Poems

A Poetic Letter To Contemporary Writers

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDear writers,

Please do not write to find your sanity.
Write instead to fuel your insanity.
I made the mistake - I learned the hard way,
Covering pages with a sanguine spray.
Life was death by a typeset attrition,
For it lacked the spice of wild ambition.
I needed to find the darkness within
To stop committing a boring old sin.
Blasphemy had been written into law,
Suppressing the wonderful things of before.

There's really no shortage of sanguine shows
Of postmodern verse or prose that just blows.
Instead of closing the vice-flowing tap,
We drown in this sterile, flatulent crap.
Care not if the words aren’t sanitary;
They should spasm, not be sedentary.
Your insanity's the call to return:
Be madly in love with feelings that burn.
You're as mad as heaven - let it ascend!
The beautiful chaos will be your friend.

Sincerely,
A poet.

A Poetic Letter To Contemporary Writers ~ by Tom Shaw

I occasionally tune into the musings of David Gosselin, who does great work exploring the poets of the past in light of current trends in society. Some of his works I particularly enjoy include features on Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Schiller for the Rising Tide Foundation. Both of these poets - along with many others that David has covered for RTF - had a lens of trying to capture the “sublime”. For me, that means reconciling the opposing forces we experience in our lives into a non-dualistic conception, something I think poetry is uniquely suited to do.

I see this involving the recognition and creation of something beyond the material present of our circumstances. I believe there is a blueprint for our most authentic, integral self within all of us from birth. I see it as our mission in our lifetime to work out how best to kindle and reignite its flame, especially in the face of adverse and traumatic events where we develop self-limiting belief systems. When we create a vision of ourselves in this light through the language we use about ourselves, and when we create stories about who we are able to become, even when by objective measures it “doesn’t exist” in the here-and-now, we help make it real. I do that with my own poetry, and help others achieve the same through Master Your Word. Schiller, as with many other poets, felt something similar.

That brings me to the poem-letter hybrid you’re reading here today. Great writing - writing that “moves” something within us - requires speaking to emotion without degrading it into cliche or fact. It acknowledges unfairness and wrongdoing without inviting us to be victims, and inspires us to still find hope that “someone gets me” or that “there’s a way out of this” or that “I can recognise when evil lives within me”. This requires being bold - not for the sake of being bold, but because it is vital for maintaining your integrity in the story you need to tell, and to speak to a world that might not be here yet, but that you are creating.

This poem’s title is a bit of a red herring, because, in truth, we are all writers in one way or another. You are a writer every time you tell your life story. You are a writer every time you send a message or email, or even a proper letter. And we all need to be bold in defining who we are and what we’re here to do.

Your Turn

It’s taken me a long time to feel comfortable describing myself as a poet - and now, here I am.

So here’s an invitation for you: tell me something so crazy and bold and unorthodox about who you are that most people have no idea about? Because I guarantee there’s something in that act of hiding which is holding you back.