ABOUT
Kristen Boudreau + The Project
Poetry is fascinating. I, like most other students in the American education system, was taught to read poetry as if it were a puzzle. As if there was some secret message that would be uncovered if only you put all the pieces together. But, when I took my first creative writing class, half of which was devoted to poetry, I learned that poetry was not like that at all.
Poetry is freedom. After years of being forced to write formulaic five-paragraph argumentative essays—introduction, body paragraph one, body paragraph two, body paragraph three, conclusion—poetry was refreshing. With poetry, there are no bounds. It doesn’t have to be a certain shape or a certain length, to sound a certain way or even make sense to everyone. Sure, poems should have a purpose, something that is being communicated, but those are the only bounds. You can use a vast array of “tools” to reach this goal: form, shape, enjambment, caesurae, word choice, stanza breaks, line breaks, anaphora, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, text size, rhyme, rhythm, meter, allusions, metaphors, similes, imagery, repetition, the list goes on.
Poetry is fun. You can experiment. You can break rules. You can be your true, honest self.
But most of all, poetry is scary. As I continued to learn more about the genre, taking more and more classes throughout my undergraduate career, poetry became very, very, intimidating. The more I read the works of great poets—Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith, Chen Chen, Jericho Brown, and more—the more I was violently humbled by the reality of how much I didn’t know about poetry. I learned how amateur my poems actually were. That even if poetry was fascinating, freedom, fun, all these things were eclipsed by how each time I tried to write a new poem, I was irrationally scared. I’d like to believe that I’m the type of person to go after what I want even if people disapprove, but when it comes to poetry—an outlet for my deepest, most personal thoughts and experiences—I can’t say that’s how I would characterize myself. What if people thought they were weird? What if people thought they were off-putting? What if I was revealing too much personal information? Do people actually care about what I write? Why would they care? And, most importantly, what if it was obvious how terrible they were? What if people didn’t think they were good? Naturally, this led me to ask: what makes good poetry, anyway?
Although when I was tasked with completing a semester-long writing project I was extremely hesitant to choose poetry, it turned out to be the perfect genre. It was my last semester of undergrad, and I was facing a life crisis. I was struggling between choosing the industry I had wanted to pursue since childhood—publishing—and the industry my heart and mind were tugging me toward: law. Three long, challenging years of law school that will test your physical and mental limits followed by upwards of gruelling 90-hour work weeks is not something that a person just signs up for unless they really, really want to be a lawyer. Thus, a massive amount of introspection is required before one solidifies their desire to pursue this route.
For me, this project served as that required introspection. I thought about how the law has impacted my life, and something I have always known is that it has affected me daily. That is because when I was seven years old, my parents decided to get a divorce. Divorce is definitely not rare these days: a common knowledge says that half of all marriages end in divorce. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that even after all this time, I had a lot of unresolved feelings toward my parents’ separation. While I’m very open about this aspect of my life, it is still personal, and poetry is the one place where I feel I can be my true, honest self.
After completing this project, I feel like I can confidently call myself a poet. I know my poems are not weird or off-putting. There is no such thing as revealing “too much” personal information in poetry: that is what the genre is for, for me. There are people that care about what I write, and even if there weren’t that wouldn’t matter to me because I care about what I write. My poems are not terrible, they are good, and although not everyone would agree with that statement, I do, and in the end, my opinion is the only one that matters.