The Lady Poet

Yvette Sanders had two problems.

The first problem was that she was a poet.

The second problem was that she was achingly beautiful.

Yeah, I know. Makes you wanna roll your eyes, doesn’t it? You read that and immediately you imagine some entitled bitch whining, “Oh my god I’m too pretty and nobody takes me seriously and they think I’m just some dumb bimbo and even when I accomplish something they say it’s just because of my looks or because I slept with somebody because of course they assume I’d never actually work hard for what I get in life and it feels so invalidating and I’m always on edge because when they’re not fawning over me they’re trying to knock me down a peg and it’s like why can’t I just be a human being like everybody else?”

And believe me, reader, I too feel an urge to roll my eyes. But you have to remember, Yvette Sanders was just as human as the rest of us. Thrown into a world she’ll never understand, doomed to the slow decay of time and inevitable death, and with certain features of her person she had no choice in affecting the way others treated her every single day of her life.

Plus she was a poet, so you know she was a little fucked up in the head.

So let’s start there, since that part’s a little easier to sympathize with. Yvette started writing poetry when she was eleven years old — on a summer trip to visit her aunt and uncle in Tampa.

That summer she learned some hidden truths about human nature that would haunt her in more ways than even she would know. Although of course — maybe you’ll understand — the whole thing seemed oddly normal at the time, even terribly comforting.

But regardless of all that, she loved walking by the sea. Watching the sunset over the Gulf on evenings when she found a nice secluded spot where she could get away from the feeling of being watched. To watch the sun sink into the water through fiery bands of cloud… reminding her of her own intense smallness, the smallness of the city around her, the smallness of the Earth itself. Along with the sigh of the waves that lulled her into a near-hypnotic state of self-forgetfulness, the moment filled her with a keen emotion… an emotion that can only be described as the birth of poetry.

And so Yvette wrote poems. Not very many, not very good, not thinking of herself as a poet at the time. But she wrote them.

She had to put words on the emotions of that summer, somehow.

Even if they were hesitant words. Even if they weren’t the smoothest words when it came to little things like rhyme and meter. Even if they were cryptic words, ringing with the longing to say something and not say it at the same time.

At least they were words. At least they put a name on the wound.

Soon enough the summer ended — an unbelievable fact when you’re eleven years old. Yvette returned home to Ohio, a changed girl in more ways than one. But touched with the spirit of poetry.

Over the next few years, things changed and stayed the same. Yvette became both more reserved and more surrounded with people clamoring for her attention. She fell in and out of love a handful of times — yet another occasion for poetry. And through it all, the little girl grew into a young woman.

Around the time she graduated high school, she started writing poetry in a serious way. Diligently, daily, taking the time to master the meter and rhyme, practicing with the fixed forms to see which of them she really had a liking for — she found the repetition of the villanelle somehow delighted her in a way constructing a sonnet never did.

Yvette wasn’t a shy woman — a woman who always walks around with the spotlight of great beauty on her never has the luxury of being “shy” in the strict sense — but she hesitated to share her poems. Because they were essentially her. Because they expressed more of her than even her closest friends knew. Because she hated to think that someone would read them without understanding — or even worse, that they would understand!

You see, though she’d disciplined herself with poetry, the cryptic quality in her style remained, just as present now as when she was eleven years old. She’d found that element of her style, reflected on it, tried and failed to free herself of it, and at last self-consciously developed it to the point where it became her signature style.

But pause and reflect, reader: what’s expressed in Yvette’s so-cryptic style?

I’ll tell you. It’s a desire to be understood — yes, just like all writing. But it’s a desire to be understood only with pains and great effort taken. In other words a desire to attract nearer, a desire to create intimacy with the reader, a desire to express and not express.

To express and not express: that came awfully close to the core of Yvette. Oftentimes she hardly knew what her own words meant.

It’s no wonder she hesitated so much to share her poems with anyone.

But the day came when she decided to start sharing them. On Facebook, as it happened.

And Yvette didn’t quite know why she did it, but when she posted her first poem to Facebook, she included a selfie.

And you remember how achingly beautiful she was, of course.

So when she posted her poem with the selfie she got about five thousand likes and five hundred comments.

(And here, reader, we reach the point where sympathy with Yvette’s plight begins to break down. But let’s just assume everything’s on the level here and she really was sincerely out to share her poetry and tacked the selfie on as an afterthought.)

Most of the comments were from thirsty dudes saying things on the level of, “Pls show bobs and vagene.”

Some were from slightly more sophisticated thirsty dudes praising or (even more sophisticated) critiquing aspects of Yvette’s selfie. Lighting, choice of angle, filters, makeup, hair, etc.

But none of them were about the poem.