you know, and what you could never know. You are at home in the world. You feel alone in your head---and it's a beautiful thing, once you get used to hearing your own echo.

Or maybe you don't feel alone in your head---maybe there are voices in there telling you that poetry is dumb, that your execution of that sonnet was piss-poor, that you will never, ever, in a million years make it, that there's no money in poetry, that there's no future in poetry.

Tell those voices to go to hell. Kick them out. Who needs them? Certainly not you, poets. These are not the voices of reason, they are the voices of insecurity. The voices we give to society.

For me, they're the voices of people who have asked me incredulously "So, what are you going to do with that?" when I tell them I'm an English and Creative Writing double major. They're the eyebrows that shoot up in disbelief when I tell them that one day I want to teach poetry. The polite nod. The "Oh". To these voices, I say, in no unconditional terms: go to hell. Now you try---free yourself from those pesky, judgmental voices you've allowed to belittle your passions. Enough is enough.

Shelley once said "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." When did that change? When did we go from being applauded to being ridiculed? All questions you may ask, poets. But let me let you in on a little secret: it never changed. 

We still are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  (Read: keyword is "unacknowledged".) What we read of history is hindsight. Things are still much the same as they have always been, despite all the technological advances and progress. Because the human heart hasn't changed. Because the human need for art will always outweigh the mainstream ideas about practicality that we tell ourselves to feel more secure, less silly, and invulnerable. Poetry rips off these lies we tell ourselves and it tells us the truth. The world will always, always, always need more truth. The world is laid bare in poetry and each painful revelation is exhilarating. This experience has not changed. When we are done reading, we hunger for more---more of that poem, more truth, more exhilaration, more feeling something. 

But the poem does not exist for gratification only. The poem exists to tell us something. To stop at the hunger and need for art would cheapen its various forms. When you ask for more, the poem is mute. It frustrates. It tells you to find what you're looking for on your own. All the more you could ever need exists in the lines that you've just read. Poetry is meant to be difficult. If it were easy, it wouldn't be worth it. It asks you to take that 3 lb. mass of grey matter knocking around your skull and find the answers on your own. Some people find that irritating. Some people hate that a piece of paper is forcing them to use muscles in a new way. Some people dislike difficult things because they are difficult. That's OK. That's not your concern, poets. 

Because for every person unwilling to turn 3 pounds of flesh into dreams, ideas, and expansion, there is another person willing to do so. It may seem like you're outnumbered, but you are not. People---some who have never read a poem in their lifetime---are waiting to hear what you have to say. So say it.

And say it today, poets. Don't wait. You will have so many days to find the right way to say it. Don't let the elusive "right words" stop you from writing. Draft a poem. Then draft it again. And again. The right words will find you if you don't stop looking for them. Don't be afraid to walk the fine line between compromising the integrity of your writing and letting it eclipse the joy of your life. You'll find yourself on either side of that line many, many times throughout your lifetime. But you'll also find many moments of peace---the moments you know you've landed right in the middle of that line. Remember what those moments feel like. You've earned every second. You'll earn so many more future seconds.

This is the point in the pep talk where the wine bottle is empty. We're both smiling into the dregs of our cups and we feel light. It's not just the wine that makes us feel this way---though it helps. It's the timeless feeling of shouldering a burden with a like-minded person. Anyone who tells you passion isn't a burden is fooling themselves. Choosing to care about something enough to call it passion is undoubtedly a burden, but why does that have to be negative? It isn't. You've chosen to be brave. And you've found others who are also brave and willing to help you carry this beautiful, huge passion in your heart. 

But here we are, at the end. All I have left to say to you, poets, is this:

Cheers.