Adam Ai : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

Poems seem enter from somewhere else and leave in print so they are only mine for a little while and I’m part of a larger process. I appreciate the time I have with them more. There’s so much about the process you aren’t aware of until it hits you. I used to say nobody cared what I have to say so why bother and I guess I don’t have that excuse anymore. I lost a lot of years thinking that way. But it takes what it takes and you can only start from where you are. I realized this too late for my mom to see any of these successes. She knew me as she knew me, and we had little to be proud of. If I had stopped running earlier I might have been able to help us both. Given both of us reasons. Healing. Forgiveness. So the cost of that kind of thinking is high.

I heard a poem isn’t finished until somebody reads it and I’m finding that’s true. Poems I thought I’d probably keep on editing into different forms privately and just not show anyone have become something outside me and really do seem “done” – warts and all. So I’m learning something about letting go in that sense, and it’s a blessing of the process I didn’t see coming and a balm in a year of crisis. My poems were each a moment for me – but a moment I couldn’t let go of – and now they’re a sort of benchmark for how much I’m learning and how far I’ve come.

I really didn’t know the first letter of each line in a poem doesn’t have to be capitalized, for instance. I’m serious. There’s a word for that, but I can’t quite come up with this moment. Naïve will have to do. But that’s what happens when you spend all your time reading Emily Dickinson and other old-schoolers but have no exposure to modern poetry, or know any poets or anyone really interested in poetry. It’s just not my background. I learned what ekphrastic means the other day – I’ve been writing poems about pieces of art in other disciplines for a long time, dudes. A long time to not know that. But again, we all have to start somewhere. 

Nobody sees a poem of mine until I submit it, and since I never simultaneously submit or show the same version of a poem to successive editors it’s always a shot in the dark. I have to trust my instincts and that’s a useful, if rigorous process for a poet I think. I see now that many poets have a circle of people they trust and show their poems so they can get feedback and a sense of how it’ll hit people once it gets into the world. It sounds lovely but it’s not my story. If I leave the house with broccoli in my teeth I have to live with that. The lesson? Poems are never perfect. And they aren’t supposed to be. That’s not the point. Perfect isn’t a reasonable goal. So, I’ll live even if I’m embarrassed and hey, makes me push for the next poem to be even better. 

Anyway I figure the more varied and diverse voices we have in the poetry world the more potential there is we get a shot at saving someone. So I’m okay with being weird. I’m relieved I’m not the only one.