Have you ever read anything that you connected with so much to the point it felt like it was speaking directly to you? A piece that spoke to you in such a way that it drove you to write something of your own? “A New Poet” by Linda Pastan is a poem that describes exactly that.
Using the simile, “Finding a new poet/is like finding a new wildflower out in the woods,” the speaker creates a mood of discovery, specifically one that is wild and implies an adventure. The speaker goes on saying, “You don’t see//its name in the flower books, and nobody believes in its odd color or the way//its leaves grow in splayed rows/down the whole of the page,” furthering the idea of discovery and that this poet/flower is truly new. Here, there is an outside perspective through “nobody believes” and solidifies that this poet/flower is unique to whoever found it. That their poetry is only meant for you to understand. Expanding the metaphor, the speaker continues with, “In fact/the very page smells of spilled//red wine and the mustiness of the sea,/on a foggy day – the odor of truth/and of lying,” which moves on from just the simile of a wildflower, but to the fact this poet is a whole world in of themselves. To read their poetry is to live a full-fledged experience, one that is smelt and felt. The words are a space-time window into a life you would have never known. Fresh in your nostrils is the scent of realness, “of truth”, but you know it is only words on a page that are crafted, and in a sense, there is also the scent “of lying”.
In its second to last stanza, the poem turns its attention from the discovered poetry back to ‘you’ saying, “And the words are so familiar,/so strangely new,words/you almost wrote yourself, if only//in your dreams there had been a pencil/or a pen or even a paintbrush,/if only there had been a flower” and suddenly it is not just about the new poet that is found but also about how words can resonate so much with you that they move you to string words together yourself. A pencil, a pen, and a paintbrush do not only live in dreams. Flowers can be found anywhere, you just have to be willing to look.
“A New Poet” is such a great poem because it encapsulates the satisfaction of reading poetry that speaks directly to you and heals your soul, but it also encapsulates what motivates someone to write work of their own. The new poet found within “A New Poet” is not only a poet that you just discovered but the discovery of a poet who has not yet written anything that could be recorded in books. It is a poet who is completely unheard of, one who has maybe never even considered writing poetry before. One where their poetry would be fresh and new, and nobody would believe in it because it had not been done before, meaning they must be convinced. The new poet in “A New Poet”, the wildflower out in the wild waiting to be found, is you.