"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
- Robert Frost
Anyone who knows me, has met me, or who has read my personal statement, will know that I love poetry with such a whole part of my being. It's the first place that I ever found the beauty in heartache and the despair in love; it is the first words that made me crave a light in the darkness but also appreciate the protection darkness can offer.
My love has taken me down many different roads, from traditional page poetry to spoken word poetry to your modern day Instagram poetry. All of these seemingly different forms have one key thing in common, they are poetry, which means their intention is to encapsulate a feeling, emotion or experience. If you ask me, the best poems do all three of these.
Were you to ask me who I am, I would tell you to look at my poetry. Through rhyme, metaphor, simile, imagery and semantic fields I create a depiction of experiences that nobody else could create. No two people could ever write the same poem, even if they wrote about the same experience. There is something that I have found in the intrinsic nature of poetry, that results in your voice being influence by everywhere you've been, everything you've been through, and everyone you've known. My poetry shows who I am because it isn't trying to be something it's not. I've written about not being able to think straight enough to write, I've written about love, about goodbyes, about hope, about injustice. I've written calling cards to everyone you feels abandoned in this world, and I've written timelines of my destruction. No matter what I've written, it has always been poems that only I will ever be able to write.
My favourite thing about poetry, and why I have been able to write so much in so many ways, is that it doesn't have heavily enforced limits, but rather it is limitless. There are things that I haven't been able to understand until I wrote a poem about them, because it allows me to sift through my thoughts with intention. in order to organise them into some kind of chronology. Or otherwise, some kind of organised chaos.
Writing is something everyone does in their own way. While I've written a blog post about how I write poetry, which you can click here to read, there is no one set way to write. All you have to do is start. And sometimes, in my case, that means writing an entire poem in notes on my phone, or constantly being plagued by the same two lines that I have trouble expanding on for weeks, so instead I write them on top of every piece of paper I come in contact with hoping that it sparks some creativity inside of me.
Poetry is a way to mourn, it's also a way to fall in love. That love doesn't have to be with anyone else other than yourself. When I started to write poetry, I challenged myself to try and write a poem everyday for a week. I now have a notebook full of poems I wrote in 2018, compared to the year before when I didn't write poetry unless it was for a school contest. I fell in love with poetry because I fell in love, and I fall in love every time I write, with how it makes me feel. It's an outlet where I am in control of what I say and how I say it but it's also a place where I can work through experiences without facing them head on. Stars signify both lost souls and the life fueled by the stardust in each of us; storms indicate the greatest of enigmas; and a garden of roses suggests my hope. The figurative takes the place of the literal and allows the literal to be more bearable, therefore making it easier to deal with. That's the beauty of what I do, I take the unbearable and make it easier for myself to understand.
I'm not going to say that writing poetry is for everyone, I know that isn't true. But what I am trying to say is that it is incredibly important that everyone tries. Poetry used to be out of my comfort zone, and because of that I hates it. Now it's something I do in my spare time, I devote my passion towards it. Sometimes the most unexpected things are what lift us up in life. That is something that should never be ignored, and it's something we should all be open to, if only to cope with this crazy whirlwind that we call life.
So open yourself up to new experiences. They just might make this world a brighter place, or at least a little bit easier to cope with.
Your stage is waiting.
Hollie x
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