When I started writing, my reading strictly revolved around the novel genre, especially the high fantasy and scifi subgenre. It was in this shrine of imagination I discovered the words and worlds I compressed into my poetry until suddenly it wasn't enough. I felt as if I was locked out of the language of poetry, as if the poem wants to say something from my tongue but cannot because my tongue, like a child's, was yet to fully form, to weak to handle the new language of life.
To build myself, I began reading poems. At first, I found poems on the tweets of fellow poets and I saved the ones that caught my eyes. I began to see the beauty, the new ways of being and soon I began to hunger for more. I started searching for poets, mostly European, African, asian or Latin American and a few north American. I fell in love with Russian poets, japanese poets, Spanish poets, Greek poets, Arabic poets, Hindu poets— I didn't know there were so many poets to love and many were not in the canon I studied at the university which was mostly English as in England.
This reading has turned my writing on its head. Right now, I can barely recognize how different my writing has become. The only thing that remains constant in my poetry now is the darkness and maybe the metaphors which are my eternal love. Why am I saying all of these things here? Well it simple, I want us to share the poems and poets we are reading here.
In sharing the poems that are inspiring us, saving us, healing us, we are building not only a community where those who find the understanding of life and the why we are here in the reading of great poetry can share their treasure troves with each other, but also a place where we can grow together as poets who hope to write the poem that suffers inside us so the world too can understand what it is our bodies are trying to say.
This is not a contest. This is simply sharing. The rules are also simple:
- Drop an image of a poem you're reading or that you've read that has touched you based on a theme which I will drop every week.
- Do not drop a poem that doesn't fit into the theme mentioned in the week's post.
- Remember to add attribution to the poet and if possible the title of the collection or anthology in which the poem can be found.
- Only one comment containing the image of the poem and attribution is allowed. Do not post more than once.
- If you have a need to speak on how the poem makes you feel with regards to the theme, feel free to do so on your own blog post. I would love to read that too.
- There are no rewards besides my tiny upvote.
- Once the next post is made, the previous theme has expired. A new theme will be dropped seven days after the previous theme.
For this week, the theme is CITY. Here is my submission;
by Caki Wilkinson, Circles Where The Head Should Be, 2011. Winner 2010 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.
