The "Narcissistic" Poet

Last Friday I encountered a few choice words from my Creative Writing teacher that I found interesting. He was looking over my poetry, making editing comments about it, asking me what certain things meant or why I put them there. He then told me that, "you can't be imcomprehensible. You need to be accessible."

But what does that really mean?


Let's take a moment to break this down.


As a poet, it is your duty to express yourself, whether yourself be concise, chaotic, peaceful, sick, loving, angry, alive, or dead. Whatever it is that you are in that moment--you must express that.

And poet's are not there to express what they think is accessible. Quite the opposite, actually. Poetry, art--is narcissism. It's replicating something of yourself that others can love, for others to love. It is duplicating yourself for the purpose of enjoyment, for the purpose of awe. Understanding is really only a by-product of the general enjoyment of poetry. Let me explain.

There are many things you consider when writing a poem. For me, meaning hardly comes first-- a feeling comes first. I hardly ever have an ending in mind when I start writing. And why? Because I enjoy poetry, mostly, for how it looks, how it sounds.

The by-product is understanding.

If it sounds like something beautiful, I feel like it is beautiful. If the array of words looks physically beautiful, I feel like it is beautiful. If there is a meaning in it, it is beautiful. But who knows what was going through the poet's head at the time? By the given poem, no one excet the poet.

To say that you must alter your art for the general public--for accessibility--is not only stifling expression, but underestimating the audience. It is saying, "If I don't understand this, no one will." It is blatantly limiting the beauty of poetry.
And all of that feels unnecessary. There is not one meaning in poetry--there's a thousand meanings. There's probably more than a million.

But "it is not necessary to understand--only necessary to love".