Saturday, June 9, 2007

Poetry!

If you've hung out here very long, you may recall that I had the somewhat painful discovery in December that I need to be more intentional about bringing beauty into my life. You may also remember that I used to write poetry pretty prolifically, but had them evaporate when I was prescribed atypical antipsychotics for bipolar disorder, and I mourned this loss until very recently.

So in the last couple of months, I've been reading a lot of poetry. I used to have a great deal of trouble reading poetry. I tend to devour reading material, reading very quickly, which doesn't lend itself to the pace and reflectiveness needed for poems. I have fallen in love with Rilke and Heine, and desperately want to find some good English translations of Veronica Micle. My first love is, of course, Emily Dickinson, but I find myself very fond of the Romantics in general.

I found this book to be absolutely incredible as a taste of all kinds of wonderful poetry. Of course, I've always been fond of Garrison Keillor anyway. I'd love to go to sleep to the sound of his voice reading me poems.

The most wonderful side effect of all of this is that I find myself writing poetry again. Even better, the poems are starting to whisper themselves in my heart and head as they used to, to seduce me until I put them to paper. I can't tell you how wonderful and exciting this is for me. I had so missed the poems that would come to me, from the smallest images or the most mundane experiences. I've shared a couple here, and I'll share more, but for now, I find myself re-learning the craft and rediscovering places within myself that I'm not quite ready to reveal. But soon. Soon, there will be more.

Thanks be to God!

Update: A few hours after writing this, I took a chance. I sent in the first submission for publication that I've sent since 1997. It was a set of four poems, and I sent them to Strong Verse, which is published by an author I have tremendous respect and admiration for. The poems in the current issue are breathtaking, and I feel just a bit audacious submitting to this zine. But in a couple months, we'll see how it goes. It is great to have put something out there again, though. Yay for me! :-)