Hoarding Words

By the time I was 18, I recognized I had already begun repeating myself in my poetry. In both my ideas and in my word formations.

Part of that repetition was inevitable. A writer will always come up against their personal obsessions and interests. These are the directions the writing is asking us to follow. I was just starting to find those directions. Another reason was that I was only 18. I had experienced things worth writing about, but it would be many years before I could begin to write about them.

One of my favorite poets at the time was Dylan Thomas. Reading him one night, I realized something about his work: though his poetry continued to develop throughout his too-short lifetime, the vocabulary of his last poems is exactly the same as the vocabulary of his first poems. If anything, his vocabulary became more limited.

Over half of Thomas’s poems were written before he was 20. Thomas struggled with alcoholism, health issues, as well as the distractions of his work with the burgeoning BBC and his own celebrity. His poetry is dense and highly wrought. He loved to write in elaborate verse-forms that would have intimidated even W.H. Auden. And you can’t always depend on inspiration. This is more than enough to explain why he only completed one poem a year during the final six years of his life.

Yet looking at those last poems, I felt I could take a passage from one poem and substitute it with a passage in another poem and it would make little to no difference except in the rhyme scheme. At least that I could find.

If you limit your vocabulary, you limit your work. That’s what I had been doing. I had limited my poetic vocabulary. I had become too involved with the idea of a “pure” poetry. Extending my poetic vocabulary meant extending the possibilities of my writing.