"Poet" in Doubt

"Poet" in Doubt



Hummin': Twelve Day of Xmas

I had my FA105 Introduction to Creative Writing Class today. My professor, Danilo Franciso M. Reyes, required us to write on a sheet of paper about books that we've read recently and how we felt about them.

At first, I was confident. I was thinking, oh yeah, I've read a couple of books just last week so this is going to be easy, but then just as I tried to remember what the titles were, my mind drew a blank. I couldn't remember the names of the authors nor the titles of the books.

Not even the lead characters names were retrievable from my memory bank. I mean, I could remember the plot, but names just eluded me at that point. I kept thinking, how could I forget all that? Didn't I read all 800++ pages of each story?

Afterwards, Sir Reyes began asking us about our favorite authors. The class wasn't quite responding as he hoped. No one wanted to volunteer an answer, so he asked, "Does anyone look up to J.K. Rowling?" As an avid Harry Potter reader sitting at the very side of the class, I nodded my head vigorously.

But my response went unnoticed. He asked again, perplexed, "Has anyone in this class of Creative Writing majors read Harry Potter?"

Silence.

I raised my left hand and looked around. My hand was the only one up. I couldn't believe it, and apparently, he didn't see it either. His eyebrows shot up to his hairline at the thought that these supposedly "writers" or wannabes didn't read Harry Potter.

"Well," he says, "What about your favorite poets?" His questions were again met by downward gazes and blank, uncertain stares. "None?"

From the silence, I assumed the same. He adds, "It's actually called name-dropping. And it helps to shut people up when you mention particular poets and you make them realize that you've read a lot of literature." He shakes his head and says, "How can you write poems when you don't have any favorite poems that you read?"

From that point on, I began questioning myself, shutting all other noise out.

I felt like I was a driftwood in the middle of the ocean, floating aimlessly.

I had written a lot of poems over the years, some were lost, some I had saved in a journal; but I admit that I don't have any "great" poets that I idolize. I just never took a liking to reading poetry that held too much air. There are just poems that even after reading and analyzing each layer and line, I still don't understand. I tend to classfiy those kinds of poems as mental garbles, or elitists.

I truly believe that if you want to express your feelings, you would express it in the way that most people would understand. Wouldn't it be practical to let other people understand what you have to say? Not just other people, but ordinary people who wouldn't be intimidated by all the high-falluting words. Do we not write because we want to convey what we keep deep inside?

I left the class still confused. Some of the so-called "great" poets tend to do this, drown the readers in all their intelligence and limitless vocabulary, and that makes me dislike their work. Could there be something wrong with me, as one who aspires that level of greatness? Can I even call myself a real poet? Or will I ever truly be one?

Could my indifference to what I think most writers idolize signify I have less passion and less ambition than they do? Could the yo-yo-ing in my craft mean that I don't love reading, or more importantly, writing as much as I should?

Hmmm...