Vision: A Resource for Writers
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Holly Lisle's VisionReflections of StarlightBy Nic Bronson©
2002, By Nic Bronson
I've
heard a lot of things about poets. I've
heard that they're depressive, suicidal, with sick twisted minds; that they're
happy people who just like the sound of rhymes; that they're deep, intelligent
social critics who explore the nuances of our society; and that they're slightly
crazed individuals pattering out little ditties that make sense to no one but
themselves. Guess
what? It's all true. And like it or not, I'm a poet. For
me, writing poetry started a few years ago. Though I'd been writing in some form
or another (and indeed, a few poems), I actually produced the majority of my
work to date over a three-year period, from 1997 - 1999, the final years of high
school. School was never fun for me, and I swung between hopeless depression and
slightly less hopeless depression, and though I'm not sure exactly how it
happened, one day in 1997 I started to write poetry and forgot to stop. It
was almost therapeutic, a way to deal with my emotions by immortalizing them on
paper. I'd never read many poems, so I fairly quickly developed my own, somewhat
technically flawed style, . It wasn't until much later that I started reading
and refining my work into something I'm proud enough to show others. Since
then I've finished a book, though it's never been published and I doubt it ever
will. But it is for me a poetical
documentation of that period of my life, to its somewhat happier conclusion. There
have been many influences on my poetry since I first put pen to paper, and while
I just fell into it, it's been some of those great poets of history that really
inspired me to keep going. I've always liked rhyming poetry: in fact 99% of my
poetry is in rhyming form, so first on my list were some of the great English
poets and their works: Banjo Patterson's "The Great Australian poet,"
Edgar Allen Poe's “The Raven,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his “Rhyme of
the Ancient Mariner” and the opium-induced “Kubla-Khan,” and just about
anything by Robert Browning, to name a few. A
lot of my work around 1999 was inspired, at least in part, by Baudelaire, one of
the greatest unappreciated poets of the 19th century who is only now
being recognized for his morbid genius, which went unappreciated in the time
where French Romantic poetry was in ascendance. He was unafraid to write about
death, tragedy, and the sorrow of the human condition, and the beauty he found
in these neglected topics. A
lot of my late work, however, has been inspired by poets much older than those
so far listed, and my current work shows
their influence as I take my poetry far more seriously than I ever did before.
The social criticism, epic scope, and hitting imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy
and Homer's Illiad and Odyssey inspired me to do more than just capture a
feeling or situation, but rather try to explore a more complex theme or set of
themes. The shorts "Absurdity I - VIII," "Raining Dreams,"
and my current work in progress, "Heaven and Earth," are all part of a
planned collection called Absurdity, a comment on modern life. Poetry is beautiful and mournful, depressing and uplifting, flowing and stilted, philosophical and simple. It's a paradox that cannot easily be defined. Like life.
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