Poetry Rocks

In ways, that title feels like an oxymoron or at least a crude juxtaposition of words. I mean, poetry might most often be associated with glib, gliding, lyrical rhymes that form on a smile and maybe leave you with a sugar-saturated stomach ache.

In my experience, it’s not been that at all. Sure my earliest exposure was nursery rhymes like everyone else. Then it was lyrics, jingles, poems we had to memorize, forms we had to imitate. Then I endured poetry analysis and that painful feeling of always being wrong, having always missed some hidden something.

In my thirties, I finally had the breakthrough, and it came after losing battle after battle when encountering the work of e.e. cummings. Once I yielded to it, appreciated line breaks coming where they meant something, I had epiphanies rack my soul. I was shaken to my core.

Then I attended poetry readings and spoken word events!

Poetry Rocks!

Poetry can cut to the quick. It can plaster on a balm no friend’s consolation might muster. It can kick me in the balls more fiercely than any Jackass antics. AND it can make me say, ‘huh,’ like nothing other than the best lucid dreams.

Sometimes it can do all the above in a stanza…a line.

So when I say here that I’m writing a poem a day, I hope the poets reading this won’t just dismiss me as a hack. If nothing else, I hope they will realize that I have a meaningful and personal relationship with poetry.

That established, let me explain my poem-a-day practice. I am often derailed from my creative pursuits. Sometimes it’s just life getting in the way (hospital visits, flat tires, editing—and yes, I’ll probably always lump editing in with such things). Other times I just need a defibrillator to jolt me back to my creative best. I might get mired too much in my fiction/prose and just benefit from a good stretch of the synapses and syntax.

Nothing I’m pumping out in those bursts will change the world. That’s okay. None of that poetry will be capital-P poetry. Most all of it will likely always be considered ‘poetry’ by the critical world. But I’m sticking with it, because that wordplay works for me in many ways.

Let me know if you want me to go deeper, or if you have encounters of your own to share here.