Poetry
While I have always loved poetry from the very moment I found William Blake's The Divine Image at 15, it is a form of writing that I struggle with the most. Poetry is something that I've always had a love/hate relationship with and is often a form that I don't work in. However, lately, I have found some confidence in the form and have challenged myself to create more pieces from poetry.
Here are a few of my most recent pieces that show my progression as a poet, even if I still falter around the stanzas.
Academic Papers
This series of poems was inspired when my mother's diagnosis of dementia had progressed to the point that she needed to be placed in a care home. It explores the progression of the disease that steals memories from loved ones, creating a loss before their death.
While it is inspired by real events, the pieces are an amalgamatoin of fact and fiction, my mother is there in the lines but so are others who have experienced this disease. There are 11 poems and I use a range of different styles from prose poems to concrete poems to create a story of progression through the emotions around this diagnosis.
More of an experimental poem, this is a free verse poem within a prose poem. Throughout the poem, words are written in italics and those italics form a free verse poem when placed together.
The prose poem is one about stress and feeling overwhelmed. It focuses on the grind of the day to day that prevents us from pursuing our dreams.
However, the dreams still remain in the italics and allow us to hope and aspire to something more than just the drudgery of daily life.
Written during a writing exercise during class, we were instructed to choose five (5) words and create a poem for each word. My mind immediately went to emotions: Love, Joy, Rage, Sadness, and Peace.
The poems are free verse and prose poems and make up a series of 5 that tell the story of a relationship and the breakup of that relationship.
It was a fun activity and I loved having the opportunity to play with form a bit more in this series.
A short free verse poem that explores the loss of love and the emotions swirling around it. It focuses on the tactile experience of heartbreak through the imagery of fire and ice.
This was a fun exploration of form for me that came to me from some part of my brain that wanted to be heard. I'm not sure where the idea came from but it started with an image of billowing clouds and grew from there.
