Sunday, April 29, 2007

No Poetry!

My career in poetry has been very intermittent. I only started dabbling in it for the first time towards the end of my undergraduate days, and my approach was very jokey. I lapsed for a while, starting up again when I was teaching high school, where I had the advantage of spending a lot of time reading poetry (that's when the haiku fetish began). Then I had quite a long fallow period, until the great doomed love affair with 'The Evil One' gave me something to write about: I had an intense period of productivity that year, but then fell out of the writing habit once again. It was the second great (failed!) love affair of my life last year that started me off again - but this time, for some reason, I have kept going.

Anyway, I haven't posted one of my pomes for a little while now, so here's one of the older ones I've recently rediscovered. Poetry did prove an effective aid in wooing both of my lost loves; but with The Evil One, I was worried that I might be overdoing it, I imagined that she might one day complain that it was an illegitimate tactic, too potent a means of manipulation. Hence.....




No poetry!


"No poetry!" you'll say.
"Poems are unfair."

And what is poetry anyway?
The desire to say things better
Because we feel them deeper -
They call that poetry.

"No poetry! Poems are unfair."

But the unfairness seems to me
That you can be a poem
While I can only try to write one.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When I started to read this blog of yours about Poetry, I thought someone who writes well cannot not write poetry unless he/she has never been in contact with love or pain -usually in that order.
Then I got to the next bit. So I was right, poetry and many other forms of art just feed on the emotions related to "love", I think.
Regards, Negin