This week: Why Be a Poet? Edited by: fyn  
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ~~W. H. Auden
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~~Plato
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity. ~~Samuel Beckett
A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep. ~~Salman Rushdie
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~~Khalil Gibran
What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry — but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry. ~~G. K Chesterton
Always be a poet, even in prose. ~~Charles Baudelaire
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In the last several years, I've written hundreds of poems. Some could have been articles. Some perhaps should have been short stores - or are only in poetic form. In my mind, I've been working on a memoir. Memoires usually take the form of prose. Except mine won't. Mine will be poetry and 'short stories' and snippets and more. Because that is who I am. And I am, if nothing else, a poet. My writing seems to burst forth as poetry. Nothing wrong with that. At all.
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. Anaïs Nin
Poetry is good for dealing with the various states of mind we are at at any given time in the miasma of our lives. Hindsight being that proverbial 20/20, rarely do we ever see where we are whilst we are there, but rather in retrospect see where we were. We may well write what we are feeling, or think we are feeling, but even by that time, it is of the past we write. Of our past within a framework of our now.
Adding the concept of 'thinking memoir' to the mix, I find myself seeking to find those moments, those epiphanies, that I missed in the day-to-day. Sometimes, they do not exist even in the now looking back. Other times, they become a brick wall that I've either smashed into or battered my way through only to repeat an action at a later date showing myself that at the very least, that I have yet to learn from my mistakes or that, just maybe, they weren't mistakes at all. Or were they? A conundrum, to be sure. *grin* But, at least, it is my puzzle to figure out. My father always said I was an enigma. As a child, I always figured an 'enigma' was something akin to Brussels Sprouts or Green Grapes in Sour Cream - both of which I thought were truly horrific things to eat. An Igma. It couldn't be something good and sound so bad. Ah. The things we figure out as life goes on.
Poetry often by the paucity of words involved, leaves out a lot of excess verbiage. It can (although my poetry tends to the far wordier) skip over or avoid the surrounding info that life gives us and focuses on one cell of a whole. That important cell in the moment. That defining cell which then bleeds over to the surrounding. It lets us isolate moments in a way other writing might not. Sharpens our focus.
My life view often leans to a kaleidoscopic viewpoint, so I find it helpful to attempt to filter out the accompanying noise so to speak. Personally, though, I need to remember that it is those surrounding patterns that may give added dimension. Ah, the joys of poetry!
It dawned on me recently that in the action of writing the poetry, we all are, in a sense, writing another chapter of our story, our memoir of self. For me, that was one of those defining moments that solidified my choice to have my 'memoir' include much of the poetry I've written over time. Even if, in referring back to those moments, I now feel the urge to expand or redefine those moments given the accompanying filters of 'that was then, this is now' or somesuch. We do, over time, evolve. As writers and as people. We, for sure, are not static beings. At least, one would hope not. *Remembers back to the days when she thought she knew the answers to everything!* Uh-huh. Sure. *Proceeds to laugh at herself.*
In a conversation recently with Monty  we were discussing rhymed vs unrhymed poetry. How certain poems tend to lean one way or the other. This then led m to the thoughts of how, back in the way back, histories were verbal, how the use of rhyme helped people be able to memorize said histories. Again, this, for me, helped me cement the idea that a memoir could, indeed, be comprised of a lot of poetry. Validation, I suppose, of a concept that is by no means anything new, but, possibly, in the midst of being rediscovered.
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#1998815 by fyn |
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Poetry: July 06, 2022 Issue [#11441]
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