Maria's Art & Words
  • Home
  • About
    • CV
    • Press
  • Publications
    • Poetry
    • Prose
    • Visual Art
  • Adoptee Song
  • Work with Me
    • Success Stories

On Poetry

3/24/2016

0 Comments

 
Although the first works I wrote as a child were fiction and creative non-fiction, it was poetry that captured me. In the fourth grade, our city shuffled school districts and I ended up at another elementary school--a relief to my parents, who had witnessed my social struggles, but not to me, since I had to start over. I ended up meeting a lifelong friend who just happened to want to write poems together. We lived an artistic life then, exchanging books, collaborating on poems, and even going to a writer's conference at the behest of our teacher.

Throughout high school, I wrote. Though I was working on two novel-length projects at the time, I filled several notebooks with poems of all sorts: experimental freeform, perfectly-metered formal poems, translations, poems that used different languages, poems and translations in a fantasy language I developed for my writing project. 

In college, I stopped writing long-form fiction, and my poetry writing also tapered off. I wrote some short stories, but after I applied to a poetry workshop--because yes, you have to apply to take a writing class at Princeton--and got rejected, I thought my poems were derivative, useless. (I took one fiction seminar, in a semester riddled with personal issues, where I was afraid to write in my authentic voice and I had no idea who Chimamanda Adichie was.)

Between 2007 and 2013, I wrote almost no poetry, but I kept coming back to the urge to create. When I enrolled at Goddard, I wanted to work on poetry, but it took a backseat to fiction-writing because that was my chosen genre, and writing a thesis in two years requires concentration. I also happened to work with advisors who were not poets in any way. However, I did write a few poems, and even got published thanks to a spur-of-the-moment Rilke translation and a poetry class I took from UWisc's Writing Center (they're a great resource).

I say this because I've dealt with impostor syndrome, the feeling that you don't really belong and are lying about what you are, in many forms--when I first went to Princeton, when I first went to graduate school, every day as I sit here and pretend to be a writer. But there has never been a genre of work where I feel more like an impostor than poetry.

This is stupid because I have had so much practice as a translator it's mind-numbing, and because I went out of my way at Goddard to study the density and intensity of poetic writing.

​Yet, even though I will never claim that poetry is my main genre, it is an annoying habit I can't quit, so I might as well get better at it.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    June 2020
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015

    Topics

    All
    Aisthesis
    Analysis
    Art
    Beadforlife
    Business
    Classes
    Conference
    Cool/inspiring Activities
    Current Events
    D3
    Dear Reader
    Esports
    Firefighting
    Freelancing
    Gaming
    Guildmaster
    Gw2
    Hapax
    Heroesofthestorm
    Heroes Of The Storm
    How To
    Kngo
    Lit Mags
    Metablog
    Nanowrimo
    Nonprofits
    Painting
    Personal Memories
    Personal Post
    Photography
    Publications
    Residency
    Swtor
    Travel
    Uganda
    Volunteer
    Website
    Work In Progress
    Wow
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Home 

Email

Copyright © 2022
  • Home
  • About
    • CV
    • Press
  • Publications
    • Poetry
    • Prose
    • Visual Art
  • Adoptee Song
  • Work with Me
    • Success Stories