The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

Better was largely irrelevant when it came to mothering because the entire enterprise relied on the presumption that one day, sooner than you thought, your child would become an entirely self-reliant, independent person who made her own decisions. That child wouldn’t necessarily remember the Halloween costumes you made from hand six years running. Or maybe she did, but she resented you for it because she’d wanted store-bought costumes just like all her friends. It didn’t matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child walked off into the world alone.

The dilemma was that any words I might say at a lectern or in the pages of a newspaper would never achieve the same strength as the words I wrote as a poet. Inspiration, calls to action, can take many forms. It is not so much the persuasive force of an argument that prompts engagement, but a feeling that inspires it. A sense of injustice, a longing for redemption, empathy, rage. What better to provoke any of these than a poem?

What I wanted to say to this man was that the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.

In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time.