Being seen and heard.

I’ve just had 2 short poems accepted by http://nutshellsandnuggets.tumblr.com a ‘blogzine’ (could there be an uglier word?) It’s always a buzz to get work accepted. I’d like to be able to say I write poetry because I love to and don’t care if it finds approval elsewhere, but I can’t say that honestly. The process of any artist isn’t complete until someone else has viewed it, in my opinion. Why do any of us write stories, poems, paint, sculpt, design weird buildings, knit Christmas pullovers, etc. etc? I think it’s to unite us to the rest of the human race, to communicate and to be heard. What could be worse than semaphoring in a fog. To be heard and seen - maybe to shock, or provoke, but anyway to get a reaction, affirmation that we are existing.

I’ve probably posted the following before but what I said then still holds:

Why I write.

I am obsessed with the thought of what it must be like to have 360’ vision, something we humans are quite incapable of, the nearest equivalent being the view from a very high place, or a plane, but that isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly as much as a poet hopes to express. A good poem (and I don’t consider my own to be in this category) goes above, below, and beyond, is global, transpersonal, cosmic, transcendent. A spiritual 5th dimension that has nothing to do with physics. That’s what the poet hopes to create and sometimes does, making it look effortless.

A poem should be the distillation of an experience or thought, the physical event mattering rather less than the effect the poem has on the psyche of the reader, which should go far beyond the words themselves. Words are the shorthand of the higher thought processes (someone else said that, not me). They are also the springboards into those higher processes.

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Other opinions on the writing of poetry, the why’s and the wherefores.

 Robert Graves likened a finished poem to a round tower, from which no stone can be added and none taken away.  

Why am I writing? (taken from an article in ‘New Poets Press.)

  ‘This is the heart of the matter.  If you're writing to become
famous or immortal, you can save yourself a lot of time, effort,
frustration and disappointment by stopping now.   There are
literally thousands of poets alive today, probably hundreds of
thousands...now, name three famous poets still alive.  If you
were able to do that, name ten.  Very few poets can do so, a
few published poets can name perhaps half a dozen, but nearly
all could name over a dozen famous poets that are no longer
alive.  You don't have to be dead to be famous, but the best
measure of greatness is your ability to last and be appreciated
by those still living.’