I like to say that there are two kinds of poets: the poets who think that they are God’s gift to the genre and the poets who are fairly certain that they are no good at all, but they simply cannot help but write poetry. I fall into the latter and, as such, I find it difficult to talk about myself as a poet without feeling like a bit of an imposter, but I cannot deny that, above all else, the one thing I know in my bones is that I will forever and always be a poet. 

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How did I come to write poetry almost exclusively? After all, it is not the most popular or most profitable genre of writing. The truth is, I didn’t choose to write poetry. Poetry chose me. I wanted to be a writer before I could even write. In preschool, I would take a yellow piece of paper and a white feather and paint squiggly black lines, pretending to pen something impactful. Originally, I was set on being a novelist, writing the first few paragraphs of over-complicated stories with a dozen or more characters snaking through plot holes and falling into inconsistencies, only to set the notebook to the side and start a new thought. 

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I was always aware of poetry growing up, a huge fan of Shell Silverstein for as long as I can remember. We even had two hardcover copies of his book, “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” one for me and one for my older brother, Christian. It wasn’t until sixth grade that I began to explore poetry as a medium for my own self-expression. Throughout the year, we learned about different forms of poetry, trying out each style and amassing a body of work to create spiral bound poetry books. Mine was called “Piles of Poetry” and each page boasted a different font and text color. Sixth grade was a particularly difficult year for me. My grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when I was eleven and I spent the year watching her bravely fight the disease before ultimately passing away on my last day of school. Poetry became an escape, a way to safely process my ongoing grief and express my emotions. 

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Once I began writing poetry, I truly couldn’t stop. I am Autistic and, while I am extremely verbal, I often find communication, making myself wholly understood, to be very difficult. The more poetry I read, escaping into Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, and the more poetry I wrote, some concise and some diluted, the more my brain began to function within the art of poetry. I started thinking in rhymes, using metaphors and similes to explain the previously unexplainable. I fell in love not only with the art of poetry, but with the ability to communicate that poetry gave me. Poetry became more and more enmeshed into who I was as a person. It wasn’t so much that I chose to write poetry as much as my brain constantly filled with new ideas that had to be poured onto paper lest it overflow, like a bucket bearing too much water that must surrender some down it’s wooden sides, absorbed into the earth and lost forever. This is why I rhyme.