Advertising drove me to Poetry

The gap between my last post and this one is perhaps the longest since I've started blogging. I have several things I'd like to post about, but the "20 books that made you fall in love with poetry" game that's been going around the blogosphere has been weighing on my mind. Once I get this off my chest, I should be able to write those other, probably more interesting posts.

Here's the thing: I don't have 20 books that made me fall in love with poetry/Poetry. It only took three authors to make me fall in love with it. One, Shakespeare. Two, EE Cummings. Three, an ex-girlfriend who wrote a lot. This was all in high school. Anybody I read after that added to my knowledge or gave me new ideas or became a particular poet whose work I loved, but it only took these three to give me the bug.

More importantly than that, even, is why I decided to become a poet. I wrote, as many children do, ditties and song lyrics as a young'un, rhymes to sing-song in time with a swing or teeter-totter. They were crap, as most of these things are. In high school, influenced particularly by Cummings, I tried to blend form and content. If I wrote about two people from opposite sides of the tracks, I'd have the lines going in different directions on the page, mirroring each other. But this was just something to do in my free time, to show one or two other people. Even entering and winning a poetry contest (READ magazine) my senior year was due primarily to the encouragement of my English teacher, Mr. Murawski. I had no intention of BEING a poet.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I interned at a major advertising firm. I worked with words every day, copywriting. In a set number of words, we had to influence people, create a particular emotion or association, a longing for a product or lifestyle. I learned far more than I contributed during that time, and when I was done, I was no longer a historian who happened to like words. I was a poet who really liked history. This was as much a rejection of the advertising world as it was an embrace of Poetry. I (somewhat naively) made a decision that I did not want to use any verbal talent I had to get people to blindly accept what I was telling them. That's propaganda, advertising, reducing consciousness.

I chose poetry because it did the opposite of what we were doing as a firm - it forced people to think, to question. Sears, Jim Beam, Pokemon, Star Wars, Taco Bell. These are the things that cemented my love for Poetry.