“How could I ever forsake poetry? It was poetry that saved me.”
LJavenkoski
Somewhere in the piles of paper I have written on, I have my first poem I wrote when I was 8. It was about a cat, I think. I began writing in earnest when I was about 12 years old. It was the only way I felt I could truly express myself. Colors, feelings, objects, songs, people, all mingled together. I liked the way the words grew together in my head. Sometimes they would just come to me out of the blue, and they would fit perfectly in the empty spots, not because of rhyming, but because of rhythm. I felt like something a little magical was happening when my pen would stop and I would think “There’s the word. That’s done.” Most of my work is broken up into decades of my life, so it only makes sense that I would start at the beginning as I share them. Roots starts in 1990, the year before I graduated from high school. A lot had already happened in my life by then….Growth and Flowers will come later. I’m starting as close to the beginning as I can get. Go to the top of this page and click on There’s poetry in here…Roots.
The key to reading and enjoying poetry is to understand that you might not understand it.
You might not even enjoy it.
But if you feel something, well that’s the golden moment! You have “gotten” the point of a poem even though it might not feel like it. You must open your mind and stop trying to figure out what my word salad tastes like. Put your own thoughts and words to the feeling it provokes and go with that! All I really want to do is plant the thought that maybe there is more that brings us together than pulls us apart.