By Claire Polders

I’m not a poet.

I voiced this denial a number of instances in my life and with full conviction. It’s the very first thing I informed Alyson Shelton when she invited me to contribute to her “The place I’m From” collection, which can run its 200^th poem this summer season.

I’m not a poet.

The artwork of poetry lies on the finish of an uphill path like a sacred glacial lake, mist-covered and deep with reminiscence. Centuries of noble pines encompass the lake to guard it from invaders like me who lengthy to dip their ignorant toes in its clever waters solely to disturb the delicate fact.

I’m not a poet.

I worry that my clumsy method to poetry will make me laughable, so I have to deny I’m on this path in any respect. Nonetheless, I’ve written and printed what some would possibly name lyrical essays, prose poems, and hybrids. Does that make me a liar, a poseur, or each?

Poetry has been in my life so long as I’ve been a reader. My dad and mom gifted me poetic image books that turned the low, grey skies of my youth into vast open Sahara areas. Poetry these days is sort of a international language that I can’t communicate but one way or the other perceive after I pay it sufficient consideration. Studying poetry clears the murky mornings of my thoughts and mirrors the world into which means.

I depend on poetry in my writing life, too. Each time the load of lacking phrases pins me down, I flip to poetry for inspiration. Studying a couple of strains is commonly sufficient to get me going once more. It’s like wanting on the rain for assist and seeing the solutions come up in spontaneous puddles.

It’s solely extra just lately, nevertheless, that I dare to write down what I nonetheless have problem calling by its identify. Can one write poetry when one isn’t a poet? Does one turn out to be a poet by writing poetry? I’m not that daring.

However I’m that needy. As writers, we regularly don’t know the place we are going to arrive after we begin on our journey and uncover our vacation spot alongside the way in which. That is what makes writing so exhilarating to me: We don’t simply describe our world; we create it. But the means by which we uncover our tales influences what tales we’re capable of finding.

I’m much more perceptive to what’s hiding inside me after I descend—partially and briefly—into poetry.

Writing poetry inside my prose makes me lean into language. I pause lengthy sufficient to pay attention for unintended rhythms and marvel what they signify. Typically, I lookup phrases to deepen my understanding: I need to be actual, and as a non-native speaker I really feel the necessity to double verify. Different instances, I search ambiguity as a result of an excessive amount of precision would flatten the expertise earlier than it totally unfolds.

Once I search for alliterations or synonyms to boost the circulate, I pattern phrases—in my mouth—that I might not have been capable of voice in any other case. Such phrases steer me into unexpected instructions, away from what I aspired to say and towards extra participating insights.

The identical occurs after I transfer my phrases round on the web page. I experiment with totally different orders and study from the parallels and contrasts that emerge. What occurs to which means if I minimize this line in half, if I erase my hard-won but compelled conclusion?

Once I write a hybrid, my logical pondering takes a number of steps again in order that the writing itself can lead me to locations I didn’t know existed.

I’m not a poet.

I write most of my nonfiction lately on my Substack publication Wander, Surprise, Write. My subscribers count on travelogues and private essays, not prose poems. However they discover the distinction between studying a report and being transported. The tales that got here as a revelation to me elicit the very best responses.

I’m not a poet.

However I want poetry to prime my notion and my prose. How else can I write from a first-person perspective about shedding my sense of self? How else can I maintain shifting ahead by wanting again?

In my forthcoming assortment, Girl of the Hour, I needed to depart the style of prose to impersonate its fifty characters. And in the poem I despatched to Alyson Shelton final 12 months, I landed on a metaphor which may turn out to be my subsequent nonfiction ebook.

I’m trespassing into the sacred lake of poetry with out an invite, as a result of I’m not clever sufficient to turn out to be the author I need to be in another manner.
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Claire Polders is the creator of 6 books and 100+ essays, tales, and ebook opinions. She was born within the Netherlands, lived in Paris, married an American, and now slow-travels the world. Her newest ebook Girl of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Riot (Vine Leaves Press, July 2025) isavailable for preorder. Please join her Substack publication Wander, Surprise, Write to comply with her on her journeys.

Tagged: Alyson Shelton, poetry for prose writers, the sound of phrases