Regarding my own relationship with poetry.

I started writing poetry because all the people I thought were cool. People I knew. People I wanted to know. People I admired but would never know. Living people. Dead people.

People.

All these people thought poets were cool and I thought writing poetry would make them think I was cool too.

It was terrible. It did get me laid a couple times, and that was okay, but it was terrible. I knew it was terrible and it wasn’t just the critical inner chorus speaking to me. It was just plain bad.

Then sometimes I wrote fragmented thoughts that kind of reflected the way words and phrases bounce around in my head. They weren’t fragmented and oddly spaced on purpose. They just represented the way a thought might echo in the vast space between my brain and my tongue. I wrote them down the way I would speak them to myself.

Every so often someone would read these fragmented ideas and they assumed I was trying to write poetry and told me it was cool. No rhyme. No meter. No structure. Just my brain farts on paper.

They were terrible too.

I couldn’t write a sonnet with a gun at my head, even if someone else had their finger on the trigger.

Funny shit.

(note: the wordpress format bores me. I think I’m going back to Glossophagia. I like the way it rolls out and unfolds on the page like an endless scroll. )