your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

I finally published my poetry book, it is a deep book and it is a journey to self love,self discovery and our purpose. When you read it, you heal, the purpose of my book is to connect you to you, to the higher realms of love.

''a single strand of light passes through your heart it opens the vessel in you, that needs to be heard, seen and felt. it is time for you to face and look for the beauty that lies within you by your side, there's your pain that overlaps your days there is your happiness that you bite into, with a small mouthful too scared of being greedy somehow you are curious to know more about yourself you, your biggest mystery''

have yours here :www.amazon.ca/Filaments-self-M…

Nobody in love is original

Christian Wiman wrote this gorgeous remembrance for poet Craig Arnold that is full of everything "the necessary but destabilizing intensities of poetry, and the life that one risks by cultivating those intensities, and the life that—in some cases, our cases, we both felt—poetry also rescues." I don't know about you, but in college I was trained to separate the poet from the poem, and while I think a poem needs to stand on its own without needing the context of a poet's biography to fill it with anything it's lacking, but in the last few years I have wanted so much for poetry to connect and reconcile me to other people, places, and things - and not least the people who write poems, inasmuch as we can ever know another person, or at least for as much as we can know them through an experience of their words. 

I truly believe that books find you exactly when you need them, and I just want to tell of the happy journey that led me to this at exactly the right time: years ago someone loaned me Carl Adamschick’s Saint Friend, still one of my all-time favorite poetry books. It was published by the McSweeney’s poetry imprint, and some months later, at random in the library, I saw another McSweeney’s book, and while I was really put off by the title, Love: An Index, which made me think it was going to be a book of poems built around a conceit, a trick, on the strength of the many good McSweeney’s poetry books I’d read, I borrowed it, and devoured it. There was definitely a central operating principle - sections began with A, B, C through Z - but I remember many moments in that book as rising above it to be really good, and I was moved that Rebecca Lindenberg had written it in memory of a partner who had died suddenly and unexpectedly in an accident. About three years later, @waitingforthecat liked one of my posts and I was intrigued enough by that handle to look up their tumblr, which wow is full of stuff I really love, and when I read the poem Bird-Understander I got that I-must-read-everything-by-this-poet-immediately feeling, and it turns out to be by Craig Arnold (and the beloved in Bird-Understander could well be Rebecca Lindenberg - and even if it isn’t literally, autobiographically, everything we write comes from who we are, and the people who make us who we are).

From an interview with Jeremy Richards, “How to Write Love Poems”:

What’s the most pressing challenge in approaching a love poem? Craig Arnold: For a poet at the beginning of the 21st century, I think the most difficult thing is how to navigate this brave new world, where we’re in the midst of making up our collective mind about what it means to be men and women. In the Western tradition most love poems have assumed a male poet writing to or about a female object, who can accept or refuse the offering but who doesn’t otherwise say much, and the formal conventions of poetry have crystallized around that assumption. There are those wonderful Provençal troubadour poems that imagine the poem as a dialogue, a back-and-forth between two mutually desiring individuals, but those are among the few exceptions. Now when we sit down to write poems to our lovers—or to the people we hope will be our lovers—we’re more likely to be thinking: What am I responding to? How do I hope this person will respond? How is this part of an ongoing conversation? With “Bird-Understander” I wanted to say not, as an Elizabethan courtly sonneteer might have said, “Look, I made your words into poetry, aren’t I fabulous?” but rather “Listen, what you said to me, it’s already poetry, better than anything I could write, and it would make me happy simply to have you see that.” Where do you think most bad love poems go astray? Any love poem has to strike a careful balance between the particular and the common. As a lover you feel as though you and your beloved are the most intensely particular people in the world—“Never again a love like this,” as Roddy Lumdsen says. But the fact is that you’re submitting yourself to what is possibly the most common or universal human experience, and that sometimes the most direct and most accurate expression of that experience may, in fact, be the language of cliché. I’m thinking about the duet that Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman sing on the rooftop in Moulin Rouge, which is just a pastiche of trashy pop songs, and in some way that’s what all love poetry is leaning toward. But when you think about [it], what is a cliché, if not a poem that won? We feel that so many love poems are bad, or clichéd, but I suspect that what we dislike about them are not the clichés, but the experience of being in love itself. As poets we like to think that we’re original, and it embarrasses us to remember how utterly unoriginal we can be—the sudden appeal of the corniest things, the mood swings, the crying at movies and the like. Let’s face it, nobody in love is original. We all feel and do pretty much the same things, make fools of ourselves in the same ways, and hopefully come through it alive and well and happily in bed with someone else. But that’s also precisely the appeal of love poetry, the intensely humbling nature of the experience it tries to describe. As a younger poet, did you ever fumble with the bad, saccharine attempts at love poems that most of us write? What can we learn from those fumbles? It’s hard to say. I came into my writerly existence in the 1980s, the Decade of Irony, when it was very uncool to express any sort of strong feeling directly or plainly. If you wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, you learned to police yourself for any signs of sincerity, to cloak them in irony and diffidence and perhaps a certain obscurity. A while ago, my first lover sent me a copy of a poem I wrote when I was maybe 19, and what strikes me about it now is, though I clearly meant it as a gesture of love, I didn’t frame it as such. Rather than I addressing you, it was all in the third person, a sketch of a character from a noir novel, a sort of Philip Marlowe–like individual smoking underneath a window. It was a stealth love poem, a meta–love poem, a sort of “I have this friend who’s in love with you” kind of poem. The habit of indirection was already very strong in me, as it was with other poets of that era. So I think the danger then was actually not being too saccharine, but rather of being too cool, too frigid. Now the danger is probably being too caffeinated—I’m thinking of the maniacally antic poems of the New New New York School, whatever generation of that we’re on now. So one can fumble by being too cool, and one can fumble by burying the truth of one’s feeling under a heap of jagged and jarring images. I think Creeley, of all people, was able to hit the right note, plain and plaintive and wistful and awkward—what he brings out is the awful hesitancy of that moment where you’re holding out this little offering to somebody else and hoping to hear Yes I said yes I will yes. And what you’re risking is a certain kind of sentimentality. But for my money, I think it’s better to risk the sentimental and fail, than aim for frigidity and succeed.

So now I’m going to read Robert Creeley. I am so grateful to have poetry in my life.

(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69223/how-to-write-love-poems)

“you. it will always be you. don’t you get that? if i had the choice between you and a million things i’ve always wanted, i would choose you every single time.”

laughuntiltherearetears

“autumn exists to remind us that things must end to begin again.”

d.j

the same eyes that taught me to love, taught me i’d never be good enough to be loved back.

excerpt from a book I’ll never write #471

“every poem was yours. even when i thought it was for someone else, it has always been for you”

emery allen

“do you think the universe fights for souls to be together? some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.”

unknown

“waiting for what? i’d like to know.

it is august.

my life is going to change. i feel it.”

raymond carver

“there’s a story behind every person. there’s a reason why they’re the way they are. they aren’t just like that because they want to be. something in the past created them, and sometimes it’s impossible to fix.”

-unknown

“in the end, we all just want someone who chooses us. over everyone else. under any circumstances.”

anonymous

i need a father. i need a mother. i need some older, wiser being to cry to. i talk to god, but the sky is empty.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

it ends or it doesn't. that's what you say. that's how you get through it. the tunnel, the night, the pain, the love. it ends or it doesn't. if the sun never comes up, you find a way to live without it. if they don't come back, you sleep in the middle of the bed, learn how to make enough coffee for yourself. adapt. adjust. it ends or it doesn't. it ends or it doesn't. we do not perish.

Caitlyn Siehl (lotsofpinkplaid)

I finally published my poetry book, it is a deep book and it is a journey to self love,self discovery and our purpose. When you read it, you heal, the purpose of my book is to connect you to you, to the higher realms of love.

''a single strand of light passes through your heart it opens the vessel in you, that needs to be heard, seen and felt. it is time for you to face and look for the beauty that lies within you by your side, there's your pain that overlaps your days there is your happiness that you bite into, with a small mouthful too scared of being greedy somehow you are curious to know more about yourself you, your biggest mystery''

have yours here :www.amazon.ca/Filaments-self-M…

“today i saw you, i didn’t feel the butterflies and i didn’t want to kiss you. i just saw you and you were like every boy in the world, and i swear it was your fault”

- excerpt from a book i’ll never write #9

“it all comes down to the last person you think of at night, that is where your heart is.”

unknown