The Poet Tries to Entice the Reader

Trying to come up with a good title for a poem is an effort in enticing the reader. I want the reader to want to continue to read my poem. A good title can be one way a reader’s experience of a poem is shaped while not giving away the mystery or suspense of what will follow. A good title is unique. One could say a good title is seductive. This is a tall order for a few words.

The attempt to find the right words for my recent poem reminded me of what writers and all manner of other people call “the power of words.”

Just 30 days ago a young woman stood behind a podium and delivered a powerful poem, The Hill We Climb, and used her self-agency as a black woman and the first U.S. Youth Poet Laureate to remind us that poetry can be, as she put it later that night, “the site in which we can re-purify and re-sanctify the power of words.” Amanda Gorman had wanted to, she said, “invest that into the highest office of the world.” We know she achieved much of that goal through her performance on Inauguration Day because so many of us felt moved and even transformed by her words and presence.

For four long years words were regularly violated, misappropriated and exploited by the highest office of our land, and this young poet, acting with her own phenomenal will, chose to invest the office of the presidency, or I should say, re-invest it with the power of words going forward, a huge gift. And a gift we needed in ways we had not known before. Her words were revolutionary.

A writer’s work is demanding and rewarding. Many of us who write would also name it as a compelling need—we cannot NOT write, we often say. The work is rewarding in spite of the effort it takes because we are giving a gift to the reader. We give our best thoughts, best feelings, best crafting of each piece that we can give. We give these gifts with generosity, without expectation of something in return.

As a writer I hope in some small way, to repay the vast richness I have been given in the 60+ years since I started reading as a small girl—that richness of many new insights and transformations all the writing I’ve experienced all these years has given me. Writing by others, and now by myself, has literally revolutionized the ways I see and experience the world, often changing my perception of that world. There is no going back once a transformation has occurred, is there?

The poet Aracelis Girmay says “we are all so lucky any time anybody speaks with their full voice and questions—it’s a gift to humanity. Any time anybody carries their complexities and shares how they think, feel through, and try to make sense or undo sense in the world helps us as readers be and imagine more world.” To Girmay, this is critical and vital work. To me she speaks to the hope of what else can happen, what else is out there, what else we can learn, how we can grow. Girmay is currently serving as the first editor-at-large of BOA Editions’ Blessing the Boats Selections of poetry books written by women of color, doing, in addition to writing her own poems, this critical and vital work in 2021.

My humble hope with my own work is to at the very least open up space for readers to see or hear something new, some new aspect of a familiar thing or experience, or for a reader to find a new idea or new image that stirs them in some way. At best, I wish for my writing to help the reader come away different than before they read the piece.

Whether or not this happens for a reader I may never know. I can only keep writing because I cannot NOT write. I am compelled to do this. I have a passion for words and a deep appreciation for their power. I want to spend the rest of my life immersed in them and lifting them out into the world.

What is your passion? What compels you to do what you do? What is your critical and vital work?