on poems

friday 4 february 2011
turners tricksters

Anyone who's done any wandering around on my website knows already that poetry has become very tough for me, both reading it and writing it. In the summer of 2008, when the stealing of my animals was very recent, I was still able to deal with poetry for a number of months. But since the end of that year it has become a progressively more difficult thing to do.

I continue to cite other people's poems on my blogs, but I can't tell you how hard it is. To read poems is nearly as rough as writing them. Expression in a poem is very different from expression in prose, and that is poetry's chief value, its mode of expression. I still turn to that value, but it has become an effort and an ordeal that it never was in the 46 years before the theft of my animals, when I read and wrote poetry nearly every day. When poetry was as regular a part of my life as eating meals.

I wrote one poem over this past November and December. Not because I forced myself to the job, but simply because the first few lines came to me, and I didn't want to just let them go. Over a month or so, more lines came, two or three at a time. Slowly, reluctantly.

And then today, something a bit bigger than a few lines appeared in the brain. Appeared when I was out walking at 6 a.m. in the two-degree air, walking the steps I used to walk in the early mornings with my dogs when we lived beside the river. I have no idea how many people reading blogs are fond of poetry, but today's lines that showed up in my cold-walking brain are part of my blog-life now, and have no title beyond today's date: fourth february.
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read poems... Scealta liatha... shadowpoems...
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.