I’m continuing a series I began on my other blog (Only the Lonely Press), Dead Poets Society, with a poem by Edgar Allan Poe:
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Tag Archives: poet
Friday Favorite: Helen Keller and Poetry
It’s Friday–FINALLY! 🙂 🙂 🙂 Hope your week has been productive, and fast. Mine was a bit chaotic with both hubby and son home sick for the past few days with colds. I had a MRI done on a shoulder, and the results were positive–no surgery will be needed. Just more physical therapy, but that I can handle. 🙂
Can’t help though but to feel a tad frustrated since I hadn’t done any writing this week. It’s not that I’m feeling unproductive, but if a day or more pass by and I hadn’t created anything, that’s where the frustration lies. I feel like an addict in that if I don’t get my fix (in the act of creating), I feel pent up, and agitated.
Sounds familiar?
Anyhoo…
A question popped in my mind earlier this morning when I began thinking about Helen Keller (one of my favorite inspirational writers): how did she feel about poetry?
Reason this question came to mind is that I’ve been doing some soul-searching as I start to make plans for a memoir (which will be written around a series of poems I wrote throughout various parts of my life). A realization struck me in how important writing poetry was to my healing (and dealing with losses), and I’ve begun to look at the role of how poetry therapy played in other people’s lives.
I knew Helen Keller had written at least one memoir, and several essays, but I wondered if she ever wrote poetry. So, I hunted online to find the answer. Although I did find it, I also found this particular quote by Keller that I’m considering to have framed and placed on my writing desk:
Poetry is liberating. Writing poetry enable me to delve deeper in emotions and experiences that have been too painful to voice orally, and even openly about.
What about you? Have poetry been instrumental in certain aspect or time of your life? Do you have a favorite poet or poem?
#YouTube Tuesday: Dead Poets Society Series
I enjoy creating videos for various poetry, and have started a new series on my You Tube channel called “Dead Poets Society.”
This is my latest one, “Waking in Winter,” by Sylvia Plath:
If you enjoyed that one here are three more:
God Lay Dead in Heaven by Stephen Crane
I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain by Emily Dickinson
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Finish This Statement…
Writing: Would You Do Things Differently If You Could Go Back In Time?
Click on the image to access this group’s official page
This month IWSG question is: if you could backtrack and do things differently as a writer, would you?
Wow, this is a loaded question. One I have pondered on and wondered about from time to time. Who hasn’t? Especially now that I’m in my mid (ish) 40s, this question keeps popping up in my mind.
My first inclination is to say “Yes!”
I’d have attended SUNY Potsdam (only) majoring in Journalism instead of bouncing around at least six different colleges and ending up with a degree in Physical Education (which I barely used).
As a journalist, I would have traveled the world. In this reality, I’ve only visited one other country…Canada.
Perhaps I’d even started my own magazine or newspaper company. Or, maybe even branched off into the publishing industry and became an editor or something.
And just perhaps I’d ended up living in Boston (one of my fave cities) where I’d pen my first and break-through novel that landed me on the New York Times’ Bestselling List.
If I’d done all the above, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
As a writer. As a poet.
A mother.
A wife.
Living on a small farmstead in eastern North Dakota of all places 🙂 Writing full-time at home.
I’m richly blessed. I don’t think I would give this life up to relive it as a different person. It’s nice to dream about it, but that’s it, just a dream.
I like this reality better.
What about you? If you had the opportunity to go back and do anything differently as a writer, would you do it?
You Tube Tuesday: Dead Poets Society
Over at my other site, Only the Lonely Press, I started a new video series called, Dead Poets Society, where I will take a poem of a given poet (long since passed on) and create a video for it. This one above is one of my favorite Robert Frost’s poems.
Below is a bit of a morbid poem written by Emily Dickinson which I absolutely love.
I plan to create more videos for this particular series in the near future.
Do you have any (short) poems by your favorite poets to suggest? If I like it (a lot), I may just create a video for it!
Life Imitating Art (or is it the other way?)
Click on image for original source
The other day I posted a poll that asked a question on whether you believed life imitated art, or art imitated life. If you like to voice your opinion, here’s the poll.
Oscar Wilde believed that-
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.”
But, I believe Fyodor Dostoevsky hit closer to the truth –
“At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts.”
Here’s what Aristotle had to say about this:
“Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.”
“Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature’s unrealized ends.”
What are your thoughts and opinion?
Art and Life (Poll)
What If There Was No Internet?
What if there was no internet? Whether it crashed due to an electromagnetic storm, or a massive meteor shower took out most of the satellites…and the internet is now GONE.
As a writer, how would you function? How would you go about sending out your stories to the world?
Would you still keep writing?
So many completely rely on technology (namely internet) to get things done, and to communicate with others. Would we be able to revert back to the “old” ways of doing things?
Scary thoughts?
#ThursdayThoughts: What IS Success?
Many writers feel that touching even one life is success. Not by how many books one published, or by how many awards one garnered; although these are VERY nice to have.
For some writers, writing goes much deeper than any physical items or accolades. It’s about using their gifts as storytellers, healers, change-makers for the sake of others.
Success is based on the number of lives impacted.
What about you? How do you view success as a writer?
