Greetings!
While most of my posts will be about things in poetry — poems I love, why I love them, things that inspire me, etc. — I figured this first post should be a little about who I am and why I’ve created this website.
I don’t generally care much for talking about myself, but I think it’s warranted here. I am a poet currently residing in Laramie, Wyoming. I was born and raised in Wyoming — born in Laramie, raised in Thermopolis. I wrote a lot as a kid. I suppose I’m fairly “normal” in that respect as regards writers of all sorts. I wrote for assignments and nothing more for the first while of my early schooling, but I had a breakthrough in sixth grade when amongst the daily writing prompts I found I loved writing. It was at that point that I realized I wanted to be an author. (My focus was short stories, though I did make a couple disastrous attempts at writing novels. I never finished either of them, thankfully.)
Truth be told, I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that writing would be so important to me. I enjoyed creating stories before I started regularly writing them. As a child, my older sister and I would tell stories — building whole worlds that we would continue to explore night after night. We even wrote stories down, trading off the paper in one of the old you-can-only-read-the-last-sentence-the-other-person-wrote exercises. I enjoyed it, but didn’t yet know what writing would come to mean for me. And though I can’t remember now hardly anything of the stories we told — some of them certainly included goblins, fairies, and castles — I am glad that the storytelling could begin then as it gave me a place to jump off.
As mentioned, in sixth grade was when I really caught the writing bug. For the rest of middle school, I was sure I was either going to be an author or join the NBA. Given that I’m 5’9” and went with Speech and Debate in high school instead of basketball, I went with the former. (Now, I don’t even watch basketball. Oh how things have changed.) In high school, the writing continued, and though I began to write a little more poetry, my main focus was still short stories. Poetry was mostly relegated to angsty, depression-ridden Instagram posts.
Toward the end of high school, I began to give up hope in becoming a published author. Looking at the numbers, it just didn’t seem realistic. (It still doesn’t. As a poet, I won’t be making a living off my writing. The difference now is that I just don’t care.) So I started looking at other career paths. And I went through plenty of them. I started college as a Political Science major. I changed to Philosophy my second semester, and added my Creative Writing minor, both of which stuck. It wasn’t until late Freshman year that things started to shift in my writing.
In ways that I still don’t understand, I slowly began to write poems more than short stories. Perhaps it was partly my creative writing club who had praised my poetry and referred to me more as a poet than as a fiction writer. Or perhaps it was something else entirely. What I do know, however, is that everything changed when I took my first actual poetry class in the fall semester of my Junior year. After that semester, I was sure that I was a poet (though I still indulge in the occasional bout of flash fiction/prose poems). What’s more, I was sure that I was going to be a poet both regardless of the world and because of it. The professor I had that semester changed my life.
It may sound corny, or perhaps just clichè, but that professor made me realize that I was looking at poetry wrong. For too long, I had looked at poetry, at least in part, as a means to an end — as a career. Through time spent with that professor, I came to realize that I should write regardless of whether or not I could get paid doing so. The purpose of poetry is poetry, not money, not a career. It seems obvious now: you don’t have to make money writing to be a writer. You don’t have to be famous to be a writer. You just have to write.
It was that same professor that recommended I start doing extra writing about poetry. While my initial temptation was just to write for myself, she recommended that I might start a blog. It’s a thing a lot of writers do, so I would be joining some good company in doing so. As a result, months later, I have created this blog to do just that. Sometimes to examine a particular poem, sometimes a poet, sometimes a form, sometimes just poetry in general.
Recognizing poetry as being an end in itself made it all the more precious. For Aristotle, what is ultimately good is that which we seek for itself and not for anything else. Whether there is one such good or many is a matter up for discussion. Aristotle argues that there is only one. For him, this was eudaimonia (happiness/flourishing). For me, at least one of these goods is poetry. With this in mind, my drive to hone my craft was massively increased.
Of course, as with all art, I am nowhere near finished. There are years and years left of work to do. Decades. Lifetimes. Of course, it is art. It will not be finished, it may not be able to be perfected, but it can be created, and it can be improved. A poem, I believe, can be better or worse, even if it can never attain to the perfection of the Forms (yes, I’m a Neo-Platonist, and, my apologies, the philosophy references may occasionally abound). According to Nietzsche, the only possible justification for life is an aesthetic one. I don’t know if he’s right about that. But I am sure that poetry is essential to life just as life is essential to poetry. And if nothing else, poetry can at least help to justify our existence, to reaffirm it.
So that’s why I write. I write to stay alive. I write because it gives meaning to life. And on that grandiose note, I think I’ll stop. Wishing you all the best.
— D.C. Leonhardt
