Tell us about your poem

Do you ever write a poem and then really want to tell everyone what it's about but don't necessarily want to add a 17 page author's note to your piece in case that deters or biases reviewers? Or maybe you've had someone interpret your poem that you intended to be about a whimsical camping adventure that is a metaphor for the risks of capitalism into a autobiographical piece that reveals the root of your identity and you want to set the record straight!

Whatever the reason is, there is often a reason that we write the poems we do - and here's the place you can share about it if you'd like to!

Feel free to leave a link to your poem and explained why you wrote it or what the elements meant to you, feel free to comment on other people's answers too!



*note this is not a place to critique each others' work or to just advertise your poem without saying why you wrote it or what it means*

gone

Heyo, thanks for making this thread, alliyah! I'm pretty sure this will be interesting too to our new members and poets, and I've got just the occasion to give it a bump, so hope you don't mind me reviving it ^^

So I once wrote a poem that mentioned a mum, or a mother-figure. I took that poem down because the interpretations I got displeased me:I didn't like the poem that other people thought I had written. I've come back to this and also come back to this not-so-new thread because on reflection that whole episode has actually influenced the way I write, rewrite and publish poetry nowadays, so in a sense, it's actually still relevant.

I won't be quoting it here because I don't want the people who reviewed that poem to feel bad that they came to a different conclusion ^^' I understand people tend to bring their own experiences to their reading. At the time I wrote poems expecting people to read analytically and focusing on author-intention - I now realise that's an unrealistic expectation and that's not the way people actually read when undirected.

Anyway, I wrote the poem because I wanted to explore the feeling of both teaching and being taught at once, and the frustration but also the uncanniness of that situation. Most of the time this 'teaching and being taught' thing tends to be portrayed positively, so I guess I was like 'ha-ha! i've got a very original take here uwu'. The age difference between the speaker and the mother-figure also makes things uncanny, as I was trying to reference this expectation that adults should know everything and lead everything - and also a contradictory expectation that children are the future and should also somehow lead everything.

I tried to portray a speaker that was frustrated by their mother-figure's dependence on them while ironically also being dependent on their mother-figure. There was a parallelistic structure in the middle of the poem that was intended to convey this, and I think this was the part that I somehow failed to get across, which is a shame, because this was the core of the poem for me.

I wrote it partly because I was feeling frustrated at the time, but also because I was interested in taking apart the reasons for that frustration and making sense of them in a kind of distant, intellectualised way. Looking at the bigger picture, if you will.

I think that poem taught me not to distract my readers, and also the ways in which I *was* unintentionally distracting them. I wanted to tell a big-picture narrative but I chose small concrete details which make sense there in my own personal context but which point towards other narratives generally. That contributed to changing the interpretation to being about 'problems with mothers', which was . . . not what I was going for. The figure in my poem happens to be a mother, but she could easily have been a teacher, an older mentor, a grandfather, or maybe the speaker and the figure could have been the north pole and the south pole *shrug*.

That's why I tend to spend time on creating an atmosphere in my poems, letting my readers know that this is a different and specific time and place, and that these figures aren't direct stand-ins for people in the real world - they're characters, like you'd see in a novel or a film.

P.S. And I just want to leave it here for the record- my relationship with my mum is fine!

A HUGE *virtual hug* of thanks to @alliyah for making this thread because I have been DYING to share the reasoning behind my poem, iworry.

Okay, get ready...

I wrote it when I was technically supposed to be going to bed, (school night!) but you can't control when inspiration strikes, right? I had some lines in my head so I sat myself down on my bedroom floor, whipped out my phone, and typed for somewhere near 20 minutes nonstop on my notes app. (It was a pain because it kept correcting my spelling and capitalization.)
This is what happens when a teenage poet has had a rough few school weeks, (and rough start to the school year in general,) is extremely tired, starts to think in verse, (which happens more often than you'd think...) and then writes down those crazy thoughts. Behold.

iworry

Sometimes when I read poems, they are like songs in my head, except that I don't exactly hear them... I don't know how to describe it, really. (W.W) That's how I was thinking for most of this poem. The lines that have words that are all connected are rapid, frantic, and also painfully slow at the same time. It's putting emphasis on the way the speaker feels stressed but also is trying to pretend to be elsewhere. (See quote below.)

onacloud
ifloat
tothesky,

The parts where it says repeatedly

[iworry,
illbe-[/quote]

are parts where the speaker is on the brink of a hole full of worries and distracts themself with other thoughts. But the fear goes in a spiral and the speaker always ends up back at the same place.

Eventually the speaker falls into the hole and the poem turns from short lines with uncapitalized words squished together to long, drawn out lines that cut off at the end to start a new line or stanza.

\\\

Throughout the poem, the speaker refers to a "them." This poem is supposed to be chaotic and is probably made more confusing by the fact that the "them" changes every few stanzas.

At first, the "them" are mean kids.

causepeople
areoh
somean,

...

fromthewords,
andtheirmouths
withthedaggers
comingout

Then the "them" turns into friends. More specifically, friends who seem like they would rather speak and have the speaker listen to them than listen to the speaker.

i listen to them so they should listen to me

...

They find
It's easier
To talk
And for I
To do the listening

Then the "they" goes back to mean kids for this particular line:

Thethingstheysayarehurtingme,

Then it's back to friends until the stanza

And 'cause it happened twice,
They assume that I'm all spice
And they don't ask for my side
Even when
The truth isn't told but even then

where the "they" refers to school admin/teachers. (Side note, in real life I did not get suspended, as said in the stanza before the one I quoted above. I just found out today that I was only sent home for the rest of the school week because they wanted me to have a break and feel less overwhelmed. This actually made me feel more overwhelmed in the long run. O_O)

Then the "they" goes back to mean kids.

They see the tears on my cheeks

Another confusing thing is that in the first stanza it says

ilookforyou,

but it never says 'you' anywhere else in the poem. So I thought I'd just add that the "you" talks about looking for friends/nice, empathetic kids to counteract the worry thoughts and the mean kids' words.

The exclamation points inside tildes (official name for this symbol: ~) express the inner shouting and chaos of the speaker's mind, while also exclaiming without shouting in the all-caps stanza above it.

The I's are sometimes capitalized sometimes lowercase, because I like the way it looks and I feel like this is what it would look like inside the speaker's mind. The I's are capitalized when the speaker is/feels strong and the I's are lowercase when the speaker is/feels soft/tiny/insignificant/etc.

But my poems are open to interpretation, and however the reader interprets them, they interpret correctly. (In most cases. ^^)

I'm not sure if anyone is still on this thread, but I wanted to share not just one poem, but a reason why I write poetry in general.

I write of art as survival, of intense devotion equal in its loss, symbolic in its nature. My love and my grief are inseparable from my work, and transformation is how I process these experiences. It's my inner monologue, my diary, my expression, and my understanding of myself in the context of others. I harbor severe pain, hopelessness, frustration, and crippling self-awareness, writing things like "digging through red waters, scratching in vain, murky with peril,/ I never realized there wasn't a bottom to that barrel." But in these vast emotions, I want to see what others feel from it, what they gain, not so much attached and demanding that they follow my reasoning.

I tend to physicalize my grief, turning my emotions into tangible pain, as if it lives inside my bones and blood. Not only that, but I make it an active attempt, a ritualistic expression. However, it is not just grief I write of, it's of rage, it's devotion, it's pride, it's longing, and it's sorrowful memory. There are no records in my work to correct it straight; it is a longing for interpretation in many forms.