in which i talk about

I spontaneously started a poetry journal a few months ago. It's where I keep poems that sing to my soul. This way, I'll never lose track of them-- they're always less than a moment away. By dint of this little journal, I'm always near beautiful words. Words designed to spark emotion: happiness, anger, longing, fulfillment. Within a few hundred unassuming pages, there are enough thoughts and meaning and hope to fill the world.

a little peak:

The front cover. I should of gotten some beautiful
hardcover journal that would last a long while
through wear and tear, but this one is cute, at least :)

a view of the pages

two poems side by side

One of my favorite poems :)

close-up view

There's something about this journal that makes me happy.

Ever since I discovered that I could stand, liked, loved, can't live without poetry, I've been diving headfirst into a world I didn't even know existed six months ago. Miraculously, I haven't drowned yet. I'm swimming along, immersing myself on the words penned by the likes of Plath and e.e. cummings and Ginsberg.

Even though I'm so new to reading poetry, I'm in love. How can I not be? When there is such complete soul in just a few lines. When my heart skips a beat when I find a poem that is great. When I feel what the poet feels and it's like literary giants are speaking to me or to themselves or to everyone about what they've experienced.

It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful that I feel like I can't even understand how much beauty is out there waiting for me. That I won't ever be able to read it all in one lifetime or several lifetimes.

I'm wishing now though--after paying a visit to my local bookstore that only stocks around ten different poets on two, tiny little shelves; after perusing a poetry forum in which the number one topic was "is poetry becoming extinct?"; after realizing I didn't know a single person in real life that reads poetry for fun--that there was more I could do. Go around and knock on people's doors; leave my favorite poems everywhere for people to find; sit down next to a stranger and ask, "have you ever read a poem that sang to your soul? Because I have."

I want to tell the whole world to go out and read poetry. I want to show you that poetry is something wonderful. Because now that I've realized it I want you to realize it too. I don't want to hog all the beautiful words and poems and sayings, I want you to read them too.

But wait, you think: I hate/dislike/don't understand/rather not/ nothankyou/not now please/ poetry is just not for me.

Let me tell you something: I've been there before, too. I used to avoid poetry, complain about analyzing it, reading it, seeing it. I was exposed to nothing but musty old poems that spoke confusingly of O' and thou and art. Then I read a book of poetry by Atwood and it changed--

everything.

Poetry can't be contained or classified properly: there's too many variations, forms. I found that I liked contemporary, lyrical poetry the best, but could do well without most written before the 1800s. Poetry is basically emotion in words. And there is no way that you haven't felt emotion, that a poet hasn't put that exact feeling down somewhere for you to read. Poetry tells you that you are not alone. That we aren't.

So I guarantee you: there's a poem out there, especially written for you. About you, even.

You just have to go looking for it. We all do.

***

And I just want to post a poem that I particularly love. I think this is the one that made me realize I could love poetry.

Pre-Amphibian by Margaret Atwood

Again so I subside
nudged by the softening
driftwood of your body
tangle on you like a water-
weed caught
on a submerged treelimb

with sleep like a swamp
growing, closing around me
sending its tendrils through the brown
sediments of darkness
where we transmuted are
part of this warm rotting
of vegetable flesh
this quiet spawning of roots

released
from the lucidities of day
when you are something I can
trace a line around, with eyes
cut shapes
from air, the element
where we
must calculate according to
solidities

but here I blur
into you our breathing sinking
to green millenniums
and sluggish in our blood
all ancestors
are warm fish moving

The earth
shifts, bringing
the moment before focus, when
these tides recede; and we
see each other through the
hardening scales of waking

stranded, astounded
in a drying world
we flounder, the air
ungainly in our new lungs
with sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning

***

And I invite you to do the same thing in the comments. Post poems, name poets you love, talk about poetry, whether you've only read one poem in your life willingly or if you have a bookshelf full of poetry.

And maybe, just maybe, you can fit a poem or two or a hundred more into your life.