(Not) A Poet in Paris

Le Chateau sweater (c/o) (similar)
Mavi jeans (c/o)
Sezane boots (similar)
Anthropologie beret
Chanel cardholder
Zara sunglasses (similar)
& Other Stories necklace
Madewell rings
Old Navy earrings (c/o Ivanhoe Cambridge)
Location: Place Dauphine – Paris, France

I assure you, dear friends, that as I told you on Instagram, I am definitely not a spy. And I was definitely not in the middle of a dead drop when the first photo was taken.

This is hardly the first time when, dressed in all black, I’ve been compared to a member of a clandestine organisation. There is something undeniably chic about a spy, so I take it as a compliment. But the truth is, when I put on a black turtleneck with black jeans and a beret, I’m not taking inspiration from spies – now and always, in the back of my mind at least, I want to look like a poet.

Yes, you read that right; a poet.

I scribbled my first poem late one evening on a piece of scrap paper. And then I scribbled four more, each one in about five minutes. I’d shown no particular inclination towards, or even interest in, poetry prior to that evening. But I was thirteen, which is the age, I know now, when most angst-ridden teenagers who choose to express themselves through sloppily written verse begin their oeuvre. Between 9 and 9:20 pm that evening, I became a poet.

Let’s be realistic: I was hardly a poet. But I loved the turn of my own phrase, I won’t deny it. And I was at a particularly self-indulgent age, wherein I felt not just a desire but a genuine need to immortalised every emotion I experienced. Poetry made it easy.

I think that if you do something for long enough, eventually you develop a level of proficiency at it, no matter whether or not you have a natural gift for it. Those first five poems were dreadful. Laughable, even. But my poetry did improve in time, most likely by simple virtue of the fact that I wrote reams of it. I entered contests, won awards in approximately two per cent of the ones I entered and actually gave a reading at a local bookstore, which was the highlight of my life up to that point. (It should be noted for the record that, in typical teenaged style, I loathed the poems I had to read by the time the day came. I cringed the whole way through, sure I could have chosen better examples of my work.)

All of my hard work, my midnight scribbling sessions, culminated in my studying poetry as part of my Creative Writing degree in university. I devoted two full years to weekly classes on the subject, critiquing and being critiqued, over and over.

And then I graduated. I moved home. I got a job working, quite improbably, in insurance. My life changed and, for the most part, my need to express myself in couplets dissipated entirely. It’s been a decade since I wrote a poem, perhaps longer. The fact is, towards the end, all the writing and rewriting lost its charm. I aspired more to the sartorial style of the Beat poets than to their lifestyle and work.

When I put this outfit on early Monday morning in Paris, my long-ago dreams of being a poet came back to me. It’s cliche, but I never do feel more literary than when I’m dressed in head-to-toe black. And if I’m dressed in head-to-toe black to go sit outside a Parisian cafe, eating croissants and reading a book, it just makes the experience that much more like I used to dream it would be.

For me, poetry, like Baby-Sitter’s Club books and gymnastics, was a brief, burning passion but, ultimately a phase. In recent months, I’ve seen a lot of younger girls share their own poems in their Instagram stories and I can’t help but smile – somehow, a group of modern female influencer poets, with their platitudes dressed up as verse, have made it cool to share your midnight scribblings with the world. I’m sure, if I were ten years younger, I’d think they were all brilliant. And they would inspire me to post my own, too.

I’m not ten years younger. I studied writing, and I still believe it is about expressing your own complex truth, not just saying what everyone else is thinking in the most succinct way possible. But I also don’t believe that poetry is the exclusive domain of quietly cool people who dress all in black. I can’t count how many people have told me they don’t understand poetry this year alone – and it’s only March. I reflected on that, sitting at Le Bar du Caveau on Place Dauphine. And I concluded that it’s better that people embrace poetry, that they try to find their own place in it, even if they do it poorly or ultimately give it up, rather than writing it off as incomprehensible, which it simply isn’t.

I am not a poet. But I understand why poetry is important and meaningful to people, especially at particular stages in their lives. I’m not about to pick up my pen again anytime soon. But I will never give up my devotion to what I still think is the most poetic of styles – all black everything.