“Why poetry?”
The theatre was filled with the sound that I love to elicit myself on the stage—that warm, slightly conspiratorial audience laughter. One of the panellists pretended to get up and leave in protest, prompting even more laughter. What the audience didn’t know, thankfully, as the moderator didn’t preface the question with my name, is that they were laughing at me.
The question he read aloud, of course, was mine: “Why poetry?”
In my mind, I had asked a real poet-to-poet question that I was so confident about I added my first name to the form, instead of my normal comfortable “anonymous” or maybe “H.” so the moderator, who I know, and whose poems I love, could tell it was me.
What was wrong with my question? Why did the moderator call it “terrible” before he asked it? I’ve certainly been part of my fair share of post-event conversations where we dissected the questions asked during the Q and A. Sometimes they can be inappropriate or downright racist, often naively so. But mine wasn’t one of those. I didn’t ask a multilingual writer about their “surprisingly excellent” English skills. I didn’t conflate fictional protagonists with real-life experiences of the writer. I didn’t ask a memoirist to redescribe the most traumatic events they’ve written about. I didn’t even ask an unanswerable non-question meant to show off my own knowledge or close reading.
I often think about why a concept I need to get onto the page needs to be a poem. Why isn’t it a story slam piece or fictionalized or maybe written as memoir? I even had my own answer to my question: because that’s how the words came out in order to frame my innermost fears into a few structured lines to challenge the status quo and that also felt safe and contained and just like I want them to feel on the page. Or in short, because it feels as close as I can come to being me.
It continues to amaze me every day that I’m an actual poet, and that I can be part of these conversations. But the audience laughter awakened the anxiety driving that amazement: that someone will figure out that I don’t really belong. I’m not a Real Poet. The anxiety surfaces even though I’ve been writing poems since I was too young to remember starting to write poems.
It surfaced even though I had been buoyed by my confidence in my own poetry during the intermission at this event. I had said hello to my publisher, who was in the audience. She introduced me to the person next to her, and that person excitedly told me she had recently read my book. She also told me a lovely story about going to visit her mother and being surprised to see my name and the title of my book, Permission to Settle, on a memo board in her mom’s room. She thinks it was likely written after hearing me on CBC and then wanting to remember the book to gift it to her daughter for her birthday. And in my memory, I was asked a very similar question to “Why poetry?” during that interview that I loved getting the chance to answer. Full disclosure: I also might have cried on the way to that CBC interview in disbelief and joy.
By the end of the semester, the answer to “Why poetry?” in the classes I teach at Capilano University lies somewhere between “Because I can!” and “Because I am a poet!” I’ve learned that my students often don’t consider themselves poets at the beginning of the course. One told me she didn’t realize she was already writing poems in her collected ideas on scraps of paper and journals and notes apps. But they understand at the end. We all become poets together.
I considered the moderator and what may have prompted him to react to my question with such derision. Perhaps it hit a fear of his own underneath the real question—maybe even whether it was enough to be a poet.
And while all this was happening inside my head, I wasn’t listening properly when, after the laughter, one of the poets sat calmly on the stage and answered my question from her heart with an empathy and kindness I understood even while not fully hearing her words. I was reminded about extending generosity—not only to myself, but on the stage, to the next emergent poet sitting in the next audience. I was reminded how it feels to be listened to and supported as a writer by other writers. I was reminded that my answer to the question “Why poetry?” is straightforward.
I am a poet.
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