Happy Poetry

Image by broma via Flickr

This was going to be in my zine ( I have been working on the zine non-stop, hence the lack of blog posts recently, and am pleased to announce that it will be out by FRIDAY!!), but I cut it at the last moment. It felt too "bloggy" to me, so here is a piece of non-fiction especially reserved for the Tsaritsa sez...

It was always really easy for me to write poems whenever I felt sad or depressed. My year living in England and studying in a foreign school produced a treasure hoard of gloomy poetry-- I didn't really have any friends there besides the guy I was dating, and to make matters worse I was obsessed over some dumb boy back in the States. These perceived feelings of loneliness and longing, plus my self-induced isolation from my peers, created a prime environment for dipping into my goth side and getting my emotions onto paper. I didn't have anyone I could talk to, as far as I was concerned, so instead I wrote.

I wrote a lot of sappy and desperate poems about my homesickness and the fucked up situation I had created in my head. I'm not sure why I was so convinced that I was in love with this kid I barely knew-- a person I communicated with chiefly through letters and e-mails. It was a pathetic mess. To aggravate the already embarrassing ordeal, I was including my poems in the letters I sent to the boy, knowing that he would know the poems were about him. He even asked me in a letter he wrote in response if the poem was about him and all I could do was sheepishly tell him the truth. "I figured it was about me," he wrote back.



In Norwich's city center, looking gloomy

All this time, I was also involved with the University's poetry society, where I read my work aloud in meetings and at open mic nights, and was submitting my poems to the school newspaper and literary mags. Despite the lame source of my inspiration, I was actually getting a lot done in terms of putting my thoughts on paper and getting them published. It was a good time for me for writing and for feeling like a real writer.

Flash forward to present day: I'm in a happy and committed relationship and life is good, which means I've been going through a terrible writer's block and haven't been indentured to my craft (I realize how pompous that sounds). It's harder for me to feel poetic when I don't have anything soul-scorching to complain about. Is it wrong that negative feelings propel my creativity, that I have to feel tortured in order to make, what I deem, true art? I'm not sure, and I'm a little nervous about calling myself an "artist" back there.

Can poetry come from a happy place? I know a lot of people write happy poems about being in love and being in a good mood, but that's not really my style. I believe art-- any kind of art whether it be a poem, a rap, a painting, whatever-- should come from a real place and reflect the artist's experience. There's a reason why Oprah disowned that guy's fake autobiography-- no one wants to read, or look at, a completely false interpretation of something. Therefore I should not be afraid to embrace positivity if I'm so concerned about making a true portrayal of my life. Perhaps I'll learn something from focusing on the happy, but if I fail I will always have my memory to fall back on. My poor, tortured memory.