writing about poetry

June 30, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i can feel you
just past my fingertips
lightly guiding my time
here

and i wonder if you
hear me when
i talk to
you

~~~

language
is a slippery slope
a slow burn to
bonfire blaze
flames
licking the sides
of a place
you once called
home

language
and manipulation of it
is spending years
decades even
trying to find
the perfect word or phrase
for every situation/
meaning/
feeling
until you realize
language will never be enough
so you just do what you gotta
until the day when something
comes close enough
that it gives you
a shadow of
that feeling

language
is my art form
and when i’ve done it right
it paints pictures without a canvas,
tells stories sans narratives,
brings others into a close embrace
without ever
getting
near

and for someone who despises words
and their limitations
as much as i do,
i sure hold language dear.

~~~

is it time?
time to prose it up
again?

my fingers now type
automatically
in stanzas
(could i even go back
to straight narrative
if i tried?)

these poems might not be
exactly
what i’m trying to say,
but damn is it closer than any
‘stream of consciousness’
over-writing
will get me.

June 14, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

poetry has been my solace
for so long;
a private morning activity
to get my brain a-moving,
a way to express myself
when the words of prose
just seem to go
on and on and on and on
and still say nothing close to what i wanted,
but if i try to make poetry
an actual ‘hustle’/
a way to make money/
a full part of my identity
(as opposed to this quiet, nearly secret
part of me),
will it lose its magic?

~~~

that book,
that book with all the poetry
and science,
that book
which inspired me
to look at the world around me
and find inspiration
from the birds
and the stars
and the emotions
flowing through us all,
that book
which i finished
but is still on my mind
one zine
and one other book started
later,
that book
called Figuring

i think you should read it, too.

~~~

i’ve started fudging
words
and concepts
and stories
to fit the narrative
i’ve established
here

and i can’t tell if that’s a good thing

or not…

June 8, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i’ve been reading a book
about great poet-scientists
of the last few centuries,
and within these last few chapters of the book
the author (and voices from the past)
have assessed
that the greatest authors–
the greatest poets
are ones
who are
open
and honest
with their
emotion

and i think i am not yet there.

my poetry is very head-y.
most poems appear in my head
as something like
‘i think’
not at all
‘i feel’

and maybe that is my access to my emotions
[head to heart to body]
and, although i’d like to get there someday,
i really don’t think i am quite there
yet

even my depression
is very thought-based;
a reaction to an over-thinking mind
that won’t shut up about
all the pains and sufferings in the world
and how i could do something about it
if only i were as powerful as i
thought myself to be

so i’m not yet there
emotionally
in my poetry,
but someday
i may be

and when that happens,
y’all had better look out
(because i’ve had so much practice
with these mind-based poems of mine,
my emotion-based art will be
so great)

…(or, watch, it’ll read
like a three-
year-old
wrote it)
(but that’ll be ok
because it will be mine.
and it will
it will
it will be
honest)

June 6, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

once again
i am stuck
pondering
what in the world
i’d thought of
to write
last night
when this morning
my brain
doesn’t seem to light
up
with any words
or concepts
or phrases
just stages
of grief
over lost
concepts

May 20, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i wonder if poets of yore
ever practiced writing
with mundane daily tasks.
i know they wrote of the very human
feeling of falling in love,
but were there ever any poems of
getting a bit of poppyseed stuck in their teeth,
or that feeling of falling right when you’re about to
lose consciousness to go to asleep?
there were poems with storms as metaphors,
analogies,
but were there ever poems where storms were simply storms
and they enjoyed in the moment,
and wrote in the after
of feeling the thunder
shake
and quake
the whole house?
i feel as though my poetry hits a spot
that hasn’t necessarily been hit
that hard
yet;
the mundanity of human existence.
and i can’t be the first person
to put prose emotions into poetry,
but i do wonder if the greats
of late
or long
ago
ever did what i’m doing
it just wasn’t as accepted
or expected
then.

May 11, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

poetry
is coming
[and going]
this morning

nothing sticking around long enough
to become a full fledged poem
but damn, are my tried and true topics
flinging themselves towards my brain
making me start
multiple
pieces
just to get bored and toss them aside
(or get distracted by other things
and totally lose my stride)

so

poetry
this morning
is coming
and it’s going

and i’m just a vessel
half finished poems
can flow through
[maybe to you]

May 3, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

it is
very
hard to concentrate this morning

and i don’t know if it’s from
the stress of last night
or
the vividness of the dreams
or
the sadness of this morning
or
the lack of coffee in my bloodstream
or what

but

it is
very
extremely
extraordinarily
bizarrely
quite
hard to concentrate this morning.

~~~

i feel like i’m getting a better handle
on what makes my poetry
my poetry

(but i really have
absolutely
no idea
still
about what makes any poetry
‘good poetry’)

~~~

i would like to write
another
slam poem;
start a flow
and just go,
balance out the rhythm and rhyme
with internal structure,
alliteration,
and find
the transitions,
the cues,
from one section
to anther,
playing with words
and meaning
and framing
the repeating
as metaphor
as a tool
as a lock to turn the key
and find out something new
about me,
about life,
about our home planet earth,
and our collective strife
to stay alive
when all we want
is eternal sleep
(not necessarily because
death is the answer we’re looking for,
but because all these
isms
and power structures
and so-ingrained made up concepts
keep us so wide awake
that sleep seems a necessity
we never get to get
[when was the last time you had
an actual
honest to goodness
no stress
very good
night’s sleep?]

so i guess
that’s what this poem’s about:
the collective trauma
that is
white supremacy/capitalism/america
and how the one thing
that could give us
the fight
we need
to dismantle it
is the the thing
it keeps us
from doing
every
single
night.

(and are my daytime naps
my making up
for this lack,
or is that just a symptom
of the depression
my awareness
of these systems
gives me?)
((or is that a subject
for another poem
for another day?))

April 29, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

so much poetry
about tired/sleepiness
about writing poetry
about grief and grieving

but where’s the poetry for me?
where’s the poetry where i actually wake up?
where’s the poetry where i analyze and create new forms/
new words/
new kinds of poetry?
where’s the poetry where i feel
(at least a little)
more healed after writing it?

where’s the poetry where i have a sense of accomplishment
post-writing
rather than a sense of
‘well, i guess that’s ok enough to stick on the poetry blog’?

where’s my big/epic poem?

April 15, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i have so much to say
(otherwise, how would i write a poem
a day
for a whole damn year?)

but so much of my time is spent
figuring out
in words
what exactly i’d like to say
and then
overthinking
how someone might
misconstrue my sentences
so i nitpick
and pick out
word
by word
by punctuation
by phrasing
adding extra notes
to prevent
misunderstanding
even though i understand
not everyone understands
where i’m coming from
and not everyone wants to
truly
listen
and not everyone
will read my words
so carefully
delicately
chosen
and not everyone
has the same associations
with words
and things
as i do
but i still
hover
over my buffet of words
hoping to make art
out of language
hoping to create meaning
where once there was nothing
but i spend so much time
figuring out how to say things
that sometimes i forget
what i was trying to say
in the first place.

March 28, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i really don’t know what i’m doing.
my only post-secondary education
in poetry
was over a decade ago
and i can’t really remember
anything i learned
(granted, that’s probably from
all the trauma/trauma responses
i was experiencing
at the time),
but i digress…

i feel like my skills
with words
would improve
if i could just
Remember
those words.
i often know exactly what i want to say,
and that there is a word
that’s perfect,
but i can’t for the life of me
remember it.
or i know what to say
and i also suspect
there’s an even better word
that would fit the scheme/
rhyme/alliteration/pattern
better than what i have down already
and the harder i try to think
the better i understand
all those analogies
of holding sand
in tightly grasped hands
the desperation
erases
all sense of
every word
i’ve ever known.

so that’s why my poetry
is a little
imperfectionistic,
a little
‘flying by the seat of my pants’,
a little
self-aware/meta/laughing at my own poems,
because otherwise
the grasp would be even tighter
and the only remaining
grain
of sand
would be that of my name

(and even that
i don’t always remember
right away)