AND SO IT BEGINS…

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” – Edgar Allen Poe.

I could have been an astronaut. Or a political activist in a war zone. Or a trapeze artist. I could have been anything. In fact, by the time I had entered my teens, I had pretty much narrowed it down to two choices: ninja or writer. Never one to take the easy path, I decided bleeding on pages was for me.

I know, I know. Madness.

Not your light, intermittent craziness either. We’re talking about a compulsion approaching Poe proportions of obsession and insanity. A hypergraphic desire so intense that it pricks like a burr under your skin, sizzles like acid in your veins until you have scratched it out of your system. That grows back twofold like a severed Hydra’s head, making you wield pen, laptop, finger dipped in mud, what-have-you because your mental well-being – your very being depends upon it.

A madness that asserts itself because you have fantasies to spin, realities to acknowledge that you can’t hold inside even if you tried.

And you’ve tried.

I wrote my first ode at the age of six for my newborn brother. The sense of accomplishment from that first clumsy foray was incredible. I felt like I had won an entire collection of Enid Blyton books and simultaneously transformed into She-Ra, Princess of Power. I read those four lines of conceptually dodgy but rigorously rhymed verse to his bald head five times a day. He is still waiting for my apology.

The fat-cat-bat-hat poems of my childhood morphed into the angsty, existential rants of my teens, the demon-battling anthems of my experimental twenties and over time have matured into the politically, socially, culturally sensitive verse of now. I adhere to Rilke’s advice:
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.”

Everyone knew I wrote. Only a handful knew WHAT I wrote. My writing was entrusted to the pages of diaries and spiral notebooks with a secrecy that would do Area 51 proud. The desire for audience came to me gradually and with difficulty. I wanted to retract my first submission of poems the minute I hit the send button and obsessively haunted the mailbox for weeks afterwards, wringing my hands over every envelope. The mailman started giving me a wide berth every time he saw me on the street.

Validation came when of the first five poems submitted, three were picked up by an award-winning literary journal. The remaining two were published in different magazines. Since then, there has been no looking back.

Whether poems, essays or journal entries, writing has been such an important and inseparable part of who I am, that even when I have put it away from me, sooner or later I have found my way back to it. The simple truth is: it is meant to be in my life and I am incomplete without it.

This weekly blog is an attempt to document my adventures — the good, the bad and the ugly, as I work to complete my poetry manuscript. It follows my thoughts on the process and craft of writing, strategies successful and otherwise, techniques I have learned and honed over the years, writing exercises that help me make it through writer’s block and other ways of keeping sane. If you are at the same stage of writing as I, then hopefully we can compare notes. If you are a more seasoned writer I hope to benefit from your experience. If you are just starting out, I hope you can benefit from mine. If you don’t write at all, I would still love to hear from you.

Until next week!

P.S.: Poems that have appeared in various literary journals and magazines are in the Published Poems section of this blog. Give ’em a read!