Why Poetry? Nobody Cares.

That's my tortured poet face. See? 

As  per usual with me, it's mostly hair—and blur—but mostly hair.

How odd to settle into the writer thing. It is terribly unglamorous. And a literary writer at that. Nobody gives a rip what you do and can’t really understand why you do it. I remember my poet and professor, Kate Daniels, at Vanderbilt and her first question on the first day of the advanced poetry class. She said, “Why write poetry? Nobody cares.” And she is absolutely right. Absolutely. Nobody cares, but then, if it’s in you—if it’s really in you—then what else can you do? There is nothing else and the fact that nobody cares is something we all just have to grow up about and live with.

Even other poets don’t really care, often too concerned with their own work to pay attention to yours beyond what they can learn (read pillage) from your craft. It’s predatory, really, but this is the weird little world in which we bury ourselves.

This isn’t to say poetry isn’t important. We are exposers of epiphany—truth and vision. Also, historically, poets have been responsible for keeping and, when necessary, rehabilitating the language, but the credit often passes to novelists and journalists and orators. Ah, well—lament, lament, lament. Maybe all this “nobody cares” business is part of the fun of poetry. We do love having things to sorely lament and tear our hair out over and swoon on our swooning couches about and loudly bitch with other poets concerning.

More than the poetry itself, that’s probably why nobody likes us—gorgeous, important, language-keeping, epiphany exposing, short-attention-span-having, precocious, pretentious assholes that we are.

How I love us all.

-M.