Month: September 2019

A Purpose to Poetry

I suppose it could be argued that poetry seems as a colossal waste of time and a fruitless expense of energy. What does it gain a writer to craft flowery limericks or a reader to encounter an edgy rambling?

Everything. The writer gains everything when she tears wide her heart and permits it to pour freely onto the pages before her. She commands self-expression, a moment of triumphant bravery in giving voice to her thoughts. She gains creative fulfillment, realizing the great power within her to speak design into being. And she finds freedom, bursting, finally, from the parliament of self-defeating doubts.

The reader, likewise, gains everything when he encounters skin-raising poetry. He feels the fire of inspiration stirring within him, motivating him to conquer what is yet unconquered. He finds beauty, an undeniable value to life and its countless expressions. And he finds freedom, with a mind expanded, a heart enlivened, and a soul enchanted.

Food and water might sustain life, but art, in its unrivaled power to unite a universe, is what makes it worth our while.

May our minds flourish with creation, and may our hands never deny its expression.

Firestone Friday – Poem I

She’s never been my sun;

she’s a vibrant moon,

and when her tides pull me in,

the waves crash and carry

my howl

for her.

                                                                             – Strong Language

 

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Strong Language, and Bloody Creations

I spent most of 2018 in the bedlam of poetry. Poetry is like a wound — one that pains and one that heals. The wound is internal, garnering leverage over the organs with every experience the poet encounters. It forms and it festers, spreading wildly throughout the trunk of a person until it finally reaches the hands. And, through claws rigid with purpose, the poetry is expelled as ink onto parchment. The lesion that once victimized the poet transforms into liniment that relieves the aching reader.

My poetry was finally, fully expelled in November 2018 when I published, with great trepidation and greater reward, my first compilation of poems: Strong Language. It could be argued that our most powerful appetite is for creation – a constant master that renders us unable to leave behind the mechanism of construction. We cannot help but to compose. What day or what hour didn’t see you forming ideas, designing sentences, or shaping reality? Creation is the only passion we don’t put down even in our sleep.

It was equal parts triumph and relief to fashion 77 wounds into an ordered piece of writing. Enthusiastic for every breed and every style of literature, my mind hammered the stone in a thousand different shapes at once. I could not tell the stone what shape I wanted, for I wanted them all. So, I abandoned expectations, prescriptive rules, and reservations to just form as many sculptures in as many styles as my mind ached to construct. My book of poetry is without a determined style and is without a certain format. It is a flowing river of bloody letters expelled from my wounds.

Poetry is alluring yet strikingly powerful – a delicate strike of lightning. I will remain in the storm a little longer.

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