Finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be

You age. You change. And if you don't maybe you are fucking it up a little bit.

There’s a line I think about a lot from the novel “Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill. (Highly recommend, btw.) The protagonist and sometimes narrator is looking at her own life as a middle-aged and still relatively new parent, remarking to herself about the ways she’s changed almost against her will and without even totally realizing it at first:

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recylced tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

There’s something to this. I was thinking about it this week when talking with the big homie Chad Dundas about the ways in which our attitudes toward stuff like writing and art, hobbies and happiness, maybe even life itself, have shifted over the years.

If you’re interested in that full conversation, it’s over on the CME Patreon. (We do one show a week that very intentionally has nothing to do with MMA. People seem to enjoy it.) I won’t rehash the whole thing here except to say that Chad brought up my interest in poetry. As in, both the reading and writing of it. This, he pointed out, is very different from the mid-twenties version of Ben Fowlkes who thought many of the poets who shared the University of Montana’s graduate writing program with us were kinda bullshit.

To be fair, I still think many poets are kinda bullshit. I read a lot of poetry but I don’t like all of it. Those poets who don’t seem to even want you to know what the fuck they’re talking about? Or the ones who think the only good poem is one you need to sit there and decode, lest you miss their clever T.S. Eliot references? Yeah, fuck those people. I mean, hey, do it however you want to do it. But my personal position is: ain’t nobody got time for that, b.

At best, they are mostly just jerking off for each other. At worst, they are fucking it up for everybody by reinforcing a general belief that poetry is an esoteric art that most people should just ignore.

But one thing I’ve come to appreciate about poetry is its ability to communicate a feeling or experience – and succinctly. Lots of great writing does this in lots of different ways, but no other form manages to do it in as few total words, occupying as little space on the page. In that sense, poetry might be the literary art form most suited to our current age of social media shares and fast-twitch attention spans.

If I post a picture of a novel I just read on Instagram along with my recommendation (seriously though, “Dept. of Speculation” is great), maybe you’ll take the time to look for it and read it all the way through and, a couple weeks to a couple months from now, come back to tell me I was right (or full of shit). Probably you won’t, though.

On the other hand, if I post a poem that takes you anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes to read, maybe you’ll do that and then get the overwhelming sensation that a feeling you’ve known without ever having the words for has been expressed in a way that makes you feel a little less alone in the universe. And then you can keep scrolling.

For instance, this joint by the big homie Ted Kooser:

The Leaky Faucet

All through the night, the leaky faucet
searches the stillness of the house
with its radar blip: who is awake?
Who lies out there as full of worry
as a pan in the sink? Cheer up,
cheer up, the little faucet calls,
someone will help you through your life.

I mean, come on. Who doesn’t know this feeling? Who has not laid awake and worried? Who hasn’t listened to the nightime sounds of their home and felt as if that’s the only other thing awake and ticking, just like them? And to end on this surprisingly hopeful note – the faucet and the pan it’s slowly dripping water into are not annoyances but colleagues and even friends, reminders that there is always someone on the other end of your reach – that’s what really makes it.

(Just a pan in a sink, bro.)

You end that poem on a different feeling than whatever you started with, and the whole thing took, what, maybe 15 seconds? You won’t get that kind of bang for your buck anywhere else in the world of art or media, dog. Not even in porn!

But also Chad was not wrong about 24-year-old Ben having a different view of poetry and poets. That guy thought literary fiction was pretty much the only writing worth doing and feeling good about. Journalism too, maybe. But that was mostly so you could still write and avoid the humiliating tyranny of a job. Poetry would never get you anywhere. It certainly wouldn’t get you paid. Plus, what makes a person (especially a middle-class white guy in America) seem like more of a pretentious asshole than calling himself a poet? It’s the cringeiest thing you can be, except for maybe a “life coach” or an influencer.

But some things happen to you as you get older. You shed a little ego, maybe. You go eyeball-to-eyeball with despair. You get enough of a perspective on time to genuinely realize that it’s running out. You start to think that if you’re not enjoying the doing of it then what is the point? You look around and realize that all the people you know are, to some extent, a little ridiculous. They certainly think the same of you already, no matter how seriously you may have taken yourself. You might as well be ridiculous in a way that works for you.

Writing poetry, whether other people think it’s stupid or not, is sort of like keeping a journal. It’s a way to document while also attempting to understand your own life and possibly even spin a little beauty out of it. Maybe you learn something about yourself. Maybe you create a record of who you were and how you felt about it. Maybe you just do some reflecting while sitting there and tinkering with it.

If you want, you can send it out and see if anyone wants to publish it. I’ve done this. It’s fine. You get a little jolt of validation when it gets accepted and when you see it laid out in someone else’s publication. Then you remember that ultimately nobody much cares.

Weirdly, that’s also the nice thing about it. Even if you get super good at it, people don’t generally give a shit about poetry. It’s like getting really good at crochet. The people who receive one of your handmade hats or whatever might appreciate it. It’s a way to show them that you love them and that they matter to you, so they’ll like it for that as much as for keeping their heads warm. But career-wise it doesn’t really go anywhere. This is actually a good thing. This frees you from the concerns of ambition. You can just do it the way you want to do it, since it’s not like doing it differently or better would make a difference to anyone but you.

That’s not totally true, of course. Some of the poems I’ve read I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. Some, whether it’s whole poems or just single lines, have given me real comfort or perspective or joy. We do so much trudging through our lives, doing all the stuff we have to do, and it’s good to have someone else there every once in a while to point out that your one life as a sentient yet bewildered animal on this planet is a spectacular wonder. Quoth the big homie Jim Harrison: “So much to live for. Each rope rings a different bell.”