For Whom the Bells Toll

The life of a poet is probably the most difficult of all. You may think I am crazy, well, I am but that is not the point I am trying to make. Poetry is almost never understood. People just don't get it. It is confusing, upsetting, and just too coagulated to comprehend for most.

The poet's job is to describe emotions through words in the simplest of forms. We give feelings to objects that normally cannot feel. Trees bleed, ocean's roar, bird's cry. Often times the reader just does not understand.

Most of my poetry is dark. I rarely share it, and I understand why I don't. When I write poetry, I tap into a very dark and hidden place within me. It is almost as if it is not me at all. I transform into what I try to write about. I know that this sounds insane, perhaps, it is.

I had a professor once pull the most deepest of emotions from me through an assignment. The lesson was not to just write a poem, but become the object in the poem. "I don't think I can." He looked at me, "if anyone can. You can." And, I learned to transport myself out of my body to another place. I became the person in the poem, the tree, the river, the sky. I closed my eyes and learned to feel emotions and relate the feelings into words of that object. I remember writing about piano keys. He was impressed, "this is exactly what a piano's key would feel like if it could feel."

I keep my poetry hidden deep, deep, deep within my soul because it opens a window that few can relate to. I can now understand completely why some of the great literary minds have retrieved and lived confined within their own minds. The more we give of ourselves through our writing, the more vulnerable we become, and the less understood.

Hemingway was an alcoholic, ultimately committed suicide. Virginia Wolf filled her pockets with coins and walked into the ocean. Sylvia Plath put her head into an oven could not handle rejection. Yet, she earned a Pulitzer Prize for her dark and disturbing poetry. Elizabeth Browning was prescribed opium for her "affliction". Even the great master, Shakespeare was laughed at and struggled as an artist and died thinking he was a failure.

Emily Dickinson was said to be an anti-social and secluded herself. She died a premature death diagnosed by doctors as a cause of stress and depression. Upon her death, her sister instructed all letters and writings not published to be burned. Thank God a friend intervened. Emily kept her poetry vague and was often criticized and labeled as crazy and having a "fictitious lover." The more her work was torn to shreds, the more secluded she became, but she did not stop writing.

It takes great courage to pour emotions onto paper. Your heart bleeds and as it does, you write not with ink but with your own blood. And, then, you are misunderstood. You accomplish what you set out to do in the process, bringing the reader into a world they had never thought of. But, you, the poet is misunderstood. Hence, the struggle of the great love I have for words. Memorized by the power within my soul, I can only write what is in my heart.

My life closed twice before its close.
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell,
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson