Been meaning to get this to you poets (this means everyone). Happy Sunday! Writing poems can be a way of pinning down a dream (almost); capturing a moment, a memory, a happening; and, at the same time, it’s a way of sorting out your thoughts and feelings. Sometimes the words tell you what you didn’t know you knew. Lillian Morrison Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper will always listen. Also, the more you write, the paper will begin to speak back and allow you to discover new parts of your own life and other lives and feel how things connect. Poets are explorers, pilgrims. Most of the poets I know are not the least bit frilly. Poets are also regular people who live down the block and do simple things like wash clothes and stir soup. Sometimes students ask, “Are you famous?”, as if fame is what would make a poet happy. I prefer the idea of being invisible, traveling through the world lightly, seeing and remembering as much as I can. Naomi Shihab Nye I was afraid of writing poetry for the longest time because I wasn’t any good at rhyming, and I thought poetry had to be complicated and very, very deep. I didn’t know that the very way I looked at things was poetry. I mean, I notice things other people don’t and usually it has something to do with the way one very small thing means so much. I once met a boy who had read my book of poems about growing up in Beaver, West Virginia (Waiting to Waltz…a Childhood) and he said to me, “I know just what you mean about Todd’s Hardware Store. Every time I walk into Western Auto Store in this little town I live in…” And he proceeded to describe to me what it was about the Western Auto Store that hit him the way a good sunset hits you and I thought to myself, This boy’s a poet. I believe he was born with that way of looking at things, as I was, and even if he never writes one single line of poetry, he’ll always be a poet. And the people around him will mutter about how intense he can get sometimes and his teachers will complain about how he never pays attention and people will wonder why he can’t just lighten up and watch “The Cosby Show” with them. What they don’t understand is that he’s seeing all those small meaningful things they’re missing, and it sucks away so much of your soul and energy when you’re trying to make sense of what you’re seeing with a poet’s heart. They will want him to be a regular Joe and he will never be able to be that, and because of it he will feel lonelier than most people- even though he may be a popular boy- and he will wonder why he can’t live a normal life like everyone else. He will wonder why he hurts so much sometimes. Why he feels so different from everybody else who’s just fitting right in to all the systems: everybody else who’s getting the gold stars at school, or marrying and settling down into a nice job in a nice town and finding a nice wife and having four nice kids and keeping a nice lawn and a nice clean car. He will too often feel like a failure, and he will too often never pick up a pen and try to get published because he doesn’t know what a good poet he is since there’s no test to tell him so. A lot of people think they can write poetry, and many do, because they can figure out how to line up the words or make certain sounds rhyme, or just imitate the other poets they’ve read. But this boy, he’s the real poet, because when he tries to put on paper what he’s seen in his heart, he will believe deep down there are no good words for it, no words can do it, and at that moment he will have begun to write poetry. Cynthia Rylant All exerpts were taken from The Place my Words were Looking For Selected by Paul B. Janeczko
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 21:08:09 +0000
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