I don’t write poetry, I tell everyone who asks.

My name is Laura and I don’t write poetry or do karaoke.

(Did I just accidentally write poetry?)

Why? ask the people who assumed that because I write about poetry, I must also write poetry of my own.

(Why? they ask, assuming that because I was in a choir for many years I must be good at karaoke. I loathe karaoke —though my FOMO is more powerful than my loathing, so please, still invite me to your karaoke birthday parties, just don’t ask me to sing.)

Why don’t I write poetry? I don’t know.

Is it because when I was in grade 11 and accustomed to winning such things, I brazenly submitted entries to both the fiction and poetry categories in my high school writing contest and wasn’t even honourably mentioned for my (almost certainly quite poor) poem? I remember thinking, when the list of winners had been read and I had heard my name only once, not twice (please, don’t hurt your eyes as you roll them), I am not a poet.

Was that it, then? Am I really so fragile, so vain?

Whatever it is, I have never felt compelled—not even then—to write a poem. It is true that when I was nine and ten and eleven years old I used to rollerblade down the hill on our street and pretend I was flying into the sunset, and as I roller-flew I thought Wordsworthian thoughts about sherbet-coloured skies and pink-bellied clouds (mostly I just wanted to be a Lucy Maud Montgomery character; they had a lot to say about the bellies of clouds). And certainly I have felt compelled to write, to find language for what I see, to find eloquent, surprising, relatable expression for what I feel. But I have never felt that only a poem could say what I wanted to say.

I admire poetry profoundly—its concision and precision, its wordplay, its lyricism. I read poems and they knock the wind out of me. I feel awe, and even, sometimes, a palpable inflation of the heart, new feelings accumulating like ants racing towards a puddle of ice cream. I love poetry.

It is entirely possible, even probable, that I am intimidated by poetry, or by poets. That I think, oh I could never do that.

What is “that”?

I would like to know what poetry is, so that I can qualify my answer about not writing it.

Six-and-a-half years ago I went to Salt Spring Island and visited the poet Phyllis Webb. While we waited for our dinner to arrive in the hotel restaurant in Ganges (fresh vegetables plucked from the garden behind the hotel that afternoon, I wrote in my journal later, with the delighted satisfaction of one who has found this Gulf Island to be exactly as she had imagined), I asked Phyllis why she never wrote fiction.

“Do you see the doorknob over there?” she asked. It was a brass doorknob on a window-checkered door that led out to the lobby. “I have no interest in who has touched it, who has come in and out of that door, who put it there. I am just interested in the doorknob as a doorknob.”

This was the most poetic explanation of poetry that I had ever heard.

Now when I see doorknobs I think: do I want to know who has come in and out of that door?

(This kind of navel-gazing thinking might explain why I have written more personal essays and literary criticism than I have either fiction or poetry.)

I don’t understand how you can write about poetry if you don’t write it yourself, a friend said to me as we rambled along a gravel path one thundery summer afternoon. This friend is a poet. I thought perhaps I was being accused of something.

It was strange, like being accused of violence when what you feel is love.

I didn’t have an answer that would help her understand.

Right now I am taking a creative writing workshop. A few weeks ago our homework was to write a poem.

Oh no, I thought.

I procrastinated all week. Finally, the night before, I did it. I took a scene that I had written a few days earlier, about eating cheesecake in a park, and rewrote it in three short stanzas. Basically, it seemed to me, I took out some words and put in some line breaks.

I was pretty sure that this was not writing a poem.

It is also possible that my previously written scene already was a poem.

Have I been writing poems this whole time?

What is a poem?

My winning story in the high school writing contest was called “In the Garden If You Need Me.” It was about a man named Harold who learns that he has a parasite and will live only three more days. The story takes place on the last day. He eats cornflakes and reads the newspaper, goes back to bed and meditates on his life, and then dies.

I think perhaps this was the most “plot” a story of mine has ever had.

I’m not so good with “plot.” Do I care what happened before there was cheesecake in the park, or after? I think that I do. But do I need to say it? How little can I say and still call it a story?

Do I want to know who has touched the doorknob, who has come in and out of that door? Or do I just care about the doorknob as a doorknob?

When the Canadian writer P.K. Page was having trouble composing poetry in the late 1950s, she jotted down these lines—part of a fragment that remains unpublished:

Write, & imagine a poem that list of trees
if you will, if you want; / the list is still a list
is not dissimilar to the laundry slip

What is the difference between poems, lists of trees, and laundry slips?

One of the reasons (as I say in some of my non-fiction, non-poetry writings) that Page fell into a decade-long period of poetic silence—beginning around the time that she wrote these lines—was that she lost faith in her own authority as a poet. A fundamental condition for writing poetry is that the poet must be able to “imagine,” as Page says here, that what she is writing can be a poem.

So what is a poem?

One answer is that a poem is what you believe it to be.

It is as simple and as maddening as that.

I don’t believe I have been writing poems this whole time. But if I did believe it, maybe, at least in some cases, I would have been.

To be clear, I am still Laura and I still don’t write poetry.

But.