Rediscovering Poetry
I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about ebooks, publishing and writing fiction. While I love writing about those topics, there is one subject that I have neglected over the last year or so – poetry. During my college days I really dived into poetry in a big way, analyzing poems from the time of Shakespeare to contemporary poems written today. It took time to carefully read a poem over and over again, but the reward came in the form of an epiphany, one of those ‘Ah ha!’ moments when you finally get it from a poem finally understood.
My interest in poetry has been rekindled. A lot of it has to do with my chapbook project I’m currently working on. I pulled out some poems I wrote several years ago to include in my chapbook. They aren’t enough. I knew I’d need to write more poems if I wanted my little book to be complete.
I began sketching out ideas, writing a few lines here and there and before I knew it, I was once again engrossed in poetry. Of course, you can’t write poetry without reading it. So I began digging through the works of my two favorite poets: Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. I can identify with both poets on a personal level and I find their poems really powerful.
My favorite philosopher Martin Heidegger said that poetry opens up truth to man. On a deep level, I believe this true. However, this does not mean one needs to be a philosopher to enjoy and reap the rewards that comes from reading and/or writing poetry. A well-written poem can evoke the same emotions as a well-composed song, only in poetry, the words do all the work by acting as the instruments while a poem’s punctuation keeps the beat alive.
Maybe one day I’ll post some of my own poetic sketches here for all to read. It takes time to get to get that point because poetry requires one to be more vulnerable than with most other writing. Don’t worry, when I get to that point, you’ll be the first to know.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christianrevivalnetwork/ / CC BY 2.0
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