Last December, when the coming year still blinked like a star in our swiftly tilting universe, I decided on a whim to write a poem a day. As I juggled grading end-of-term research papers alongside the chaos of Christmas, I also juggled words in the evenings. I threw a few in the air and tried to catch them elegantly as they circled back around. Many of them simply fell to the ground as I sat on the sofa writing, the floor littered with letters.
It was an exercise in creativity, but I realized later, it was also an exercise in naming. There were thoughts, emotions, and observations I hadn’t processed that found their way out of my head and onto paper, however inelegantly I tossed them.
When I was in graduate school, we chose a singular concentration of study for two years, but for one term, we were offered an elective. I vacillated between choosing fiction or poetry, and I chose poetry because, secretly, I have always wanted to walk the tightrope of words like a poet on a high wire. I wrote my first selection of poems, and the response from my professor and fellow classmate (an actual poet who wrote about black crows and brain tumors) was lukewarm at best.
I still have the pages of my poetry with their hand-drawn scribbles pinging like pinballs around the poems. They wrote lots of question marks in an attempt to make sense of what I wrote. It makes me laugh a little now, but at the time I thought writing veiled and slightly abstract words was the point of poetry. Readers are supposed to be confused, right? Just a little?
Early on in the session, my professor wrote that she couldn’t find a single image in any of my work. In my effort to convey emotion, I forgot the importance of concrete imagery, of naming the previously un-nameable, of fixing a vision in the mind of the reader.
The words were pretty, but they didn’t mean anything to her. I had retreated into abstractions, partly from inexperience, but also because the truth of the poems scared me a little. To attempt, with words, to put flesh and bones on the first nursing patient I prepared for the morgue was to say: one minute, John existed and the next minute, he didn’t. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
When speaking of the importance of choosing our words with care, author Marilyn McEntyre believes we desperately need concrete language in our culture. “We protect ourselves from naming the uncomfortable,” she says, rather than sit with our discomfort.
We need images, precision, strong verbs and nouns, and more attention to nuance in our language. This is how we communicate better. This is how we care for our souls and the souls of others. This is how we ask questions that elicit answers that matter.
I see now that this is why I spent December writing a poem every day as a means of naming the uncomfortable circus inside of me.
If the past few months have felt like an endless ride on a tilt-a-whirl to you, perhaps you might sit in the blur and name the things you feel and see. It doesn’t need to take the form of poetry. It may simply be something you confirm in your mind with an image, a verb, a noun that helps you see life more clearly.
What could you name today that would bring you a sense of knowing or a sense of peace?
Set the carnival of kept things free by naming them.
