Quote:So I’m saying two things: First, I’m asking how much do others here behave in their life in relation to whatever relationship they have with their poetry (and the poetry of others:poetry doesn't affect or have any significant effect on my life. i take life as it comes. poetry never helped me pay a bill or jump a hurdle, it never wiped away a pain or allayed a fear; other than i enjoy it if it's a poem and them if it's a poet. i'm one of those self centred bastards whose psychological circles consists of family and few friends. after that i don't really give a toss. that does contradict me starting a poetry forum i know but loving poetry and having it affect ones life aren't the same thing. i love poetry i love writing, i love them the same way i loved fishing. other peoples poetry is something i enjoy, again, it doesn't affect me apart from getting lost for the briefest of moments when i read a good or moving one. it doesn't happen too often.
Quote:Are you more likely to start out writing a poem for the sake of practicing the craft, or to advance and better express themes of importance than run through your life?
i never write a poem to better express a theme or anything else of importance in my life. though that may be the outcome. I write because i enjoy writing, i wish i could be great but that's an aspiration most people have about a multitude of things. i sometimes start off writing (if it's a form) with the hope of improvement but that side of it is irrelevant; my aim is to write a good poem. to make people feel the words i wrote. while some of me will be in the poem, it's mainly my imagination manipulating my experiences into a new story. i have no need to splash myself over the page. though i have done so on the odd occasion
. i am not my poetry and it is not me. it's aspect of me but not I of it.every time i write a poem whether i'm challenging myself with a sonnet or other type of form or even free verse, i want to write the best poem i can, i want to express what i want to express in the best possible way. i never put my soul into a poem though sometimes if i'm lucky, it may sneak out and wipe its feet on the carpet of my words.
i don't try and give form to reality i hope i create a reality (whose reality i don't care) that others can enter and understand. if they can't understand, then what's the fuckin point?
very often my poems are of great themes of my life's importance but only in as much as they make you smile. my pain and sufferings that i have sometimes wrote about were never important life themes, nor were the happy times. nothing i write about is, it's just writing. I look back on my my life sometimes and inwardly smile., amazed at myself and how i got here. but it was never important, it was just life. once you've rested in the arms of someone you love and told them good bye, nothing is or ever was that important. not poetry, not sex, not money...okay maybe the sex thing is a stretch; but it isn't, if anything, life is the real poem, the real poetry and when we write or speak or paint pictures to depict it, we only dilute the poem. much better to create new life in new poetry i think. and like a dash of Tabasco sauce in a chille, add just a small amount of ourselves for the purpose of taste.