It’s so funny because I’ve been thinking a lot about my own poetry and where it comes from a lot lately in light of losing ideas stored on not one, but two laptops. I feel like I’ve been really searching for the reasons I want to write and the places I feel I really write from. Lately I’d say I’m trying environmental poetry and not the Raph Waldo kind, I think, but also I think I’m starting to uncover many places within myself where my poetry comes from.
#1. Misunderstandings, misconceptions, mistakes. I oftentimes find myself dwelling on these kinds of thoughts, the mis’s, a prefix which can mean anything from badly, wrongly, unfavorably, in a suspicious manner, opposite or lack of, or just not. I think there are many instances in life where I find a situation, a word, or space has taken on one or more of these characteristics whether I have started to stare at the grocery store ceiling long enough to become chilled by its warehouse attributes or someone I have admired for a long time has just said something I do not know why I cannot agree with. (wowwww I sound pretentious)
- My funny bone/ego. I think that I often write to make people laugh and maybe to seem like a comic who has something to say about the world. I often just like the boost. It’s nice to feel funny. I get much of my imagery from alternative comedy which often becomes uncomfortable for the sake of being uncomfortable and I think that says something in itself.
- Words. Last spring semester I fell in love with Sleeping With the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen and her word style, how the words stole sounds from each other how they played with each other with rhyme and rhythm with long and short with funny and grave. On the opposite end of the spectrum, when I decided to finally work up the courage to apply for a poetry workshop I was reading and rereading a poem by Charles Olsen and I found that his words were also striking, but in a much different way. His words seemed to come from nowhere but with purpose and every time I read I felt like I had discovered a new language. To summarize, I think collecting styles empowers me to explore my own style and what that means to me.
- A hairy past and present and ???. I do believe that everyone has their own struggles and I do believe that adversity motivates a need to understand and connect. This is where much writing comes from, especially for me.
- The human body is just so weird and I love to think of where I can put it, how I can contort it, where does it go?
- People watching.
- Women, because women are so cool and there needs to be more and more writing on them. I also feel as a woman I have struggled with my sexuality and how that is critiqued because I am a woman.
- My own struggles with gender, the stereotypes, the binary.
- I wasn’t going to add this, but probably from the copious amounts of television I watch, political, comedic, dramatic, etc.
<3 Sorry I am so late to the game <3