If you happened to read the article the previous Monday, then you can guess what today’s tip is about: Pouring your passion for life into your poetry. What do you stand for? What makes you rant and rave at the sky? What makes you joyous beyond imagining? At times, we take for granted that poetry is just another form of communication or art but then there are times that an event in our personal lives or in our country’s lives shakes us to the core. This week, write a poem that preaches, teaches, or both. Dare yourself to new heights and new fevered language.
Good luck to all who try it, please drop in again next week…
4 comments:
I think passion is so important in poetry and I find it sad that it seems to be 'fashionable' to drain poetry of all passion and indeed all real emotion.
I completely agree about pouring one's passion into one's poetry.
Yet in those styles of poetry that dominate these days, which are mostly intellectual and passionless styles, passion is quite dismissed. A lot of my own recent poetry has been dismissed out of hand, precisely because it's passionate. I've always written that way. I doubt I will stop–especially for the mandarins of fashion, who would have us all be pale and ironically distant, if they had their way.
I think as I grow older this is the thing I find the hardest. I have a notebook beside me and there are about sixteen or seventeen poems scribbled in it and I think I’ll be lucky if one or maybe two makes it into my big red folder. If I was twenty they’d all be in there already and I’d been feeling pretty pleased with myself. Nowadays I’m not content simply to write a poem, it needs to be a poem that means something. The trouble is I’ve already tackled all the big issues, the things that really got under my skin and, seriously, what more could I possibly have to say about truth? This is not something that only affects my writing and I suspect it’s just a symptom of growing older (nothing matters like it did when I was twenty) but it does make me regret not writing more when I was younger.
Thank you all for your comments! I also feel that poetry has been stripped down in many places I seek for poetic intrigue so I hope more passion makes it into more journals and published books.
Jim, I can understand where you are coming from. Once you feel you've said all you can it is hard difficult to find new ways to say it or find new passions.
I wish you all passionate writing whether it is new or renewed.
Sincerely,
Paula
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