Poetry was and is a place where we can express elation, trauma, passion and experiences.

MUSE

“Swim right into my eyes

my darling muse, feel

free to make yourself at home

I collect the history of your words.”

POETRY IS POWERFUL

“‘Tell the truth but tell it slant,’ Emily Dickinson famously wrote. Often the very slantness of a poem can get to the truth more accurately. All writing is a process of discovery, but especially poetry. The very form itself allows us to let go of our preconceived ways of saying or thinking about things and try new forms, new meanings.

They were a place to heal. They are also a place to encounter the sacred, to connect with what matters, to reconnect with beauty, meaning, joy. 200 years ago, in his Defense of Poetry, Shelley famously called poets the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world,’” writes Nadia Colburn.

THE PURPOSE OF CURIOSITY

Before we can write, whether it is poetry or a story, comes the observation and experience.

It boils down to a deep inner listening. You need to forget everything around you and take yourself back to that moment, remembering the minutest details. Whatever you cannot remember, or haven`t physically experienced, research until you find your answers.

Do learn to listen to your inner voice.

Heather Demitrios gives the following advice in her article “Creating from Stillness”.

“Are you a true artist? Do you want to be? Then it’s time to do the hard work of getting quiet. But how do we do this in such a loud world? We sit. We listen. We breathe.

Sit, listen, breathe: Simple, but not easy. When you meditate, no matter how noisy your internal sound loop is, you are building the muscles that will help you swim your way to the calm, still lake inside you. Sometimes you’ll only get to visit the lake for a second. Other times, for minutes on end.”

This curiosity will serve you well when writing poetry.

THE I-THOU RELATIONSHIP

“When we train our mind to pay attention, as a poem helps us do, we naturally enter into a sacred relationship, what another philosopher, Martin Buber, calls the ‘I-Thou’ relationship. Attention naturally leads to connection. As we pay attention to language, for example, we see that language takes on meaning in connection to tradition, perception, experience,” explains Nadia Colburn.

WHY DO WE WRITE POETRY?

“What we take out of life is the luminous moment, which can be a bare branch against a morning sky so overcast it’s in whiteface, seen through a window that warps the view because the glass has begun to melt with age. Or it can be the face of a beautiful man seen in passing on a crowded street, because beauty is always passing, and you see it but it doesn’t see you. It’s the promise that beauty is possible and the threat that it’s only momentary: if someone doesn’t write it down it’s gone. The moment vanishes without a trace and then the person who experiences that moment vanishes and then there’s nothing. Except perhaps the poem, which can’t change anything,” says Reginald Shepherd 

IMMIGRANT I BODY

“This fragile sense of belonging

to a place, a view, a body

when we are the belly of the earth and the dust

of stars, the living hearts of flowers.”

The power of poetry lies in our ability to access our feelings and change them into words, something readable and enigmatic.

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