One of my facebook friends, someone I don’t actually know in real life, I don’t think, just posted “I never submit my poems to pubs. I write them to heal myself.” I assume she meant either publications or publishers, because taking your poems from pub to pub and handing them to bartenders is not going to make you famous.
I don’t actually submit to publications either, but my reasoning’s a bit different. I write, I read at poetry readings, I post my stuff online (There is this, the daily news blog, and there is the section marked “poetry.” You can find a massive number of my poems over there.) and eventually I assemble it into collections and offer them up for sale on Amazon and Kindle. No buyers yet, but I keep hoping that will change.
If any publishers want to publish me, they can give me a call. I hear all the horror stories about people being rejected by hundreds of publishers, and I think “fuck that.” I don’t like rejection, I don’t like frustration, I don’t like wasted effort.
Also, of course, there is the very real possibility that my poems aren’t that great. They tend to be well received at the readings I go to, but that might just be because everybody’s being polite.
Her statement made me think of all the different reasons people might write poetry: some kind of self-healing, part of a spiritual quest, as an attempt at seduction, for publication and fame, for publication and money, to further an agenda, to tell a story, to express your view of the universe, to try and formulate a view of the universe, to turn words into music, to praise nature and the world we live in, to pscho-analyze the human race, to play games with words, or just because the words are bouncing around inside your head and the only way to make them stop is to put them down on paper, so in that sense poetry is a form of exorcism.
There are as many different reasons for writing poetry as there are poets. That’s O.K. It’s a big tent.
www.gurukalehuru.com 