As a stay-at-home dad and part-time writer of fiction, I knew that poetry was never going to put me on a best-seller list. I mean, let's be real. Poetry just isn't a big seller on its best day and if you picked someone at random out on the street to name 5 poets for you, they'd struggle. If they did, in fact, manage to come up with 5, the ones they mentioned would most likely be poets who've long been deceased. So why bother? It's a question no one ever seems able to ask, but I see it often in their faces. "Poetry, eh? Good God, what for? You aren't expecting me to read it, are you?" And that's okay. I get it. Poetry has an air about it that suggests it's not for the commonwealth.
I like to think my poetry is different. (I'll wait for the laughter to die down.) Ahem. I don't think of myself as an artist or part of some elite group of craftsman. I'm just a dude that happens to enjoy poetry. The way I see it, you aren't really a poet unless other people call you one…though, when you write books of poetry, saying "author" sounds a bit disingenuous. I've no desire to be known as a poet, truth be told. Fiction is my real passion. So, back to the question: Why put out a book of poetry?
The initial plan was to put out a collection similar to Fallen, a book I self-published back in 2005. That book, a rushed effort due to my father's increasingly poor health, was a mixed bag of poetry, fiction and even an editorial or two. (I honestly don't recall everything that was in it. I gave away my only copy long ago.) So, at it's inception, I Am A Broken House was going to be a similar hodge podge. But as I began to edit, I realized that there existed a disconnect between the fiction and poetry. They needed to be separated in order to shine. So, the poetry collection kept the working title and the collection of short stories (which will eventually see the light of day) became a book called Rough Trade.
At that point, I could have tossed the poetry idea altogether. Believe me, I thought about it. What stopped me from giving up on it was the idea that my pain and struggle through grief might benefit someone else. My lack of faith, my failures might serve to prevent someone else from believing they're alone in those feelings. My grasp of hope–anchored so deep that I cannot see the bottom–might bring a thread or two of grace to someone else. So, I Am A Broken House could not be aborted or back-burnered. I think part of it was also that I needed it to be out there in the world. I needed to take that struggle and strife and let the Author of my story turn it into something better and brighter…something I could set free as I had been freed. Sorrow can be a prison, you see. Doubt can be a disease that eats away at the core of you like a spiritual cancer. I had come through all that to the other side where only grace remained. I felt an obligation to put up a guidepost or two for those who would struggle after me.
So, while I know that I'll be blessed if I sell a hundred copies of I Am A Broken House, I think that's okay. Not everything in life is about financial success. As a writer, I have stories to tell that may never be read by anyone but family and friends. Others, with the grace of my Author, may find a home with thousands of readers. Either way, I have to be true to my gifts. In the future, I'll tell a lot of different stories about a lot of different characters, and I look forward to that. I Am A Broken House, though, is MY story. And YOUR story, dear friend. We are all broken. We have all known the violent fracture of death, divorce and the like. We have all been beaten down by the ravages of time and the hardness of the earth. We have all felt our paint peeling away and heard the creak in our floorboards. But here we are- broken but standing. We are weathered, but wonderfully full of stories…the echoes of laughter and children running. We are all perfectly broken houses. And that's "why poetry."
J
