Maddison

I’d always wanted to be a writer. 

It was the hobby I chose to define myself by when I was incredibly young– like when you said you wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot– but I never imagined myself being a poet. Like most, poetry was the medium that intimidated me: who was I to wax lyrical about life? What even was poetry? 

I was sure that I simply didn’t ‘get’ it and that I certainly didn’t ‘have’ it. 

So when I first started writing poetry when I was sixteen, nobody was more surprised than myself. Two years after reading the most pivotal collection for my writing journey (Richard Siken’s Crush), I was finally ready to put pen to paper but I kept it pretty quiet, ashamed of my own attempts at something that still seemed so far above me. Siken’s work was the first to help me realise that ‘understanding poetry’ went well beyond translating a piece line-by-line in layman’s terms. Sometimes, it told me, it really was just a feeling. A good poem can carry you off pure emotion alone, your whole body reacting to words, rhythm, and sound. Before you even know it you’ve made it through the whole collection wondering what it is about you that has changed– because something certainly has. That feeling wasn’t always something you could describe off-the-cuff. Or even ever. Poetry was something you had to sit with, to live in; you had to feel it before you could do anything else. 

And so poetry became a craft that I was desperate to crack– precisely because it couldn’t be. 

I wrote and I wrote. 

I scrapped. 

And then I wrote again.

Desperate to translate the feeling, never happy with the outcome but nevertheless determined to write for art’s sake. It became not just about the feeling of reading a poem but about the feeling of writing one. 

Then, a year or so later, I got the opportunity to help edit poetry for a young writer’s magazine and it became clear that my old relationship with poetry wasn’t quite as old as I had first thought– presumably a consequence of my own early poethood. With published poetry, we are already predisposed to believing that there is a feeling underlying the poem that we should be reaching for; it has been vetted and our job as readers becomes much easier because we simply have to find it and hold on. With an unpublished work however, we are entirely responsible for deciding whether the feeling is there at all. 

Just as the writer wants to prove themselves a poet, editors want to prove themselves worthy of detecting it. Poetry was forced to become mystical once more– something that had to be caught and analysed. Something beyond me that I wasn’t equipped to handle. This detecting was a muscle I was yet to train and, at first, it meant that I went back to my early roots of reading poetry: as though I was stuck back in school checking boxes, treating poetry like code. 

Poetry editing became a huge learning curve for me in this way. I had to start making sure it was simply me and the poem, coming to it on its own terms and taking from it whatever it was willing to offer. But I also had to hear those gaps in the story and find a way to fill them naturally, as though I was fine-tuning it. This is where I truly learnt about how that sound– and, consequently, that feeling– was made.

I learnt more about craft from reading and dissecting other young poet’s pieces than from reading published works. While I now look back and cringe at the pieces I first published in that magazine (a sign, I hope, of mere growth and reflection), I am immensely grateful for how it affirmed my passions. It spurred me on to continue writing (just as I hope it did many a writer that submitted) and I now have three more poems being published in an anthology later this year. 

So this is, in part, an ode I suppose to the literary magazines that aid creative journeys every day they stay running. I would certainly not be the writer I am today without them. But this is also my desperate call to other young poets and writers who are yet to pick up a pen. The imposter syndrome might never go away but there is always a way to work (and write) beside it.