The "Dark Poet" with Imposter Syndrome

Born to Be Some Kind of Star (Burning Bright, or Burning Out?)

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Most writers will complain of imposter syndrome. How they're trying to be someone their not. A little nobody trying to be a somebody. Someone without a spark of luck in an industry that doesn't like to take chances. What if they're fooling everyone, even themselves, that they are good at this?

I didn’t encounter imposter syndrome until I was already deep into my career as a writer. I’ve always been a loud and bold creative, even from an early age, eager to put anything I drew or wrote in front of people. Maybe I was being a show off, or maybe I just thrived on compliments. Regardless, I was rarely afraid to put myself out there. I began posting stories online as young as 12, and made my first leaps into seeking publication by 16. I wanted to share my stories and my voice no matter the odds.

Funny, then, how when I decided to compile some poems into a poetry collection I suddenly hit a mental roadblock. It wasn’t that I hadn’t shared my poetry before. I won a top ten spot in a national poetry competition when I was 15. Sharing poems wasn’t really the issue. The issue was calling myself a poet. I don’t have a problem calling myself a writer or an author. Those labels feel right and close to my identity.

I also don’t have a problem calling myself an artist, even when I rarely dabble in visual arts these days. But for a long time I could not call myself a poet. I was just a person who wrote poems. Somehow, a "poet" and a "person who writes poems" did not mean the same thing to me. One was true, and one was not. I went out of my way sometimes to just call myself a writer, lumping poetry in with the things that I write as though it was an afterthought.

Burn Out or Fade Away?

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Pin-pointing the reason I struggled to call myself a poet, even after I published the poetry collection, isn’t too hard. If writers were ranked by tiers, then my mind put poets somewhere in S tier, far above the lofty clouds where angels sing and everything is bathed in light and song. They are the most honest truth-tellers, those who speak out when other do not, the closest prophets of the muses, and people who breathe life and death into words. Their power is extraordinary, moving hearts and souls with something as simple as a few written or spoken lines.

At least, the good ones are lofty. There are mediocre poets, and probably even bad ones. But I never strived for mediocrity. If I am going to tackle a task, I jump into it with everything I have, with every intention to achieve greatness or bust. So to call myself a poet, to put myself in such a lofty position as those silver-tongued poets, seemed like trying to make a deity out of a mortal. I did not feel worthy of the title despite my devotion to the cause, like a faithful sinner feeling unworthy of Heaven.

Poetry itself is such a varied art, ranging from strictly structured stanzas to seemingly random free-styling. When you have nearly infinite possibilities of ways in which to format your poems, finding a voice can be difficult; moreover, finding a consistence voice can be even harder. A poet is nothing without a voice.

My voice was another roadblock in my journey towards identifying as a poet. My voice was so different in comparison to the voices that were around me. In the early stages of preparing my poetry collection, I started regularly attending a poetry open mic near me. Right off the bat I was an outlier. A vast majority of the crowd was over 50, while I was in my late 20s. A lot of them wrote about love, humor, and history; meanwhile, I wrote about darkness, yearning, and anguish. Despite these differences, I was welcomed wholeheartedly to the group. Even though they didn’t seem to be my target audience, I still found encouragement and appreciation for what I had to offer with my words.

The Birth of the Dark Poet

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The breaking point for me started at this aforesaid poetry group. After two years of attending, one of the organizers made a comment about the deep darkness of my poetry that still managed to find a way to shine brightly. In that explanation, she called me the group’s “dark poet”.

That moment changed me as I pondered how to feel about the moniker, and what I thought about it. After all, if poets are these lofty muses resting on clouds made of sunlight, then what did it mean to be a “dark poet”? It seemed contradictory on the surface, but I found that I liked the phrase, and that it fit with my writing. It was just the push I needed.

I decided to challenge myself to write a poem about these complicated feelings I had about being a poet, and being a “dark poet”. I wrote it stream-of-consciousness, in a slam-style, with my intention for it to be spoken instead of read quietly. My poetry voice is usually short and punchy, with some beats and rhymes for emphasis. But this dark poet poem, it was wild and winding like a forest path. It was untamed. It was black as pitch and sharp as knives, with flurries of punches not holding back, only truths and no apologies. And when I was done, I could finally call myself a poet. (That poem is "The Poem Where I Apologize", featured in Up in Flames).

Maybe I’m not a beacon of light on a throne on high. Maybe my name will never be spoken in the same way as Dickinson or Seuss, or Frost or Silverstein. But I am a poet, and I confidently know it, and I can proudly say it.

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~Dana Lockhart