On Language and Being Understood

Over the years, one of the most consistent pieces of feedback I’ve received about my writing—especially my poetry—is this:

“I like it. It makes me feel something. I just don’t understand it.”

At different points, that frustrated me. Sometimes it offended me. And sometimes, if I’m honest, I used it as a reason not to share the work at all.

I remember being in my twenties, working on a novel, when my mother—who gave me my first typewriter when I was ten—looked at what I had written and asked, “Who’s going to read this?”

She didn’t mean it was bad. She meant: who is going to understand it?

At the time, I resisted that question. Now I find myself returning to it.

Over the past few months, as I’ve reviewed my poetry—more than a hundred finished pieces, and many more in draft—I’ve sometimes looked at my own work and thought: Where was I when I wrote this? What was I trying to say? Why can’t I quite reach it now?

Some of those poems were written from places where clarity was not the goal. Some were written in states of intensity, grief, or self-protection, where language became less a window than a veil. Sometimes I was protecting other people. Sometimes I was protecting myself. And sometimes the poem held what I could not yet say plainly.

Because language does two things at once.

It reveals, and it conceals.

Say a word like love, or peace, or home, and no two people in the room will experience it in exactly the same way. Language opens meaning, but it also shapes it. It defines, narrows, and frames what we are trying to say. And sometimes, as writers, we use it not only to express what is true, but to circle it, soften it, or keep it partially hidden.

This morning, writing a new poem, I noticed something different.

I wasn’t trying to hide anything.

I was trying to see clearly—and to say what I saw in a way that someone else could follow. Not simplified. Not flattened. But readable.

Clarity doesn’t mean losing depth. It means inviting someone in.

That is the threshold I find myself standing on now—as both a writer and a host of a creative community. How do we write in a way that still carries truth, complexity, and feeling, and also allows someone else to walk alongside us?

I don’t have a final answer. But I think I’m beginning to understand the question.

And for now, that feels like the right place to begin.