Hello friends (and haters)!
Poetry: a love language to a writer, a classic toxic relationship to me. I am on poetry’s good side when it comes to writing it; I am able to become vulnerable in ways my friends wish I would be. However, poetry gets on my nerves when I have to read and analyze it since I do not live inside the poet’s brain, which makes me fear that I am interpreting everything completely wrong. Although poetry is art and art allows unlimited room for interpretation, the mere act of not knowing something is unbearable. I live to know, but is that really living?
I have to admit, reading and writing about Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” was a beautiful experience— maybe not as beautiful as the lover described, but close enough. Although, I was still hesitant to write about it. Analyzing poetry is one thing, having to construct a coherent, strong argument about it is a part of a whole different territory— a much more intimidating one. This experience, however, has filled me with pride. I started writing about poetry in academic settings since high school, and during that time, it had never occured to me to read it through a queer lens due to the simple fact that queerness was never a topic that was discussed in any of the poetry units, let alone my English classes. Now, here I am as an English major at a public university in California, who is studying to become an English teacher, and I am able to take a step back and ask: “Hey, why have we never questioned if the narrator in Shakespeare’s sonnets is queer?” Even better, I am able to write my own poetry, automatically making me a queer poet. I was able to share this moment with my class, where I opened up about the end of a queerplatonic friendship that shaped my life. That moment in itself is poetry.
In my future teaching, I do not want to make poetry a dreadful experience while still acknowledging that I do not have control over my students’ individual experiences with poetry. Through my approach, I would make them write poetry first so they have familiarity with what the brain of a poet is like. I want them to experience it first hand before they write about poetry. I would make it a fun unit that hopefully will stick with them for a long time. Afterall, the art of poetry exists within everyone.
