Poetry

An Introduction

ee cummings

It seems like I have been writing poetry all my life. When I was a preteen, my poems were full of anxiety and darkness as I tried to sort through all the my life. In high school, the poetry was all about boys and Crohn's--the boys were unrequited and the Crohn's was active, both making me miserable. It was in high school that I discovered the poetry of ee cummings because of a research paper I wrote on him. He took poems and made physical art out them, using the white space on the page as part of his raw material. "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond" is my all-time favorite poem. I also had a very encouraging teacher my junior year, Mrs. Barnes, who inspired me to write. She told me I had talent and every time I sit down to write, I remember her.

Amy Clampitt

In college the first time, I took a creative poetry writing class and it was awesome. My teacher introduced me to Amy Clampitt, who aside from having a great first name, wrote about the sea and nature. "Beach Glass" became a favorite poem. I wrote my first grown-up poems in that class.

When I met my husband, falling in love inspired bunches of sappy poems. I believed most fully then in destiny and the stars aligning, and a lot of the poems were about those things in the context of finding love. Some of them are beautiful but most are overly sentimental.

I've continued to write over the years when the inspiration struck--a line would come into my head and stay until I purged it by writing down what it demanded. And now, in college the second time, even when I have an assignment to write, the line or lines will come to me. Most of the time they flow out of me and then I have to make sense of them by arranging them properly on the paper. It's a process that is fun to me, and sometimes frustrating, and in the end, I feel complete. And the poem is as well.

In this blog, I am going to post some of my poetry. All my poems are personal to me, even the ones I've had to write for classes. They are a function of my life, facets of the most inner me, truly my own. I hope you enjoy them.