Something Called an Introduction

This is a poetry book but I am not a poet.

To be honest, I don’t believe any self-respecting person should label themselves a poet prior to their own demise. In fact, if you’re calling yourself a poet in front of your friends and they haven’t made fun of you yet, I suggest you get new ones. These people do not truly care about you.

I’d like to preface this all with an admission: I love poetry. I realise that this book may seem like an attack on the form, but I can assure you this isn’t my intention. I’m simply just a really bored guy seeking to understand why we resonate so much with the fleeting thoughts of strangers when they’re presented in stanzas. And I figured the best way to explore this notion was through the only way I know how: A pathetic, drawn-out, highly ridiculous joke.

Within this book, I try my best to replicate the depth of serious poetry without any real sentiment behind the words. One may even use the term Utter Gibberish to define the subsequent scribbles, and I would have to agree. I wanted these poems to exit my mind as quickly as they entered, no internal critic or middleman involved.

To complete this self-imposed mission I devised a regimented method of writing. When it came to the more serious sounding poems of the book, I allowed myself ten minutes to complete the first draft. This left me no time to plan ahead and therefore prevented me from imbuing any deeper conscious meaning. I wanted to test and see if the stuff that numbly poured out of me looked in any way like poetry, or, at least what I recognised poetry to be. And if it did, what would that mean? How would I approach my subsequent reading of other people’s work? Did I care? Should I be more focused on my future? Applying for graduate positions to earn an actual income after college? Probably. Yes.

In regards to the shorter comedic poems of the book, I allowed myself a longer thirty-minute time slot. I wanted them to be funny, at least to me, and to perhaps make the reading of this selfish experiment a little less dull. Besides, I’ve always found that it takes more time to come up with something that will make someone laugh rather than cry.

So, what is the book’s official origin story again? Why have I taken on this project? Were my parents killed by a poem when I was young? Is this my revenge? No. But this idea has been growing inside my mind since childhood.

I’ve always held this intense anger when engaging with poetry. And I’m not sure why. It’s always just been there. Deep. Immediate.

I encountered my first poem in primary school, when our teacher assigned us some reading for homework, a chance to acquaint ourselves with the poetic form before trying to write our own in class the next day.

I never understood what was so special about the words on the page. To me, it felt as though we were praising a stranger’s half-baked thoughts and nothing more. I used to joke around and say that I could write this stuff in a few seconds — Not to boast or claim that I was as skilled as these writers, but just to explore the idea that no matter what I wrote down the teacher wouldn’t be able to dismiss it as not good enough. And that was revolutionary.

You see, up until this point in my academic career there had always been a right answer. At least, this is what we were taught. And so, when this assignment came around, I was utterly baffled at the fact that my spoofy opinions on the colour of the sky (blue) and how much I claimed to love my family (a lot) was actually accepted as work.

Even when I entered secondary school, and began to analyse poetry more seriously, I couldn’t break away from the idea that it was all just shallow words placed into a neat rhyming scheme — Or sometimes not, as we were swiftly introduced to modernism and the idea that when poems don’t rhyme and have no structure whatsoever they are considered even more impressive.

This didn’t help with my scepticism.

We looked a lot at Irish poetry which tended to find beauty in the mundane — in the housing estates and fields and bins. And, of course, this infuriated me further. Because now I felt as though these poets were really taking the piss. It seemed like they weren’t even bothered to leave the imaginative space of their own sofas to come up with ideas. And I respect the laziness, don’t get me wrong, but I always felt as though I was missing something, something that elevated these printed sentences above the more insightful and outright funnier etchings on the backs of our classroom chairs.

Skip forward now to college, where I’m greeted with the minds of Yeats, Pound, Bukowski, and Hemingway. Suddenly, the idea that poetry can be anything becomes a little more profound. But still, naively, I ask myself, How hard could it be? I mean, obviously these writers had great causes to respond to, but couldn’t you just fake it? Couldn’t you just lie about your life and achieve the same effect? Why not just arrange a handful of random powerful words in an order that presents as poetic in the most cliched way possible? What would be the difference? What would be the missing ingredient preventing your poem from transforming into something revered, moving, revolutionary, something to be studied for centuries to come?

There’s no doubt that most art seems to reach the modern individual’s early morning instagram story before it gets anywhere near their heart. And I know that we aren’t supposed to judge other people’s relationships with creativity, and that everyone, in some form or manner, is an artist. But I sometimes sense that this might also be a steaming pile of complete horseshit. I don’t know.

Anyway, I think it’s important to note that I am a hypocrite, a loser, and a grumpy awkward man. But despite all of the cynicism and ridiculousness which lies at the core of this book, I hope you’re still able to find something in here that will make you think a little bit deeper, and maybe even smile. But not laugh. Because as we all know, those who laugh out loud at books are difficult and a bit fucking odd.

— Love, Curtis.