On cringy poetry

I’m far from a poet. In fact, I’ve never really taken a proper English class at all. Writing, I’m going to say, is not my strong point.

The idea that writing is a skill that can be improved is honestly quite daunting to me. Any writing I’ve written is either so beautifully written I’m going to cry, or its not unlike my own, fragmented pieces of rambling, quite like what I’m doing right now.

The two instances that I’ve been very, very impressed with writing are once in a workshop, and once at a book fair. You see, I took a class where the instructors held 12 different week-long workshops throughout the semester. One class had an English professor come in, and all she used was a single Robert Frost poem to teach this bunch of business majors (and a handful of engineers) on looking at a piece of literature through different viewpoints and dissecting it line by line. It brought a lot of ideas out and I thought, wow, you can do that with just 5 lines of poetry? It still sticks in my head how much we can read into such few words to bring out so much meaning, although I do wonder, how much did we overthink, or did we overthink it at all?

The second time I was impressed with writing was when I had a personalized poem written for me on the spot by someone manning the booth. I told him about my life story and what I did, and what I aspired to do. While I won’t share the poem, I will share that it touched me in quite a way that I hadn’t been in a while. The poem, sadly, overshoots my goals at the moment, although I do keep thinking about it sometimes when I lose hope in this job market we’re all going through. The piece he wrote didn’t resonate with the current me, per se, but I think it did give me some hope that I would be able to resolve my dreams and reality. Just a little.

With that out of the way, I realize that writing is quite a journey. Like I said, it’s daunting, and I don’t think I write enough to improve myself. I’ve received advice from a very dear mentor of mine to start writing about things that interest me, and while it’s unfortunate that the advice is around 3 years old and it would have served me quite well to start writing then, better late than never is the approach I’m going with it seems. The only pieces of writing I’ve done is pieces of cringy poetry that I’ve compiled into a short collection of sorts, cringier-ly titled ‘Odes to the Boy(s) I’ve Loved’. A title, which I shamelessly adapted from the lines of Troye Sivan’s ‘Animal’.

Granted, fragmented writing did help me build up a sense of writing, however small. I did start with short phrases as a part of ideating for art classes, although this has transformed more into capturing random thoughts that pop up during the day, or as desperate attempts to remember fantastical dreams I’m loathe to admit I’ve forgotten most of.

While I don’t think I’ll be able to fulfill the oft-dreamed short novel that most people aspire to write starting sometime in their teenage years, I think that cringy poetry might be the way for me to write more thoughtful pieces. I do want to write more thoughtful pieces, just like all those Medium authors who seem to be able to do it with the snap of a finger.

With this musing out of the way, I leave you with a haiku that I wrote while missing someone who was very dear to me at the time. I wrote this haiku and printed it out on a letterpress as a part of a graphic design class, while we were learning about the history of printing. I think this is less cringy, but it is really quite corny.

Here’s to maybe more actual cringy poetry released here in the future. Odes to the Boy(s) I’ve Loved is 18 pages of full and fragmented writing. That’s not even counting the writing in my notes app.