Just recently, I have been popping a lot of rhyme. Poems have been and continue to spill out of me and you know, thats just fine and dandy. I enjoy poetry. I enjoy playing with words and sounds. Somehow, poetry gives us the flexibility to play and joke with words and structures without having to worry too much about whether the result is correct or not. There surely in no correct in poetry – no right and no wrong. Poetry just is and it either works for you or it doesn’t. It doesn’t even have to rhyme!
When I write a poem I usually start with just a feeling. Not an idea. There is no plot, no characters to develop, no story line. Just a feeling. Poetry is, or should be in my opinion, about feelings. Words become the tools of feeling and the words chosen somehow resonate those feelings like an orchestra of string instruments. Hopefully, the reader is then also able to feel the poem too.
Strangely enough, the feelings I use are often those of long distant memories from childhood. I have written about these feelings and memories but normally structured writing can’t get there. It can’t somehow transcribe the feeling nor color it the way that it should be colored. Poems can do that. They bring color and depth and wavelength to feelings.
To me, poetry is like art. It is visual and should speak to your heart. You either like it or you don’t. Quite honestly, I feel like an artist throwing paint around and having a super messy time with words on my canvas when writing a poem. And don’t ask me to edit it. I basically write it. Spurt out those feelings in lines of words on to the canvas and when its done, its done. Whether good, bad or indifferent, it is done. It exists and it is somehow complete if not perfect. In fact, feelings are strange amorphous things that can never be quiet grasped or communicated nor reproduced even by words and phrases. The poem is never a perfect representation of the feelings but more of an approximation of the color, hue and heat of that emotion.
Funnily enough, almost all of the poems I have written recently have hit the paper while listening to Blackfield. Somehow, their music reaches inside of me and plucks out those feelings, emotions and vague memories or other existences and realities. This track in particular, has been very productive for me.
So, I hope you enjoy the poems. I hope they play your strings too and you find an entire orchestra of feeling within your soul.