Apologia

     A conversation with a friend of mine this afternoon prompted me to post this poem. We were browsing in a bookshop, one of those cozy, cluttered used bookshops whose poetry sections contain as many forgotten, out of print, "old-fashioned" poets as the most widely anthologized and currently studied.

     My friend is not a poet, and found it interesting when I told her that, despite being a poet myself, I really don't read as much poetry as perhaps I should. The poetry I do read is of the type that was quite admired in its day by critics and readers alike but would now be considered sentimental and hackneyed by academics. "Old-fashioned," to put it briefly. My friend remarked that she enjoys reading my poetry and that of my sister, probably because she knows us and therefore knows where our poetry is "coming from." She finds our poems readable, accessible, understandable. I told her I seldom read contemporary poetry because I truly don't understand much of it. Some famous living poet said, "You don't have to understand it; just feel it" which, frankly, I consider a lot of hooey. Why waste my time reading something I should only "feel"? For that, I'd rather watch a movie.

     I know, I know, I'm a funny kind of "poet." To quote myself, I only write that which I know. And I only read what I can readily identify with. If what I identify with is considered hackneyed and sentimental, I'm glad of it. I'm not ashamed of sentiment.

     Regarding living poets: I love Mary Oliver. Billy Collins. Richard Blanco. Mark Strand. Random pieces from a few others. To sum up, if I don't "get" a poem on the first reading, I don't bother reading it again. Life's too short!

     I really enjoyed writing this poem. One of the things I've been trying to do lately in my formal poems is to include more inner rhymes along with end-of-line rhymes. You'll discover the inner rhymes near the beginning of the second and third lines of each stanza.

Apologia

My verses are but letters never sent,
The wringing out of years too full to bear,
The winging of a heart consumed and spent,
Laid out for judgment "excellent and fair." *

My words are only echoes of the words
Unspoken, hostages of heart unvoiced
And broken like a captured wing-clipped bird
That gave its higher songs to silent joys.

My poems are paradoxes better read
By eyes unschooled, uncritical of skill,
By readers ruled by heart instead of head,
Whose hope has never waned and never will.


© Leticia Austria
First published in The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry
* excellent and fair - from Emily Dickinson's poem "Ample make this bed"