Joyful Torment: A Prose Poem

When poetry is serious and purposeful, it has a grip on us, it means something profound. Something happens to us or to someone else, and when it digs far deeper than usual, we need closure, or we would just harp on and get upset with the story. Poets write poems because it means something intense in our hearts and it is our art. Many people, especially in high school, do not understand the joyful torment that can be writing a poem and they think poetry is just an easy way out of an assignment because it's short. But the point of writing is to go deeper into your mind and soul than you ever thought possible, to face the emotions bottled up you didn’t even know were there or that you did know existed but were terrified to face. 

The writing of the poem can be torture, a look at your chaotic image in a shattered mirror, but more importantly, afterwards, no matter how positive or negative the piece, you can’t stop smiling because a weight is lifted off your shoulders and you are given a brand new mirror and you can breathe. Tears might fall, but they are proud tears because you have created something that you never thought could come from you. And now the thought that the piece would give you a good grade or positive feedback in Writer’s Workshop no longer matters because no grade can suffice for the personal standards you have exceeded. 

When you sit down and write your poem and you ponder every work choice and every punctuation mark and every tone of every stanza, it is far more difficult than anyone else could ever imagine because it is a battle with ourselves, not even necessarily the story, and if we do not get that one word right, we feel we did not do the poem justice. This is why writers (and artists in general) are so much more prone to self-harm and why we are so self-conscious. We are deeply afraid of getting something “wrong” and not portraying something sufficiently by our own (often sky-high) standards. Yet, even worse, if we don’t write it we will never forgive ourselves.