Tag: poetry

Musings

[Blog] Sometimes, it’s just gotta be poetry

Faith Hakimian

Hey, all. Despite my quietness here, including a skipped post last week, I’ve still been writing. Slowly, but writing nonetheless. And in true form, I’ve been having trouble sticking to one project. In a first, though, I haven’t been jumping from one novel/short story project to the next, but rather I found myself doing my best to put together what amounts to an epic poem.

You see, as often happens, I got a new idea. But as not so often happens, this one wouldn’t fit with prose. At all. Just flat out refused. So, in between yelling at Tanner and Miranda and trying to get them to do what I want them to do– a losing proposition at the best of times– I’m trying to remember how to write poetry, complete with meter and rhyme schemes and a whole lot more structure than I usually need to worry about. And you know what? It’s really fun.

Musings

[Blog] On Poetry

Faith Hakimian

For someone who majored in English Lit in college, I’ve always had a funny relationship with poetry. Specifically, and particularly in the past, I’ve loved the idea of it and certain turns of phrase or images will stick with me and lodge in my soul or my brain, but I would often feel like I didn’t “get” the entire poem, and that would drive me nuts. I wanted to completely understand each poem I read, and it bothered me when I didn’t.

Or, in other words, I rather missed the point.

But this past week, while hanging out with a couple of friends, we started reading poems out loud from various collections by poets including Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, I think finally began to understand. Or rather, I began to understand that it’s okay to not understand, and in fact that might be a large part of the beauty of poetry.

Maybe it was because I was with dear friends. Maybe it was because we were reading them to each other in a non-academic setting, with no grade to earn or paper to write. Maybe it was because I’m a few years older and a little more comfortable with the idea that I don’t, that I can’t know everything. I’ll likely never know for sure.

What I do know is that I have a far greater appreciation than I’ve had in the past, and I look forward to reading much more poetry in the future.