Redstorm: Poetry

My poetry is the story of my love affair with words. I was writing stories from the time I learned the alphabet--they were an experiment, of sorts, of wondering what it was like to live a different life. And so I created other lives, and the characters became my real friends, incarnated in paper and ink rather than flesh and blood.

It wasn't until I was a teen that I began to dabble in poetry. Music is a huge inspiration for me in writing, and music is what originally turned me to poetry. During my teenage angst years--those years where everything is tragically romantic, or romantically tragic--I heard a song (THE song) that made me stop in my tracks and say, "Those are my words in his voice. Those are my words in his song."

And then that was it-I knew that words would forever be the love of my life.

My graduate poetry class described the art of poetry as " a concentrated, constructed, concise, and interactive art form: It attempts to convey the human condition briefly in carefully constructed lines, stanzas and forms; with precise language and evocative images; with music created by sound and rhythm." I like to think that my heart is the emotion and my mind is what creates the words to express those emotions. I write poetry more when I'm feeling particularly emotionally unsure or unstable. Those moments when the heart physically hurts because it cannot contain the emotion inside it seem to be the best times for me to write a poem. It doesn't have to be my own pain. My poems are like a shower of sudden emotion-if only I can get them out and find them a new place on the page, then I can move on.

"Poetry is life expressed in its eternal truth." ~Percy Bysshe Shelley