I didn’t have a poetry plan when I began earnestly making posts to this site almost a year ago. Since then, I’ve been surprised to find myself taking steps to dedicate this site to the sometimes-controversial practice of writing poetry.

First years of poetry

Writing poems has been an occasional habit since some point in childhood. I began writing short stories and made a switch to poetry. I don’t remember what instigated that shift, but suppose that intriguing poems recalled from nursery rhymes and later from novels acted as prompts over time.

Either way, I’ve come to learn that this tendency to verse turns one potentially harmful habit (rumination) into another, more positive one that delivers to the writer something processable and, ultimately, actionable under appropriate means. I find myself at times nostalgically wishing that I’d been better attuned to this awareness—in better harmony with myself—first as a child in some way, and then as an adolescent. No doubt, a solid idea of poetry’s value could have been beneficial to me in the long run, and to me and others at the time.

An understanding of such value could have helped in processing emotion, alleviating pain, and understanding potential outcomes. Ultimately, such harmony of self-awareness (in a world that often didn’t understand) could have minimized reactionary experiences that would carry over into adulthood for a number of devastating years.

Regardless, writing poetry has been a positively, introspectively rewarding pattern throughout life that has brought me to this point on this day.

Poetry today

To take time for this . . . exercise . . . at days’ beginnings or ends: to dedicate that time to self, foremost—not as author but sorter, not in rumination or habit but in practice—has been of great personal reward. More, to find an effective community of like-mindedness in practice, their dedication to the potentials of poetry as an act of self care and community, has been bonus on top of my original intent and I’m grateful to be here with you.

Novel stories are created every day; many of them instrumental to needs among people. Those needed stories descend from an ordered processing of manageable bits of information often gleaned of coping and recovery, like any artistically motivated craft that hopes to touch heart and soul.

That a storyteller, or poet, could prompt such effect, perhaps in the form of one smile, mend one broken day (if only their own), or tap a well of tears in understanding, is the most broadly valuable aspect of such dedication to literary work, and why so many of us continue to plant our ideas on paper, trimming ineffective bits as much as possible.

Life's Poetic Essence

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