I used to joke, when I was single, that it was meaningless to tell the people I dated that I’m a poet, because every lesbian is a poet. The same way “every” lesbian owns cats, doesn’t know how to flirt, and drinks iced oat milk lattes even in winter (unfortunately, all of these are also true of me). I’ll admit part of that refusal came from a sense of pretension: sure, everyone could write poetry, but I was a real poet, because I was getting a master’s in it and publishing and going to — *sexy, serious gasp* — conferences. I wasn’t like some of these Target aisle poetry books; I was working on real stuff.

I’m not above admitting that this superiority complex of mine is one I’m still working on. Now that I’m older, though, I recognize why I had that much bite when it came to the genre: I was protective of it. For me, poetry is not just a way of stacking words on a page; it’s a vocation, nearly religious. I’m Benedetta having visions (and kissing girls) in the nunnery. It is, genuinely, the most important thing in my life. It’s the reason I’m still here to live that life.

I first wrote poetry as a teenager, in the least serious way possible: My high school had a student-run literary magazine, little more than pages from the library printer stapled at the thin spines, issues churned out as we ate up the ink meant for test papers and AP History essays. I ended up editor of the magazine as the years moved forward, but as a freshman, I was just eager for the glamour of my work in print. I’d written as a kid: unfinished short stories and a comic strip that was clearly a plagiarized collage of Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes, and whatever else I read. None of those things felt appropriate or ready for the magazine though, and so I made the pivot to poetry, because it was shorter. That’s it. The art form I have now spent 15 years of my life honing was selected for me in the briefest moments of my teenage ego and laziness.

The first poems I wrote were thinly veiled Glee fanfiction arranged into stanzas, and the magazine took them (if you can imagine, it was slim pickings for a high school literary magazine). That was such a thrill: to share what I wrote, to see it in ink. Since then, I’ve written God knows how many poems and have, of course, developed a much deeper love for it beyond its mere length. Size isn’t everything.

There are a lot of different reasons people take up the pen, the brush, the camera, etc. Some people are bored; some are driven. Some want a career out of that art; some just want to pass the time. I want a career out of poetry, even if the definition of “career poet” may look a lot different in 2025 than it did in 1650. But to call poetry a “career ambition” feels too watered-down. I’m not in it for money or fame (though I’d never say no to either). For me, and so many others, poetry has always been about finding understanding.

“You do not have to be good” — the opening line to Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” — has found a funny afterlife as a meme, bumper sticker, sarcastic comeback, etc. Other lines like “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life” and “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves” have found similar Internet fame. But other than unintentional meme-maker, Mary Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize winner, a neo-Transcendentalist, a lover of nature and solitude, and a lesbian. Oliver fell in love with the photographer Molly Malone Cook, and they lived their lives out together on Cape Cod before Cook’s death in 2005. While she rarely spoke outside of her poetry, preferring her privacy, finding this fact out about Oliver let me into another layer of the world.

“Sentimentality” is considered one of the worst grievances you could lobby against a poet’s work. To be labeled sentimental is to be labeled tawdry, cheap, melodramatic. In my MFA, we were taught to be emotional without being sentimental, to portray deep feelings without being cloying. A (white straight male) professor of mine once sneered as he said you should never put a heart in a poem unless “you’re talking about the literal organ.” It’s no surprise female poets are more likely to be victims of this critique than their male counterparts and certainly no shock that queer female poets don’t even make it to the conversation. Before discovering Mary Oliver, any lesbian or queer female poet I read I had to find myself, except for Emily Dickinson. Of course, going to a Catholic all-girls high school, discussion of Dickinson’s sexuality was never a part of the curriculum. But I was still enamored of her for her dedication to the craft of poetry, the following poem especially:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

Many observations of the poem decree it is Dickinson’s ode to poetry, that it is a far better genre than prose to explore one’s imagination and world. It reminds me, though, of another poet’s words: Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. In an interview with the writer Bryan Washington for A24, Vuong said:

Queerness in a way saved my life…Often we see queerness as a deprivation, but when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me, I had to make alternative routes. It made me curious, it made me ask, ‘Is this enough for me?’

When Emily says “I dwell in Possibility – ” I have the same reaction as I do to Vuong. Poetry and queerness both exist as innovations on form. Rather than the expected trajectories, both engage in what it means to play with what you’ve been given. Rather than setting a scene in a block of text, why not break up your words and sentences in stanzas, emphasizing individual sounds and textures? Why not put the lyricism of your words before their meaning, in order to emphasize said meaning? And in turn, why not question the intricacies of gender and sexuality, why not question what makes you feel more in your body as opposed to adhering to a code prescribed upon the body you have?

Is this a “sentimental” thought? Yeah, maybe. How could it not be? And how could you shrink the orbit of one’s emotional landscape to such a simple, ill-meaning word? I have been told to be less sentimental in poems. I have too been told to be “less gay” in public spaces, or private friend groups. I have been the victim of such reductions — but in the literary and queer worlds of my life, I have also found the strength to defy such lessenings. Growing up a woman, without queerness or poetry, I lament how easy it may have been for me to fall into patterns wrought by others. Being a poet drew me to seeing the world in the vigilant, yearning way of poets: I will come to a dead stop on a sidewalk to stare at a snail make her slow journey from one end of the grass to the other, or I will watch the way a stranger’s hand lightly grazes the elbow of someone they are with and may love, and I can’t not write page after page about it.

This is not to say non-poets can’t do these things — but in my life, it’s been poetry that’s opened the world to me. For me, poetry is the thinnest barrier between abstraction and emotion. Queerness, too, has allowed the world to let me in: the unbridled joy of a people who have been shunned by the rest of society is like nothing else. When society has refused you, there is nothing left of society we must adhere to; instead, we can have the world beyond that, birds and trees and rivers and ice cream and kissing and parties and whatever bangs the gong of our hearts so fiercely we think I should write a poem about this.

Although memoir is allegedly the genre of truthtelling, in poetry I find a more honest way to be. Who am I when I am doing nothing else but spilling my own thoughts out, my own observations, and as spare as a few lines on the page, nothing to hide behind, nothing to keep out of sight. That is what queerness is for me, too. I can’t hide behind it, and because of that I may as well go full-throttle through. When “I dwell in possibility,” it is not just about my creative flow; it is about reckoning with the directions I can take my life, even if I have to fight for those directions.

All I can think to end on here are the ending lines of “Wild Geese”:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

With my poetry and my queerness, when I write, when I kiss my girlfriend, when I read Carl Phillips, when I do poppers at the club, all of these things are me announcing my place in the family of things. Poetry and queerness are the two most central pillars of my life. I cannot exist without either one, and they cannot exist without each other. And I would never ask them to.

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