Do You Explain Your Poems?
Do you post and run, or bare your heart…
I got thinking about this on my morning lap of the house with the dog :) I get many random thoughts which then bring me down the creative rabbit hole. Sometimes I even get to write some of my ideas and thoughts down before they are lost to the ethers.
I always dipped in and out of writing, mainly due to lack of time to do so more fully. I’ve had a couple of short stories published years ago (the pre-children era), however, when the first lock-downs occurred in 2020 and work came to a grinding halt, my creative spring just started to naturally well up — completely of its own accord it seemed! I started to write poetry. For an entire year, the ideas and words kept flowing, so I started to record them in chronological order. Each one meant something to me personally, was penned from personal experiences, joys, hurts, love, hardships, parenting, spirituality, positive thinking, etc, etc. However, I wanted to add to each one a further little nugget of my ‘self’… I felt the need to give a backdrop to each poem, where it came from, how each one started, the whys and wherefores of them all.
My question to all you dear readers is this — do you think that in 100 or 1,000 years time it will help the archeologists and sociologists and scribes of that time to understand us better? How much easier would it be if Shakespeare and all the other greats of past times had given us footnotes to their work — would we still be debating in the classrooms and the lecture halls? Would it add to, or take away from their art?
So what do you think — is it better to strive to be understood through the addition of explanatory footnotes, or should we let our words speak for themselves, lay there there like a new infant crying out, hoping that someone will understand what it is they are trying to say and how they are feeling in that moment?
Personally, I like the back story. I enjoy it. I’m sure there are always exceptions, but for me it adds to the depth and wisdom of a writer and their work, evoking empathy and connection. To that end, I collected all my poems from 2020, footnotes and all, and decided that I would self-publish them, if only as something for my children and close family and friends to remember me by in years to come. They are a mixture of mostly poems with a few haiku sprinkled here and there for good measure (how much fun are Haiku to write, I just love a good prompt). I would encourage anyone who has a compilation of their own poetry to do the same, it’s hugely rewarding on a personal level, very cathartic.
If I’ve piqued your interest you can find it on Amazon (paperback and kindle versions), it’s called ‘The 2020 Poetry Effect’.
How do you present your work, and what are your thoughts? Do you dare to be fully seen, or is less really more?
Thank you for reading, and please leave your thoughts in the comments, I look forward to reading them!
© Bernie McCullough, 2023 (#berniespoetry on Insta and Medium)
