To Delight the Self

To Delight the Self: First Place in Hedge Apple Magazine’s 2025 Halloween Poetry Contest

Back in 2006, an essay called “A Consideration of Poetry,” by Kay Ryan, appeared in the May issue of Poetry. Ryan’s argument supports Eliot’s assertion that “poetry is a superior amusement,” meaning that there is, at the foundation of poem composition, an experience of fun, humor, or amusement—or as Ryan terms it, the “nonsensical”—for the author herself in the creation of language, no matter the content. Ryan states, in referencing the clever nonsense poem “Gosky Patties” by Edward Lear, that “[T]here is no need which precedes either nonsense or a poem. The creator is entertaining him or herself.” She contends that the poet is first “delighting” him/herself in the writing of a poem, and only afterward, an audience.

My younger self was utterly indignant at this thesis. “Entertaining” herself?! Writing poetry is an “amusement?! I disagreed vociferously with those descriptions; after all, I’d spent my entire adult life up to that point wracking my brain, sweating out endless searches images, and scrabbling my way through vagaries of language and syntax to write what I considered very serious poems—poems that would ultimately matter to people I’d never know, poems that could earn book publication, and poems that could claim to be genuine poems. Writing poems was impossible, but I’d found my life oriented around trying to do the impossible (in which I was only occasionally successful), and that was a weighty endeavor in which I needed to prove my intellectual and artistic mettle. Hobbyist poets write to have fun, I thought; literary poets write as a matter of life and death, undertaking increasingly difficult work with increasingly high emotional and professional stakes. I was convinced, at the time, that I don’t write to amuse myself—I write to change other people! Poetry isn’t a larking about for self-amusement; it’s a deadly serious business, as the making of all art is.

But in the twenty years since the appearance of Ryan’s essay, I’ve realized how thoroughly wrong I was, and just how much I misinterpreted what she (and Eliot) really meant. Ryan was not talking about amusement and entertainment in the casual meanings of an insignificant pursuit, killing time, turning off the brain, or escaping important matters. She meant those words in terms of their qualities of contentment, attainment, consummation, gratification, and realization. In other words, in terms of the emotion of fulfillment.

To rephrase Eliot, I would say that poetry is a superior fulfillment. And I experience myself every time I write—an image, a line, a stanza, or an entire poem—as a creator fulfilling herself. Ryan was certainly accurate in claiming that the first delight and joy of writing are those experienced in the writer herself at the process and outcomes of her play and experimentation with language.

So much of genuine creativity is the taking of risks without assumptions about or investment in a “correct” or “successful” outcome. So much of the joy of writing poetry is the sheer joy of shaping language for its own sake, its own sounds, and its own cadences, and being delighted and satisfied by one’s own linguistic permutations before any thoughts about readers and publication.

I could not be more convinced now that Ryan was, all along, offering me a liberatory perspective from which to view the writing of poems. And the notification today of my First-Place win in the Hedge Apple Magazine Halloween Poetry Contest is proof. My winning poem, “A Terza Rima Lament for Dracula’s Valet” was begun early in 2024 during a revelatory workshop with the irreplaceable poet Richie Hofmann on the use of traditional forms by contemporary poets. We read, among other books, A.E. Stallings’ brilliant volume Like, which demonstrates the possibilities of emotional power in juxtaposing satirical, comical, or colloquial content and received forms. Prof. Hofmann’s writing prompt was to take one of Stallings’ poems and imitate the form. It so happened that the week we discussed Stallings’ book, I’d been tutoring a high school student reading Dracula. So I naturally wondered: what would happen if Renfield got out of the asylum in the 21^st century and stumbled upon one of those food marts attached to a gas station?  I’ve always been sympathetic in a way to poor Renfield, the overworked, ill-compensated yet devoted servant of Dracula, whose obsession with the Count and the promise of immortality leads only to madness. So I chose Stallings’ poem “Shattered,” written in terza rima, and made a first-time go at using this form. As I sketched out the tercet stanzas and rhyme scheme, I found myself chuckling in some places and getting misty-eyed in others, and was—after all—delighted to discover that the formal restrictions seemed to create an arrangement of lineation I might not have thought of without those constraints. I found it very satisfying intellectually to compose this satirical poem, but being satire and, unusually for me, genre-themed, I didn’t think it carried much weight. I submitted it here and there for a while, collected rejections, then shoved it in a drawer.

Until last month, when I happened to notice a call for Halloween-themed poems by a lit mag housed at Hagerstown (Maryland) Community College that I’d never heard of before. But given that the response time was only 30 days (a miraculous rapidity these days), and that I had only a single Halloween-themed poem to my name, I made some revisions and submitted it, mostly on a whim.

“A Terza Rima Lament for Dracula’s Valet” won’t change anyone, I’m sure, and it certainly won’t change the world. It’s an oddity among my poems for both its form and its hyperbolic juxtaposition of colloquial and elevated diction. But it represents an important realization and risk taken: to submit myself to the sounds and rhythms of language within a formal structure, to play around, experiment, break comfortable habits, and most of all, to experience the freedom of feeling contentment and achievement from the process of shaping language itself, and not on the product.

I pay much closer attention now to what I feel in the initial and subsequent stages of writing. When I find myself amused or entertained or get an intellectual kick from my own experiments in form and content, I know I’m on an effective track to saying something that others might recognize as interesting, important, and perhaps, even wise. The old adage “no tears for the writer, no tears for the reader” is true, and applies to delight as well.

An apple carved like a Halloween pumpkin with a small bat resting on the top left near the apple stem.