In recent weeks, the columns on this page have encouraged Hillsdale students to broaden their artistic horizons in multifarious ways. From digesting paintings in nearby museums to picking up scrapbooking, our arts columnists have assured their readers that there is an artistic niche for people of every skillset.
This is true and valuable advice, but it’s not what I’m going to talk about. Maybe you’re a gifted sculptor; maybe your pastels are pristine. Perhaps you find your muse in pottery or ballet or face painting or ventriloquism. But regardless of your particular artistic strengths, I have one piece of additional advice for you:
You — yes, you — should write poetry.
Probably bad poetry: first poetic efforts, for those of us who are neither savants nor prodigies, tend to flounder. Perhaps, through serious discipline and flashes of creativity, you might eventually begin to write verse that stands proudly as respectable commentary on the human condition. That would be great (and I would be jealous), but that’s not what I’m talking about either.
I want rather to extol the creative benefits of bad poetry itself.
I consider myself something of an authority on the writing of terrible, terrible poetry: I have produced piles of it. No matter how modest the form I tackle or how excited I get about an idea, the finished product (if I make it even that far), far from standing tall as an independent work of art, invariably collapses — sagging defeatedly in on itself or flopping noodly around.
But while I cannot in good conscience endorse the products of my work, I have nothing but good things to say about the process.
You’re reading my column, so you could might intuit that prose writing takes up a substantial portion of my life. Between my work for the Collegian – generally upwards of 1000 words a week – and the reams of academic writing I produce as a history major, I often feel like a faucet, shooting words and ideas out onto the page as quickly as they spring into my brain. (The analogy isn’t perfect: professional faucets don’t wage bitter war against the distractions of social media. But you get the idea.)
Writing poetry requires an utterly dissimilar process. Contemporary poet Rita Dove calls poetry “language at its most distilled and powerful.” For Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry was “a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”
To fulfill either of these definitions in the space of a few short stanzas is a punishing ordeal. The poet must sweat and strain over every word, every piece of grammar, every image and turn of phrase. He wrestles with the dizzying cadences and infinitesimal connotations of the English language, stretching his knowledge to its very limits. If the resulting poem is subpar, the experience can be extremely frustrating.
The benefits of the struggle, however, soon become evident in other forms of writing. Though I often despair of ever producing a poem worthy even of being read by others’ eyes, the rigor of poetry has undeniably tightened my prose.
Hours spent sweating over the perfect way to solder clauses together pay off in academic writing when it is necessary to communicate complicated concepts in an intelligible way. The sensitivity to the nuances of English that poetry provides breathes pep and dynamism into every style of authorship.
And who knows? Maybe if you come to poetry to give your physics papers a little zip, you’ll suddenly realize you actually have the knack. Maybe you’ll acquire a taste for tweed and blaze a bold name for yourself through the pages of Image and the Paris Review.
But even if your poetry sputters and sags as much as mine, acquiring the discipline is an undertaking you won’t regret.
Andrew Egger is a sophomore from St. Louis. A history major, he is minoring in journalism through the Dow Journalism Program and is the Collegian’s assistant arts editor.
