Greatest Hits: Why I Write

So for the first little while, I'm going to repost here blogs that I originally wrote over on Facebook. Probably not all of them, mind - just the ones that I still enjoy. The following first appeared on Facebook on June 12, 2008.

For some reason, I feel like I have to defend myself every time I tell anyone I want to be a poet. I imagine that when someone asks what I want to do with my life, and I answer, “I want to be a writer,” all they hear is, “I want to live in my parents’ basement until I’m thirty-five and obese with Cheetos stains on all of my clever novelty tee-shirts” or “I want to be mistaken for a homeless man, with wild, unkempt hair and exactly three warts on my nose, until my chronic depression and savage alcoholism drive me to stick my head in an oven.” (Sorry, Sylvia).

Writing, especially poetry, never seems like the most practical option. When I got into college and declared as a math major, I cited practicality. “I can get a job with math because math is practical.” By the way, Webster’s dictionary defines “practicality” as “a prostitution of one’s hopes and dreams. See also ‘conformity.’” Look it up.

But a lot of the stigma I perceive against writers may actually be projected on the “teeming masses” from my own biases. When I declared as a Creative Writing major, I expected that my classes would be full of hermitic nerds with second-hand jackets as patchy as their beards and spiral notebooks full of handwritten fanfictions about Hermione Granger’s passionate love affair with Legolas from Lord of the Rings. These social orphans generally refer to themselves as “fantasists.” The rest of us call them “nerds.”

For a long time during my childhood, I actually aspired to join up with the fantasists. I read fantasy novels. My first real exposure to fantasy literature came the summer when I was eight years old: my father introduced me to the Dragonlance series of novels. If you’ve never heard of Dragonlance, then you probably have friends.

Today I almost blush to admit that I genuinely liked reading stories about Schwarzeneggerian titans slaying dragons with their large toenails and wooing women dressed like they came out of a ninth-century Victoria’s Secret catalog. But those books actually contributed to my academic success in grade school, surprisingly enough. Nearly every year, I had a certain requirement for reading pages, usually in the 500-1000 range. I averaged at least double that every time, accumulating hundreds of points of extra credit while my muscles melted into limp balloons filled with Jell-O and all those other “normal, adjusted” children went OUTSIDE.

I’ve long since abandoned fantasy novels for the more respectable realm of “literary fiction.” An Oxford study I just made up identifies three distinguishing characteristics of literary fiction:

1 – The good guys don’t always win.
2 – Good storytelling is less important that making a point.
3 – Everyone has sex all the time, and no one likes it.

The great ethereal “they” say that all great writers should be great readers first. Turns out “they” have a point: since I began reading “literature” as opposed to… whatever the alternative is, I’ve actually discovered a few writers that have changed the way I look at life, not to mention the way I write. One of the most noteworthy is the poet E. E. Cummings, more commonly known as “e. e. cummings” or “the reason God invented Spell Check.” I first heard of Cummings in a choir classroom, of all places – and now that you’ve heard that I was a choir boy who read fantasy novels, you most likely have questions which I’ll answer by saying, “Yes, I did, in fact, get beaten up in school.” The chamber choir of which I was a member performed a Cummings poem set to music, which begins:

“i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes”

In high school, I liked the poem because it seemed to be giving grammar teachers all over the nation the proverbial bird. However, as I’ve grown and matured (stop snickering!), I’ve come see beyond Cummings’s tendency and found real wisdom in his writing. Consider the following passage from a lecture Cummings gave at Harvard University:

“My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. ‘Would you hit a woman with a child?— No, I'd hit her with a brick.’”

Violence against women is funny.

Cummings, I guess, is partly to blame for my poetry. And I’m not ashamed to be a poet, because, really, I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since fourth grade, when I wrote that blasted poem about leprechauns. Fifteen years later and I can still recite the whole thing by memory:

“Every St. Patrick’s Day Morning
Get up at the crack o’ dawn.
The little people be dancin’ about
Enjoyin’ the mornin’s spawn.

These tricky and sneaky people
Have gold they give away
But only if you can catch one
On glorious St. Patrick’s Day!”

Did I even know what “spawn” means?

Well, a lot of people seemed to like that glittering pile of what I then alleged to be poetry. My oldest brother, who was twelve at the time, asked me to repeat the poem for him several times. He probably just got a kick out of watching me, because every time I recited it, I jumped up and down and flapped my arms like a retarded penguin.

Writing gives me an outlet. It allows sides of my personality that don’t normally get to come out and play (like the spastic penguin) to express themselves. So I can talk a bit more about how I hate touching people (and how I want to get over that), share the (I think) remarkably profound experience I had walking barefoot by the home I grew up in, and explore exactly why I think the story of Alice in Wonderland is so darn fascinating. Plus, since I write all of these opinions and experiences, I can send them out, share them, in the hopes that someone out there will agree.

Of course, since I write all of these opinions and experiences into POEMS, it’s a bit futile, something akin to putting out messages in bottles in the middle of a desert. Still, maybe someday, some poor, haggard traveler will trip over the bottle as he crawls through the sand. He’ll dig the bottle up, turn it over in his hands, and then angrily break it against a rock because there’s no water in it.

(I feel like I should apologize to D&D players, fantasy writers, women, penguins, and the rest of the world which I referred to as “the teeming masses,” but I’m not going to)