Love, poetry, and other clichés.

The first poem someone ever gave me was “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings. When I say “gave” I mean that the boy I was dating at the time copied it out for me, and put it in a card. I found this almost unbearably romantic; I fell in love with the poem. (I was already in love with the boy.)

It wasn’t just that it was a romantic gesture, it was that the act of copying it out made the poem feel somehow private. It was ours, it was mine. Ridiculous, I know, to think that. It’s not as if Cummings was some minor unknown poet. But still, that was how I felt. So after a few years, once the internet made listsicles popular, and I began to see this poem all the time on lists of Best Poems for Valentine’s Day or Most Romantic Poems and what not, I felt oddly disappointed. Not in the past boyfriend, but in my self. It turns out, I was the same as everyone else. The poem wasn’t mine, it was a lot of people’s. I felt like a cliché.

The thing is, maybe I was a cliché. I was given that poem at the end of high school, when I was in love and about to move away – and not just for college. My family moved across the entire country a week after I graduated. Saying big goodbyes for the first time and full of big emotions about it. And poetry, well, poetry can speak to us right in the heart of those big emotions, right where we are a cliché because so many other people have those same kinds of big emotions in similar circumstances. Did anyone else’s love feel exactly like mine? Of course not. But have so very many people felt the sweetness and intensity and wonder and drama of first love? Oh yes.

And so we have the poetry versions of Greatest Hits, the songs guaranteed to get everyone up and on the dance floor. And it doesn’t bother me anymore when I learn that a poem I love, that spoke to me in a special, specific way is on the Greatest Hits album, rather than being a hidden bonus track. I try to see my love for it as not a cliché but a commonality. Plus, the hits are often hits for a reason – I am not going to deny myself the love of something that is a poet’s best work just because many others agree with me. And even though that poem does belong to so many other people, it is also, still, just mine. Was just ours.