I like to say you know you’re in Tampa when you see a man without a shirt on… inside the airport. This is where I was for Chapter 1 of my poetry journey. Tampa is where culture and nature are paved over, stripped into strip malls and strip clubs. We lived in the Windridge Apartments. There was no wind, no ridge.
Day after day, beside our tiny kidney-bean-shaped pool, I wrote a very, very, very long essay about myself, all aspects. Until then, I had only written against my will for school, so this was something new, wanting to write… and wanting to get it right. (Before I go on, some courageous context. Once, in a college class taught by a semi-famous urban folklorist, I wrote an essay about my grandfather dying of emphysema. At the next meeting, before passing the papers back, the professor read my essay out loud to the class. I thought, I’m a secret genius. When he finished, he said, “Okay, that’s what you DON’T want to do.” I don’t remember his reasoning. My ears stopped working.)
This memory was floating somewhere in the dirty little pool when I finally shared my essay with my wife. After reading it, the first thing she said was, “I love you.” And? “It’s bad.” I knew it. I had love, but not a coherent essay. Eventually, after an unhealthy amount of rereading, I realized I had so compressed the language in specific paragraphs that they seemed more like poems than prose. Hoping for validation, I submitted these paragraphs to a prestigious poetry contest. To my surprise, I won, though I was worried I might be found to be a fraud. What followed was a banquet and a workshop with a famous poet. (This was my first clue that poetry was also an industry. During the workshop, a retired real estate agent read his poem, “The Heart Rides a Handsome Horse” and concluded by saying it was about his brother dying. The famous poet-in-residence responded as if leading a corporate sales retreat: “You’ll have trouble finding a journal for this. You should feel things profoundly, but with reticence.”)
I faked my way through the workshop, but afterward, I was left with the truth that I had no idea how to write a poem on purpose. Also, as a young person, if I had been asked to choose a future career, poet would have been last, just behind bullfighter and Mormon missionary. Like most, I dreaded those essay prompts about this symbol and that metaphor throughout school. I was bad at puzzles. For my AP English exam, I thought Robert Frost’s poem, “After Apple Picking” was about picking apples. It’s about death?
And why must poetry only and always be an analytical exercise? Taking something apart is quite different and less joyful than creating something. Kids love to build. Instead of another essay, why not ask students to read a poem and then write their own poem, or choreograph a dance, or make a sculpture, etc. Poems have become part of our industrialized educational curriculum—the more difficult and allusive the poem, the better for assigning essays and grades and a rung on capitalism’s shaky ladder.
Now that I’ve been writing poems for over 30 years, I can say that the accidental nature of my first poems may be the best clue to how the best poems write themselves. On the one hand, writing a poem is like writing anything else, a series of decisions, but writing a poem is also paradoxically about abandoning reason and control, realizing that logic may block the possibility of surprise.
Because we’re schooled in a culture that values analysis over creation, it’s reasonable for non-poets (most English teachers and average citizens) to assume that poets start with meaning or theme or symbol and then write a poem to fill that order. I was reminded of this tendency after receiving an email from a high school teacher in Scotland about one of my poems.
First, the poem:
Christmas Tree Lots
Christmas trees lined like war refugees,
a fallen army made to stand in their greens.
Cut down at the foot, on their last leg,
they pull themselves up, arms raised.
We drop them like wood;
tied, they are driven through the streets,
dragged through the door, cornered
in a room, given a single blanket,
only water to drink, surrounded by joy.
Forced to wear a gaudy gold star,
to surrender their pride,
they do their best to look alive.
The email from the thoughtful teacher in Scotland:
I am a teacher of English Literature at a high school in Scotland, and I am developing a scheme of work on Refugee Poetry. In this scheme, I have been planning to use your poem “Christmas Tree Lots.”
There is an obvious reference to Jewish refugees in the Holocaust, but I wondered if you were making larger comparisons between this and the modern world? The poem was published in December 2001 in the wake of 9/11, when Islamophobia was rife and the war on terror was kicking off. Was this historical comparison with the Holocaust made to highlight that we perhaps haven’t moved on from this kind of treatment of human beings – as much as we like to think we have?
Basically, I’m checking that the analysis I’m teaching is correct, or if I’m way off the mark.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Part of my email response:
I don’t think there are any limits to how one might interpret a poem. Everything you’re saying about “Christmas Tree Lots” makes sense to me. I think the images of the Holocaust, 9/11, the war on terror, etc. were/are inside all of us, so when I sat down to write the poem, those images/feelings likely found their way. However, I never sat down to write a poem about any of those events or ideas. I was simply moved at the sad sight of trees tossed against the fence of a Christmas tree lot, at how callously we treat them and nature in general. As I began writing, the poem wrote itself, the tree’s journey became a human one in times of war. Even the star at the end came as a surprise to me, and I suddenly realized I’d created a Holocaust image. So it goes with writing poems—where they start isn’t (if one’s lucky) where they end.
To be a poet and not know it. This is my career goal, poem to poem, free of preconceptions or expectations. A poet and a poem need room. Mark Doty calls this sense of openness “liberating uncertainty”; otherwise, you’re just writing well-wrought anecdotes. When I consider my accidental start as a poet, I recall Franz Wright’s prescription for a poem: it should be “completely clear, completely concrete, and completely inexplicable like reality itself.”
Chris Solís Green is the author of five books of poetry: The Sky Over Walgreens, Epiphany School, Résumé, Everywhere West, and The Dead Zoo (Bee Box Press, 2025). His poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry and The New York Times. He’s a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, whose mission is to disseminate, free of charge, works of writing by and about Chicagoans whose voices might not otherwise be heard. He’s edited four anthologies, including I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War, American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans, and Chicago Mosaic: Immigrant Stories of Objects Kept, Lost, or Left Behind. He’s also the founding editor of the annual anthology, DePaul’s Blue Book: Best American High School Writing. He’s a Distinguished Writer in Residence at DePaul University. More information can be found at www.chrissolisgreen.com.