Discussion → Pull at your own sweater
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Being a poet is the hardest thing I've ever encountered. All poets fear that they'll end up like poor Emily Dickinson--fought over and unable to defend herself. No one wants to be judged by a pile of poems found left in a drawer. The really hard part is to remain honest to what you are actually feeling, to present it that way without cheating or resorting to learned tricks of any kind. I just want to be an original poemmaker. It takes a long time to unlearn the assumptions of generations. But for poets you either will or you'll die trying to make something beautiful and pure out of whatever the moment gives you. The trouble is that keeps shifting like a sky full of stars.If you look away for a second everything vanishes, and you'll have to craft the truth out of memory--ambiguous at best, so that you have no real choice but to live the poem out as it goes on and you with it.If you are lucky you walk in grace for a rare moment. Your poet pal, Darryl P.
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Beautifully said. I can relate and ponder the part about trying to make something from whatever the moment gives you and relying on memory. I bounce from poetry to creative non-fiction to sometimes fiction, all somehow born from memory of one kind or another. They are all linked, and sometimes I get lost in those stars, the infinite spiral of light that surrounds us, but if I focus on one, it threatens to fall, become a shooting star surrendering to darkness - oblivion. At other times, something starts to work, the words come together like a constellation and instead of words like stars we have words like stars that turn into bears and hunters and heroes in our sky.
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poems and poetics
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