Today on the radio I heard some poets talking about poetry. Poetry, they said, is musical words. It is words as words. It is making. It is paying attention. It is allowing the words to carry the message, to be the message. "When I was young," one of them said, "I wrote poetry. Now I am a poet. There is a distinction between a person who writes poems and a poet. One is writing his feelings, the other is trying to make something."
Like anything, I think it depends on how you look at it, where you stand, where you want to go.
I guess I would be closer to a person who writes poetry.
SUCCESS
Hey! I made rice!
And I wrote a poem!
And I fended off thoughts
that threatened to hem
me in!
Spectacular
star-studded success,
never before seen!
Tonight there'll be dancing
and song:
hymns to the stars.
Maybe a drawing
to honor the heady events
of today!
DIRTY POETRY
written on the edge
of the sink
next to the compost
and old coffee grounds
in one hand a pen
in the other
a chicken leg
ORDER
There is a dance to be done around the apartment.
There is an order to things.
Whether it's this thing, or that
or just a small corner
ready to be ordered and swept.
I will keep to that order.
I will follow that order,
And sweep, and be swept.
Ahh, I'm so happy for this distinction. I have only had bad experiences with poets but perhaps they were people that just wrote poems and not really poets! I did not have bad experiences with the poems themselves. As long as the poet was not around. The poetry world is hard for me to understand. But, I love your poems.
ReplyDeleteGosh, yes, Marla, I think I know what you mean. The world of poetry (and poets) can be hard to understand. One thing that I really liked about the show (which I've now linked from the first few words of my post) is that they all said what I feel to be true: the way poetry has been taught has been alienating and exclusionary. But in fact poetry is in all of us (well they didn't say that, exactly, but they said that all you have to do with a poem is love it; open yourself up to it; soak it in). ..and thank you :)
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