¶ … Motivation of Writing Poetry
According to Benjamin Saenz
Why Poetry: the Definition and Motivation of Writing Poetry According to Benjamin Saenz
In his narrative at the end of Elegies in Blue, Benjamin Saenz says that when he first started writing poetry, he was "learning a new language" (Saenz 1, 95), and in his essay, Meditations on Writing: A Novena, he says that "every language is a way of translating the world, and that no language translates the world without a particular bias" (Saenz 2, para. 31). The act of writing poetry, therefore, is an attempt to translate the world and one's experience within the world via a particular language; while the motivation to write poetry stems from an innate desire to communicate experience.
Whose experience? In Elegies Saenz endeavors to communicate his own experience, as well as that of his family and fellow Chicano countryman. "I live on the border," says Saenz in his poem, Work. "I am attempting to translate the words I have borrowed and stolen, words now imprisoned somewhere...
Writing poetry for Saenz, therefore, is an act release, as much an act of communication; a release of words that allows him to breathe, and "[he] only want[s] to breathe" Saenz 1, 39).
But why poetry? If every language has the ability to translate experience into words -- the ability to allow for breath-why is poetry the language Saenz favors? Both in Elegies and Meditations, Saenz discusses not one but two beginnings of his poetry writing. While in the first beginning, he wrote poetry as an attempt to express beauty, seeing poetry as something that could "help you find the beautiful," that he saw it as such a "high art, a moral art" eventually turned him off to writing poetry for some time, after coming consider it a pill far too large for him to swallow. Later in life, however, Saenz returned to writing poetry merely for the sheer pleasure of it, referring to the act of writing in Meditations as his "therapy" (Saenz 2, para. 10).
It was only when Saenz had successfully learned the language of…
