Love

It can’t be easy being a poet. The constant search to combine verse, rhyme, reason, repetition, switch words, muddle them, pull a middle finger at grammar, check your sonnet for it’s allotted 14 lines, your onomatopoeia for musical flow, your iambic pentameter’s shoe size.

Still, this cannot be the reason, or rhyme, why so many poets are a depressed, glum, angst-ridden, alcoholic lot. Keats, Faulkner, Byron, Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams, Hemingway, Plath, Kurt Cobain. All suffered from bouts of depression and more than a few were raging alcoholics. The list is endless.

Dr James W. Pennebaker, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, theorizes that being a published poet is a high-risk occupation. More dangerous than being a fire fighter or deep-sea diver. (Disclaimer: I found this guy on the Internet so he could in fact be a postman doubling as a professor online.) Why? Because apparently suicide rates are much higher among poets than among authors of other literary forms (whew!), as well as the general population.

Now this is a blog about a wedding. I know. So far it doesn’t seem that way. But bare with me, the connective thread is coming like a lightning bolt, or at least a small, energy-efficient light bulb.

As you know I recently went to a wedding in Africa. My daughter’s Godmother married her soul’s mate. The wedding was sublimely beautiful. But there was one part in particular that touched me.

I was a bride’s maid. Part of my duty was hanging out with the bride and drinking champagne while she dressed. Terribly hard work.
So while I drank and we chatted and I drank, I watched my friend transforming from my pretty pal in her t-shirt and slouchy pants into the most beautiful bride I have ever seen.

Eventually the bride’s father came to walk his daughter down the aisle.

I am relatively okay with words. I’m certainly no ee cummings, but I do fine with an adjective or four. But the look I saw in his eyes rendered me without any. There is no way I could describe the love one sees in a father’s eyes the first time he sees his daughter as a bride. And it dawned on me. That’s why poets are such miseries.

They’ll spend a lifetime scouring, searching, seeking in head-banging-against-a-brick-wall vain, the words to capture what they never will. And trying to ensnare that achingly naked, true moment with quill, pen or type will render them miserable, alone, with a bottle of jack smashed on the floor and pills scattered like rose petals around them.

It’s not easy being a poet. Now you know it.