Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words

We can live quiet, apparently sedate lives if we express our wildness by risking and leaping in our writing...The strangest, most far-out renegade part of ourselves can be expressed in a poem while we sit quietly in our kitchen or bedroom. This can save our lives

Poems arrive. They hide in feelings and images, in weeds and delivery vans, daring us to notice and give them form with our words. They take us to an invisible world where light and dark, inside and outside meet.

Life can be like a poem that way, with the unexpected appearing in the room, not just on the page.

Image is the root of imagination.

My friend Mary Ann told me once about a lizard trapped in a room where she was house-sitting. She couldn't rescue the lizard because it was afraid of her, so it died, hiding from its source of freedom. This made Mary Ann think that often what we fear the most might be what frees us.

We tend to mistrust our own natures, as if uncontrolled we'd be freaky, dangerous, hateful, unacceptable, or at best, dull. I think in our culture we fear wisdom.

Writing a poem is a form of listening, helping me discover what's wrong or frightening in my world as well as what delights me.

Wilfred Funk writes in Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories that originally all words were poems, since our language is based, like poems, in metaphor.