Write Out the Door

“So now I’ve discovered something

lying dormant in my brain.

I will never let it go;

I will never be the same.”

“Stuck in My Id” – Reptar

 

Popular opinion of poetry often slides into arenas of contempt, prodding impatient middle-schoolers and middle-aged STEM cynics until they snap. Poetry is too confusing. “It’s pointless. There are too many points. I don’t understand these words. Everyone’s so moody.” However, I (at least currently) think that poetry is the one type of writing where explanation isn’t really necessary.

When done right—or at least with feeling and intention—it’s raw and uncomfortable, but it’s also much more relatable. These people don’t realize that; they’ve been hit too hard, too abruptly. But if they were to realize that, they might also realize that they find other types of writing (articles, essays, long-winded novels) far more appealing because they soften the blow of the message. They offer a calm easing-in, emotions largely spread out over dialogue, aging, and description of setting, allowing ample time to digest as their eyes slide over verb after quotation mark after verb. Like a movie. And if a book is a movie, a poem is a live dance.

Of all the things my high school literature teacher squawked at us, the word “purposeful” stood out. She urged us to carefully choose our line endings and modifiers in hopes of creating the most efficient combination of saturated, meaningful language. Connotation, too. She wanted some of that. It was a lot to take in. But outside of her rigid structure and requirements lies a roundabout tactic to making poetry to be what (I think) it really is: thoughts and emotions in their purest form. For that reason, I can’t urge students enough to write down their thoughts.

In moments of extreme frustration, it’s sometimes hard to find a preconceived set of words (like song lyrics or a shared Facebook post) that can exactly express those emotions. Sometimes one can find exactly how they’re feeling in the preestablished thoughts of another, but this shouldn’t detract from the impact of creating one’s own.

Free-writing is so incredibly important that I’ve come to think of it as both a mental and physical exercise, one that is largely underused by college students. Writing can release abstract anger and excitement by channeling it into words, but it can also function as an adventure, granting the writer a respite from their reality.

Living off campus offers the perfect opportunity to explore this activity. Students are, in most cases, more in control of their environment when removed from the university’s hustle and bustle, particularly its construction and constant flow of human traffic. While these can offer relatively rich writing inspiration, quieter and separate space is much more conducive to my emphasis on poetry (and any kind of personal writing, for that matter) as catharsis.

Let this song be encouragement to not let ideas and words lie “dormant in [your] brain.” Without release, there can only be buildup, and the last thing that college students need is another stressor. Writing is an incredibly powerful way to unpack thoughts, both clear and foggy. And once you’re done, you can read it out loud and, if you want, let it float away, no longer “stuck in [your] id.”