All of this "coping," all of this "getting by," all of this "day by day" has turned me towards writing poetry. One of my open secrets is that I wrote poetry for many years, most of it lost now. The way that scraps of thought could be fixed by a poem was very soothing to me. I am soothed again by that now. Well, perhaps
soothed is the wrong word,
marginally satisfied is probably better. I can pin down the small truths and then let them rest.
I keep starting essays about grief and end up with poems. Maybe it is the sudden lack of perspective I am suffering from, but a poem seems like an option now in a way that it hasn't in a long while. I don't know how I feel about this except that any writing is better than none.
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Does what you write, or how you write it, change when your circumstances change? How?
3 comments:
Yes. I wrote poems prolifically in High School, when my emotions were bigger than I. These days I feel what I feel in manageable doses, which lend themselves to structure and resolution.
Hmm. Interesting. Poetry provides that for me in the quickest way possible.
I find that when I am trying to understand how I feel about something, my brain tends even more towards metaphors, and exploring the metaphors is a way of understanding the thing itself. Maybe poetry, with its tendency towards metaphor and abstraction, is doing that for you - putting it into a shape that you can look at and see anew.
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