Writing poetry is honestly one of the best things Iâve started doing recently. It isnât even a conscious choice; whenever one of those moments comes along where Iâm feeling a profound mood or I just love how the sky looks and I want to memorize every detail of the scene, or when I pause on the hill on my way to the water and close my eyes and silently list all of the things I can smell or hear or feel â instead of letting the moment slip away, I open up a word document and start taking notes. Paragraph style, or just one long run-on sentence, not caring about whether any of it makes sense, just stringing together adjectives and colors and whatever feels right, to describe that moment, to describe the curve of the trees or the taste of the wind.
And when itâs a song that strikes that mood, I put it on repeat and just sink back and try to feel whatever image itâs conjuring up. Sometimes itâs just a color, or a memory, something that feels like it might just be the corner of a larger cloth, like Iâm reaching into the water and tugging and seeing what all comes up. And when Iâve exhausted one description, another comes up; and soon, Iâll find myself repeating ideas or twisting them into something new, applying them to another situation that I didnât realize was connected but now makes perfect sense.
And I think thatâs my favorite part: realizing midway through the poem (or towards the end, more like) what my body was trying to say, what emotion it had to get out but had no way of communicating other than through a couple of feelings and pictures. It can be exciting, when I understand what my subconscious was trying to tell me. Like it was tapping into the patterns of the universe, and it found something it really liked, and now that connection will help me understand life a little more clearly. Other times, it can be surprisingly intimate⌠when Iâm listening to a song in the library, and wondering why it makes me feel so pensive, and then by the time I finish tugging everything up I realize something about my childhood, and my nostalgia, and that great feeling of indescribable passion and fear and disillusionment and everything that I feel towards the world. It chokes up my throat and I have to stop there because I donât want to cry, at least not here, not now. Maybe one day Iâll have the courage to keep tugging, after Iâve let myself crumble into a sobbing, vulnerable mess; maybe after Iâve pulled myself through that storm, and emerged with damp eyes and a feeling of calm, Iâll be able to tug that all up into words too.
Anyway, writing poetry is one of those things that I thought was cliche but never imagined would be so cathartic, so meditative, so freeing. You should try it too. And donât overthink it â I barely realized that was what I was doing, until I stared down at the block of text and realized that yeah, those run-on sentences are kind of like stanzas, and yeah, those rich descriptions and those moods that I was just trying to convey are kind of poetic in their form. So just pick a feeling and go with it.
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
amandla
titsay
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
