Return to Sender

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I’ve always been a writer – even if I do sometimes allow myself to forget that. But there was a time when I wanted particularly to be a poet. I scribbled my first poem on a piece of foolscap torn from my binder one night in eighth grade… and put another four on paper the same evening. To this day, I don’t know what possessed me. I don’t know that it really matters. For years after, I stayed up late into the night, hiding under my quilt in the dark, writing poems by flashlight. I won contests, gave some readings and, in a bizarre turn of events, one of my poems are translated into Magyar then published in a “poetry in (public) transit,” campaign in Hungary.

It was poetry that got me into the creative writing department at UBC. But as soon as I graduated, I gave it up entirely. If I’m honest, I don’t have anymore insight into why I stopped than I do into why I started in the first place. It just happened, and I let it. As recently as March of last year, I was thoroughly convinced I would never write a poem again…

And then I bought a book of poems. Specifically, Flux by Orion Carlotto. I discovered, somewhat abruptly, the advent of the Instagram poet – Carlotto, Kaur and their ilk. The idea that poetry, the kind of writing my classmates at school universally reviled and claimed not to understand, could have mass appeal fascinated me. Particularly because so much of it appeared to be written by young women. Women who were about the age I was when I thought I would like to be a poet.

Flux proved to be very much like the book of poems I might have written. And that made me incalculably glad that I never published one. There were moments of brilliance but there was also a lot of repetition and cliche. No one is perfect at twenty-two. But the idea of all my twenty-two-year-old mistakes, not always elegantly retold, living on eternally in print is excruciating to contemplate.

At least, it made me incalculably glad at first – but then it made me think about reading better poetry. And reading better poetry awoke the sleeping hive of words in my head (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf.) Almost exactly a year after saying that I would probably never write a poem again, I wrote a new one. In the eight months since, I’ve written more – they don’t come to me regularly, and unlike my younger self, I’m perfectly willing to scrap ideas that don’t come out the way I want, so the number I’ve finished is nominal. But already, there’s a clear theme.

The Instagram poets aren’t just young women, they are mostly privileged young women, although they come from diverse backgrounds. And the few that aren’t are still writing about the same thing: love. Love unrequited, love lost, new love and rekindled love. It’s fertile ground, but it’s not exactly new territory. It’s what I’ve always written about too, for the most part. But if I were to publish a book of poems, I’d have to call it something like Return to Sender. The love in my poems is unwanted, unreturned.

I’m not sure that anyone would want to read a book like Return to Sender. Love is hard to find, in reality. Possibly now more than ever, when spontaneous social interaction is not only increasingly abnormal but also considered unsafe. Apparently it’s the book I’m slowly writing, anyway, and since I’ll never publish it, I doubt it matters. There’s a certain satisfaction in that, in putting words on paper for no one but myself. It’s the exercise of doing it that matters, not the outcome. And if I reread my words ten years from now and they sound laughable, I can have that laugh to myself before moving on.

Return to Sender will never be a real book. And I absolutely believe that’s for the best. Part of what I love about poetry is, admittedly, that it isn’t accessible to everyone. It’s a metaphorical private club for exactly the kind of eccentric person I am, and I’m quite comfortable with that. I’ve read and written in solitude for so long that it feels like the only thing that makes sense. But that doesn’t stop me contemplating what the alternative might look like every once in a while…

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