Sunday, November 19, 2017

Poetry and Trauma

A fellow poet and friend made a comment last weekend at the book launch party of another mutual friend and poet.  He congratulated him for his talent and accomplishments as a poet despite not having experienced significant trauma in his life and lacking the creative fodder that such trauma would have otherwise provided.  Several people, including myself, chuckled at this assertion, but I’ve been mulling it over here and there in the past week.  I don’t believe that good poetry necessarily comes from suffering and trauma most of the time. 

Sure, it can provide interesting content and a certain drive to expression, which may be healing or cathartic for the poet.  However, poets who have experienced past trauma may be overly fixated on the trauma at the sacrifice of a diversity of other subject matter.  Furthermore, I often find that it predisposes the poet to a low-grade confessionalist style of writing which can look a bit more like a page ripped from a diary than literature.  Consciously, or unconsciously, the poet may be using (or abusing) their poetry as a way to share their pain, garner others’ pity, or simply shock their audience.  Some of this may be valid, but sometimes it crosses a line into wanting attention for the trauma itself, rather than whatever literary construction was derived from the trauma.  Another pitfall for the poet with a history of trauma is the tendency towards a negative worldview that colors everything they see.  If and when they do write poems about subjects beyond their trauma, they may repeatedly gravitate towards the dark and disturbing, or transform even a potentially neutral subject into something unnecessarily negative. 


For me, poets (and other artists) are the sages of the ages, the ones who interpret the world through thoughtful and creative analysis, teaching and illuminating, helping others to grow personally and spiritually without inflicting dogma.  We have all suffered in life, to greater or less extents, and our suffering can be part of what fuels our creative drive.  But when suffering has been the overwhelming theme of a poet’s life, or caused them to become actually psychologically unwell because of it, it can become a hindrance to their work.  We need to see the dark and disturbing, as it is part of life, but we also need the light and gentle to survive the harrowing night.  We need the poets who can find glory in the flower, the bird in flight, the sleeping child.  We need to the poets who can write an unregretful ode to their parents, teachers, friends, and lovers.  We need the poets who can find the world in a drop of water that is dew sparkling on morning grass rather than the tear falling perpetually from their eye.  I need them, for sure, to continually bring myself back to reality, to remind myself of the balance.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Spectulative Relationships III

After our successful participation in the sci-fi romance anthology Speculative Relationships II in 2015, my creative partner and I were invited back this year to submit a short graphic story to the third and final installment in the series, Speculative Relationships III.  Our story is well underway, and has been another fun opportunity to delve into the genre of "speculative" fiction (like Margaret Atwood, I prefer the term to "science fiction").  There's something very freeing about creating a story that is largely imaginative and fantastic, since the poetry I write is typically grounded firmly in reality (except one of my very favorite poems, "Make Way," that I could never seem to get published, about a duckling who takes revenge on the SUV that killed his family).  To read more about Speculative Relationships II, you can visit the editor's Kickstarter page at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1619738205/speculative-relationships-volume-2.  I also recently discovered, by accident, that I am now a Goodreads author because Speculative Relationships II found its way onto the site.  Who knew?

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Return to Poetry

Since January 2017, I have been able to return to writing poetry on a more routine basis, which has been, for me, a joyous renunion with my art of choice.  After my daughter's birth in 2014, I found it difficult to devote as much time, particularly as I was concentrating so intently on graphic novel projects.  Although Max and I have no plans to curb our collaboration, I do intend to continue spending a significant amount of time writing poetry and getting back into the swing of journal submissions.  I've also begun participating in a local poetry Meetup group called Living Poetry (https://livingpoetry.net/), which has created opportunities for meeting, writing, and workshopping with fellow writers.  Collaboration and communion with practitioners of one's craft is, I find, so essential to my life as a writer.  I recently had the opportunity to participate in a very cool online poetry project called ERASE-TRANSFORM, which I heard about through one of the Living Poetry organizers, Bart Barker, who produces a lovely blog at https://bartbarker.wordpress.com/.  ERASE-TRANSFORM invited poets to create poems out of Donald Trump's presidential inauguration speech by removing words, thereby re-envisioning the message therein.  You can read my submission at http://www.erase-transform.ink/blog/2017/03/10/apology/.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Joyous Reunion

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've posted, but better late than never? My graphic novel-making partner, Max Dowdle, and I have self-published our first full-length graphic novel under our imprint, Artagem Graphic Library. The book is called An Unlikely Refugee: The Story of a Python Named George It is a speculative "autobiography" about the Burmese python, George, who lived in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS) for over two decades after being rescued by a U.S. Army Special Forces operative from Vietnam during the early years of the Vietnam War. We decided to write the story from George's perspective, which gave me the opportunity to be pretty free with using poetic language in conveying the contents of the snake's consciousness. We ended up successfully collaborating with the NCMNS around our project and had opportunities to speak at the museum at one of the Thursday evening Science Cafe events last year as well as at their recent annual Reptile & Amphibian Day. The museum ended up purchasing all of the original artwork, including the cover painting, which is now all a part of their permanent collection. Some of it is currently on display on the uppermost floor of the NCMNS, adjacent to the butterfly conservatory. It has been an exciting venture, and we are hoping to be able to do some more events related to the book around the Triangle area in the near future. You can learn more about the project at http://www.artagem.com/?page_id=120 or buy the book at https://www.storenvy.com/products/18094337-an-unlikely-refugee-the-story-of-a-python-named-george.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

First graphic novel publication

Through Artagem (www.artagem.com), I've had the opportunity to collaborate on a couple of self-published short graphic projects, including Greasemonkey and Nightswimming (I'm still hoping eventually to expand Nightswimming into a more full-length piece). However, this past year, Max Dowdle and I were invited to submit a piece to an project called Speculative Relationships, a series of stories around the theme of sci-fi romance. Tyrell Cannon and Scott Kroll, the creative directors, completed a successful Kickstarter, putting us officially in print! Please check out the project's website at www.speculativerelationships.com.

It's been a long time. . . .

It's been a long time since I last posted to this site. I moved from New Jersey to North Carolina in 2012, and my writing got put on hiatus for awhile. I published a poem called "The Carrot" in Apiary Magazine out of Philadelphia in September 2012. In 2010, I had begun collaborating on various graphic novel projects with Max Dowdle, and in 2013, I began to focus primarily in this direction. I'm still writing poetry, but in my precious spare time I'm mainly writing scripts for various small and large graphic projects. You can find out more about these on www.artagem.com.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

SchuylI kill Valley Journal

I just had two poems, "Ringtone" and "The Lesson," accepted into the Schuylkill Valley Journal Spring 2012 edition. The launch reading will be May 20th, 2012. You can check out the journal's website at http://www.svjlit.com/.