ROXANE GAY is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Hunger. She lives and writes in the Midwest, for now.
Because I am a writer and I teach writing, people expect me to know about poetry. In truth, I know very little about poetry even though I read a great deal of it. I am vaguely familiar with various forms—sestina, sonnet, cinquain, ghazal. I am unfamiliar with the craft of poetics—line break, rhyme, meter, image. What I do know is that when I read poetry, good poetry, I forget to breathe and my body is suffused with something unnameable—a combination of awe and astonishment and the purest of pleasures.
I will never understand why more people don’t appreciate poetry. Even when I am confounded by a poem, it changes my world in some way. Poetry makes me think more carefully about the lyricism and the language I use in my prose. It helps give shape to my writing, helps me bring the reader to the heart of what I want to say. Poetry gives me the strength of conviction to take chances in my writing, to allow myself to be vulnerable.
Reading poetry is such a thrill that I often feel like I am getting away with something just to be able to indulge in reading it. That thrill shows me how poetry is in everything.
Take the poem “Trespassing” by Lisa Mecham, a poem about the night wanderings of teenagers, written in couplets. Look at the last two lines: “Then on the plywood floor, it’s just a boy pounding away / and a girl, her quiet cries turning stars into doves inside.” There is so much captured in that moment—we are given a scene, all too familiar but uniquely rendered, haunting, aching, gorgeous. Or “Cattails,” by Nikky Finney, a prose poem: a rush of words, a story of love and distance, a whole world, and the exquisite phrase “she is reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like.”
Or xTx, the poem “Do You Have a Place for Me,” and the unforgettable lines “I will collect your hair / with my mouth / Use the strands / to sew the slices / in my heart.” This is a poem I loved so much that I wrote a story with the same title so I could carry it with me forever.
Or take Jericho Brown, telling too much necessary truth in all his work, but especially “Bullet Points,” on the violence black men and women experience at the hands of cops. “I promise that if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me.” I heard Jericho read this live and found myself on the edge of my seat, my fingers curled into tight, sweaty fists as I tried to absorb the pain wrapped in the intense beauty of his words.
Or Eduardo C. Corral, who rocks as he reads his poetry before an audience, who blends English and Spanish and demands that we, as his readers, keep up. He writes of borders, erasing and challenging those that exist, while erecting new borders of his own. “Ceremonial” is full of hunger and sorrow and eroticism: “His thumbnail / a flake / of sugar / he would not / allow me to swallow.”
Or Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who uses poetry to write of the wonders of the natural world. She writes about being brown in white America, about being a daughter, a wife, a mother, of being a woman making sense of her own skin. Her poem “Small Murders” tells of Antony and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Josephine, how scents were woven through their loves: when a new suitor admires her perfume given by another, “by evening’s end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses / on my neck, twenty-seven small murders of you.” The poem ends with the elegant twist of a very sharp knife.
I could write of many more poets and poems that reach into my mind, my body, and never run out of words. There is no shortage of excellent, truly excellent poetry in the world. As I sit here, I am surrounded by books by Jonterri Gadson, Solmaz Sharif, Warsan Shire, and Danez Smith. I can’t wait to lose myself in their poetry.