Back in the Days of Bad Poetry

There is an annual poetry contest sponsored by Hollins, the Nancy Thorp Memorial contest.  Every year high school students from all around the country send in entries—some because their English teachers require it, but still—and Hollins undergraduate and graduate students serve as the judges.  This year, I was one of them.

It was a humorous experience for me, and an eye-opener, because at one point I was one of those high school students.  I remembered writing that quality of poetry, though at the time I was unaware of how very bad it was.  There’s a tendency at that age to be very overdramatic, to be angry at the entire world and to spill angst across the page.  Yes, there were many examples of teenage angst, and we laughed at many of them.  I mean, “tsunami of grief”?  Really?

But even as I laughed, I was struck by how many there were and how similar they sounded.  More fascinating was how familiar the tone of these poems was: almost exactly the same as some of the poetry I myself used to write as a teenager.  Poetry about being alone, being stuck in the darkness...I wrote that sort of thing at one time.  It seems the high school experience is much the same wherever you are.  What makes it so?  I suppose it must be that in large groups, teenagers begin to look the same.  They form the same groups, the same rules for themselves.

After the fact, we tend to roll our eyes and laugh, but I remember those years and how they were for me.  High school was a pretty miserable existence.  I was too smart for my own good, and much too shy.  It made me unapproachable, and so my social life flatlined for years.  In a world that demands social interaction, it made things difficult for me.  I wanted people to see something special in me and acknowledge it.  What I didn’t learn until later was that I had to do something in order to show that something-special, and with the doing comes a kind of self-acknowledgement that renders mass admiration unnecessary.

Now, I had left my angst-poetry behind by the time I reached tenth grade, but that feeling came back several times throughout high school.  I write this now in the hopes that I will come back to it later, when that feeling is harder to remember.  It is the kind of thing at which adults roll their eyes, but I hope that even while I laugh, there is a bit of understanding and sympathy underlying.  Silly though they seem, those hurts, those fears that you discover at that age are real, and there’s no way to escape them except to fight through on your own.