“Poetry is a commitment to the soul.” – Gaston Bachelard
I was 14 when I started writing poems. For some reason, secretly, I wanted to find that quality about myself. It was a way to cope with low self-esteem, so it became an outlet for daydreams. I struggled with speech impediment and depression so the written word was a place to spread my mind.
Writing and drawing were therapeutic because it helped unveil my own voice. I’m still unlayering the folds, but every once in a while I know that I’ve found something through my audience. Eventually, I realized poetry is a way of being in the world, noticing a self-sufficient beauty that lives beyond “me.” Poetry is an exploration of where “I” begins and ends.
Poetry can be narrow as a stream or wide as a mountain, and everything in between. It can have rhyme or not! It’s mostly an emotion that reaches a certain depth. Certainly, poetry isn’t stiff or shallow. In his riveting book Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “Poetry awakens new depths in us.”
Poetry is an inspired vision of life, it exceeds time and expands understanding. It’s the first feeling, a direct-experience with what emerges here and now. It’s a special insight. You don’t need a calculator to see its value because it grows naturally into awareness. It’s primal, it’s soul, and we are but shattered mirrors.