A Voice without its Typical Guards: A Craft Essay by Casey Cantrell
I should start by saying that while I have, technically speaking, written and published poetry, I don’t consider myself a poet. More on this later.
Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that he writes not for the masses but “for myself and for my friends.” At least when it comes to my poetry, I adhere to the same idea, with one slight variation that probably comes down to semantics: I write to my friends.
My poem “Madness” was written after a gradual, months-long conflict that nearly ended one of my closest friendships. I’m the type of person who loves intensely, and for her, it was too much—she felt pressured to reciprocate an intensity of friendship that she couldn’t possibly meet. Miscommunication, misunderstanding, misfortune, eek!
This is a glib and extremely simplistic summary, but for the purposes of this essay, it’ll do.
In the spirit of reconciliation and “what happens now?”, I started scribbling for myself about how to communicate love to someone who doesn’t love like me—which, fun fact, was the original title of this poem, and it’s probably a better title than the current one (I am bad at titling poems)—and I stumbled onto the metaphor that appears at the end of the poem: the “gifts” tossed up by the sea. I composed the rest from there.
Besides myself, there is only one other person who can fully appreciate this poem, and that is my friend. That includes the little trinkets I left in there for her; for example, the third stanza mimics the naive tone of the title character in Piranesi, a book we both love and that, fittingly, she gifted me. (Whether she actually spotted the trinkets, only she can say.)
But the emotional heart of the poem—the struggle to love her freely, to not just reach her but immerse ourselves in each other, all while trying not to overwhelm her; the fear of failing to strike that balance; the hope (or something like it) that compels me to keep trying in the face of that fear—only she gets it.
These are universal themes, of course, and to some degree, everyone can relate to them. But that “to some degree” is key. For you, my poem is an abstraction—maybe you can relate it to something you experienced in your own life, but it doesn’t actually contain that experience. For my friend and me, this poem is tangible. It speaks directly from and about our experience, our hurt, our choice to keep pushing forward despite what happened.
In that sense, it’s a poem that only she and I can properly share. (That was affirmed for me when I read it to her, and she responded afterward that she felt like she could recite it back to me as if it were her own.) As I see it, my poem is not so much a poem as it is a letter I wrote to her, a fragment of a much larger conversation between her and me.
In fact, I can’t write poetry any other way. Not that I haven’t tried—I’ve attempted my odes to urns and such, but they always come out feeling soulless, like I’ve put together a piece of IKEA furniture. The poems I’ve written that I like, that I think are really and truly worthwhile, are always with somebody I love in mind. I marvel at those poets who can spin out beauty from the unremarkable and impersonal, because I just can’t do it. I think this is why I don’t feel like a poet.
Maybe you’re wondering, Why share the work at all, then? Why publish it as poetry if this is how you feel about it?
Well, vanity, for one—sending my friend a link to a nice, polished, professional website with my poem sure beats copying and pasting it into an email or, heaven forbid, attaching a Word doc.
More seriously, I think (and hope) there’s something of value in it for you. If letters (which is how I see this particular work) were only important to their intended audience, nobody would bother collecting and publishing the correspondence of famous people. Indeed, I think there can be something wonderful in encountering a voice without its typical guards, even if you can’t quite understand what it’s all about.
And who knows, maybe my poem will make you think more about your own friendships, relationships, whatever. Maybe you’ll read it and admire it, like a pretty rock that you’ve found along the beach. Maybe you’ll really like it, and you’ll place it in your pocket to take home. Or maybe it’ll be nothing more than a clump of seaweed that you’ll step around.
But one person walking along this shore will find a shell, listen to it, and—I hope!—hear what I wanted to say to her.
