I started writing poetry before I understood what poetry was. Bad teenage poetry, the kind everyone writes - feelings disguised as metaphors, emotions wrapped in line breaks that did nothing except signal "this is serious." I cringe at most of it now. But I keep writing. Thirty years later, with most communication reduced to tweets and text messages, I still sit down and try to compress experience into careful language. Here's why.
Why Poetry Still Matters
We live in the age of the shortest possible message. Twitter's character limit. TikTok's maximum length. Text messages. Slack. Everything optimized for speed and brevity. Get your point across fast. Don't make people work for it. Attention is scarce. Time is precious. Move on.
Poetry works the opposite way. It makes you slow down. It makes you work. It demands attention. A good poem isn't something you scroll past - it's something you stop at, return to, think about. In an age of infinite content, poetry is finite. Contained. Complete. It doesn't lead anywhere except deeper into itself.
That's not a bug. That's the point. In a world that values speed, poetry values depth. In a culture of hot takes, poetry offers cool reflection. Where everything else is trying to grab your attention and pass you along to the next thing, poetry says: Stop here. Sit with this. Let it work on you.
We need that. Maybe more now than ever. The ability to sit with something difficult, ambiguous, complex. To let language do more than convey information. To engage with words that mean more than one thing, with images that resist easy interpretation, with rhythms that work on you whether you notice them or not.
Ancient Form in Modern World
Poetry is among the oldest forms of human expression. Before writing, there was oral poetry - rhythmic, memorable, passed down through generations. Homer. The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Psalms. The earliest recorded human thoughts are often in verse, because verse is what you can remember, what you can carry with you, what survives transmission from person to person.
That function is obsolete now. We have writing. We have recording. We have the internet. You don't need poetry to remember things anymore. You can just look them up.
But poetry never was primarily about memory. It was about transformation. About taking raw experience and turning it into something that could be shared, understood, felt by someone who wasn't there. About finding the precise words for imprecise feelings. About making the private public without losing what made it true.
That function isn't obsolete. If anything, it's more necessary. We're drowning in information and starving for meaning. We have more ways to communicate than ever and feel less understood. We can broadcast our thoughts to thousands of people and still feel alone. Poetry addresses that gap - not by reaching more people, but by reaching them more deeply.
Personal Journey as a Poet
I don't call myself a poet. It feels pretentious, like claiming a title I haven't earned. I'm someone who writes poems. There's a difference. The first is an identity. The second is an activity. I'm comfortable with the activity.
I started writing seriously in my twenties, after reading too much Rilke and too much Neruda and thinking I understood what they were doing. I didn't. But the attempt to understand pushed me to pay attention to language in new ways. How line breaks create meaning. How rhythm affects emotion. How the same words in different orders feel completely different.
Most of what I wrote then was imitation. Bad imitation, but still useful. You learn by copying until you understand why the thing you're copying works. Then you can start doing your own thing. Most of my early poems were derivative - trying to sound profound, trying to sound poetic, missing the point that poetry works when it sounds true, not when it sounds like Poetry.
I got better slowly. Started trusting my own voice instead of borrowing others'. Started writing about actual experience instead of abstract emotions. Started paying attention to how people really talk, how thought actually moves, how feelings work in real time rather than in retrospective reflection.
The poems on this site span decades. You can see the evolution if you look. Early stuff is overwrought, trying too hard. Later work is quieter, more confident. I don't know if it's better - that's for readers to decide. But it's more mine. That matters.
Connection Between Reading and Writing
You can't write poetry without reading poetry. That seems obvious, but it's worth stating explicitly. Every poem you write is in conversation with every poem you've read. You're borrowing techniques, responding to traditions, working within or against established forms. Even free verse is "free" only in relation to formal verse - it's defined by what it's not doing.
I read poetry differently after I started writing it. You notice things. How that enjambment creates tension. Why that metaphor lands where another wouldn't. What that rhythm does to the meaning. Reading as a writer is analytical in ways that reading as a civilian isn't. You're not just experiencing the poem - you're studying it, trying to understand how it works so you can steal its secrets.
But you also read poetry the same way. The poems that hit you hardest are the ones where you stop analyzing and just feel. Where technique becomes invisible and all that's left is the truth the poem is telling. Those moments - when you read something that articulates exactly what you've been feeling but couldn't express - those are why you keep reading. And those are what you're aiming for when you write.
The feedback loop is continuous. Read → Write → Read better → Write better. Every poem you encounter teaches you something about what's possible with language. Every poem you write teaches you something about your own limitations. The combination pushes you forward.
The Slowest Medium
Writing poetry is absurdly inefficient. I can spend an hour on five lines. Revise them for a week. Come back to them months later and realize they still don't work. Start over. The ROI is terrible. If I applied the same effort to literally anything else, I'd get better results.
But that inefficiency is the point. Poetry resists optimization. You can't speed-run it. You can't hack it. You can't automate it (AI-generated poetry is technically impressive and emotionally empty). You have to sit with it. Live with it. Let it develop at its own pace. That slowness is valuable precisely because everything else in modern life is fast.
The digital age rewards rapid production. Post daily. Ship weekly. Iterate quickly. Move fast and break things. That approach works for some things. But it's death for poetry. Poetry requires patience. Gestation. Time for ideas to develop and connections to form and the right words to emerge. You can't rush it without making it worse.
I've tried. Written quick poems, first-draft poems, poems that came out fully formed. Occasionally it works - sometimes the right words arrive immediately. But usually, the best work comes from revision. From sitting with a draft for weeks or months, letting it percolate, returning to it with fresh eyes, finding better words slowly.
That process has no digital equivalent. It's not like coding, where you can test and iterate rapidly. It's not like writing articles, where you can ship and update. It's closer to sculpture - you're removing what doesn't belong until what remains is essential. That takes time. No way around it.
What Poetry Does That Nothing Else Can
Poetry compresses without losing complexity. A good poem says more in fifteen lines than most essays say in fifteen hundred words. Not because it's more efficient - it's not. Because it's working on multiple levels simultaneously. Meaning, sound, rhythm, image, implication, resonance. All at once. All mattering.
Poetry embraces ambiguity. Where most communication aims for clarity, poetry often aims for richness. A line that means only one thing is a missed opportunity. A poem that can be paraphrased doesn't need to exist - just write the paraphrase. The value is in what can't be said any other way.
Poetry creates experience, not just description. When you read a good poem, you're not learning about an experience - you're having one. The poem isn't reporting feelings - it's generating them. That's a different kind of communication. Not information transfer, but experience transfer. Consciousness speaking directly to consciousness.
Poetry gives you permission to feel. In a culture that's increasingly cynical, increasingly ironic, increasingly afraid of genuine emotion, poetry says: No. It's okay to care. It's okay to feel deeply. It's okay to take beauty seriously. That permission matters. People need it.
Why I Keep Writing
I keep writing poetry because some experiences can't be processed any other way. Some feelings require the compression and precision that poetry demands. Some moments need to be preserved exactly, not summarized or explained, but captured in their full complexity. Poetry is the tool for that.
I keep writing because it makes me a better thinker. Poetry requires clarity - not simplification, but clarity about complexity. You can't fudge in a poem. You can't hide behind jargon or abstraction. Every word has to earn its place. That discipline carries over into everything else I write.
I keep writing because it connects me to something larger than myself. When I'm working on a poem, I'm in conversation with Rilke and Yeats and Szymborska and Oliver and countless others who've struggled with the same medium, the same constraints, the same impossible task of putting the ineffable into words. That conversation is ancient and ongoing and bigger than any individual contribution to it.
I keep writing because occasionally, rarely, something works. A poem comes together. The words do what I needed them to do. The experience I was trying to capture gets captured. And someone reads it and tells me it articulated something they'd been feeling but couldn't express. That's the goal. Not fame or publication or recognition. Just connection. Just shared humanity through shared language.
The Future of an Ancient Form
Will poetry survive the digital age? Absolutely. Will it thrive? That depends on what you mean by thrive. If you mean popularity, probably not. Poetry has always been a minority interest. Most people don't read it. Never have. That's fine.
But the people who need poetry really need it. In a way they don't need most other art forms. And there are more of those people than you might think. They're just quiet about it. They're not posting their favorite poems on Instagram (usually). They're not arguing about poetry on Twitter. They're reading privately, thinking deeply, letting poems work on them over time.
The digital age hasn't killed poetry. If anything, it's created more hunger for what poetry offers. Depth. Complexity. Slowness. Ambiguity. All the things that the rest of digital life lacks. Poetry is counter-cultural now, which might be exactly where it needs to be. Not dominant, but essential. Not popular, but necessary.
I'll keep writing it. Keep posting it on this site. Keep revising old poems and starting new ones. Keep struggling with the same impossible task - taking experience and transforming it into language that might mean something to someone else. It's inefficient. It's impractical. It's exactly what I need to be doing.
Because poetry, at its best, does what nothing else can. It makes the ordinary profound and the profound accessible. It creates space for complexity in a world that demands simplicity. It insists that some things matter more than metrics, that some experiences can't be optimized, that some truths can only be told slant.
Emily Dickinson was right about that last part. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. The straight version doesn't work. Needs the angle. Needs the indirection. Needs poetry. That's why I keep writing it. That's why it matters. That's why, in the digital age or any other age, we need the oldest art form humans invented. Because some truths are only accessible slant. And poetry is how we tell them.