Motivation of Writing Poetry According to Benjamin

¶ … 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 between my throat and the suffocating air" (Saenz 1, 39). 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 poetry that he began to see it as way of expressing the thoughts and experiences of others-particularly that of the Chicano culture. Saenz has been called an overly political poet, a border poet, an affirmative action poet, and also-ironically -- a poet whose work is too politically correct; yet at the heart, Saenz is simply a poet who "felt [he] had something to say," and a large part of what he had to say had to do with his experience and other's of the Chicano culture (Saenz 1, 95).

While Saenz maintains that his primary motivation for writing poetry is his enjoyment of the process of creating a poem, that he is so quick to downplay the importance of commercial recognition is-to my eyes-revealing of an acute desire to obtain such recognition. Not to say that Saenz is a commercially driven in his approach to poetry, but only that he wouldn't mind being counted among the components of the literary and political cannons and 20th and 21st centuries. For example, in his poem, At the Grave of the 20th Century, Saenz addresses the past century as a person on who's headstone might read the names of artists, political activists, political leaders, war veterans and-you guessed it-writers (Saenz 1, 82-85). While he does ultimately downplay the notion of writers in this poem, that he mentions them at all is revealing of his regard of writers as significant figures.