stop being pretentious about creating

As someone who shares my writing and poetry online, a question I often get is what books are you reading? Favorite authors? Literature to make me a more smart, intelligent writer? Well, I had a realization the other day that I’m currently most inspired by music. Not books. And for a moment I was like fuck. Am I a bad writer? Don’t get me wrong, I love books too. Most recently Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous — one of my favorite pieces of writing that changed me as a person. You have the wonderful poetry of Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson. All of whom I’ve grown up with and have many of their words ingrained in my being. But is it okay to say I find my best creative inspiration more often in the most mundane, most random? Like over hearing a conversation on the train or watching the sky fall during a heavy rainstorm? How come in the world of writers do I suddenly feel like an idiot, a fake writer, if I were to say I’m more inspired by music, lyrics, conversations, a random Tuesday— than I am books and classical literature? What if I told you I didn’t study literature in college but I’ve studied all of my memories and I put them into words for you? I have a musical background- I grew up singing and performing and playing instruments. Can you be accepted in two different worlds? Can art just be art? When it comes to my writing, my art in any sense, I don’t believe I have a “niche”. I genuinely don’t care to be specialized, solely focused on one thing. I think I just want to live and see what comes through. I constantly find myself in every universe. Some days I’m a poet dealing with the dark complexities of my belonging, other days I’m a joyful, beautiful young girl who wants to run a fashion blog and write about clothes and the trivial things, next day maybe I do want to become a rockstar. I’ll put on certain music on certain days as a means to explain parts of my soul— my longings and my triumphs and my downward spirals. Sound is second nature to me. It’s like taking a breath. I’ll read and interpret lyrics exactly how I would poems. Music has inspired my poetry and writing more times than I can count. Potentially even more so than my favorite novel.

I was curious about the origin of writing, of poetry. Was there a large musical connection? Is it in my ancestral DNA to fuse the two together, like song and dance? Can poetry be music just as much as music is poetry? I discovered an article on the Poetry Foundation that I wanted to share an excerpt from.

“Poetry and music have been intertwined for thousands of years. In antiquity, poems were often sung: the first lyric poets in ancient Greece performed their work to the accompaniment of the lyre, and the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry, the Shijing, was a collection of songs. In southern Europe in the middle ages, the popularity of troubadour poets granted them unprecedented freedom of speech and social influence in their time, and their lyrical work would influence European poetry for centuries. The ballad form continues to be a common form for both poems and songs. Emily Dickinson famously wrote her sometimes irreverent poems to the rhythms and forms of church hymns, and more recent poets such as W.H. Auden, J.D. McClatchy, and Eileen Myles have written successful opera libretti.”

I thought to myself, everything is connected.

I then continued down a rabbit hole of all types of artist, new and old, that have songs out there that started off as poems and eventually were set to music. Most modern examples I found—Olivia Rodrigo’s “Lacy” was a poem first. Songs by Nirvana. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having produced new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." Poetry is music. Music is poetry. I think of Frank Ocean, Amy Winehouse, Elliott Smith— wonderful musicians who inspire my creative writing very deeply. They might not classify as an “author” but the impact they’ve had on my writing is just as important. My work can be meaningful if it’s inspired by the good cry I had after listening to a Harry Styles song just as much as if I sat by my window reading Mary Oliver. (Both things I have done, many times.) My inspirations are not of someone who is anti-intellectual, they are of someone who loves art. I love art, in all forms, and they find me when I need them. You are a writer. An artist. You are not a literature professor. I mean you very well could be. And there’s nothing wrong with any end of this spectrum of inspiration. But what I’m really trying to say is all kinds of artistry, all kinds of living, can be your teacher. Learn the way through anything, everything, anyone. Don’t feel not deserving of language because you haven’t read a thousand books or you’ve never heard of the not-basic-but-very-important-niche-literature. I don’t even have the energy or time right now to get into the privileged and often classist conversation around having this “higher up” knowledge. You can be a meaningful artist if your screen time is high on Tiktok, if you go clubbing until 3 AM and come back and write sloppy poetry in your notes app, if you started writing at 25 or 40, if you are multidimensional and create in a hundred different ways and mediums, if you’ve never heard of a single name I mentioned in this post.

Go put on a good fucking song. It’s free. Dance in your room. Kiss people and write about it. Who cares how you got here. Live!!! Create!!!

What inspires you?