Poetically Powered Newsletter, I have nothing for you/ I tried to write an update and instead wrote a story
Poetically Powered Newsletter, I have nothing for you / I tried to write an update and instead wrote a story
I created this Newsletter to keep you updated on my poetry life, my classes that I personally offer, like Poetic Catalysts, Haunted Poets, etc. and my facilitated spaces with the non-profit I’m a member of.
Breaking news: I have nothing for you.
I wanted to bring back Haunted Poets, it’s one of my favorites and a poet who took it said it was also one of their favorites of mine. It goes into the thought process of all poets are haunted as shit. We hold onto our trauma as poltergeists and then use that as writing. It’s not easy to eradicate the possession, so we end up writing from every angle. And sometimes, I don’t think we can ever get rid of that experience, so it’s okay to write it over and over again. Each time it’s a haunting, each time we are the haunted house.
I’m not the same person I was and I won’t be. When people hear you aren’t okay they want to provide you with solutions. I just want someone to sit in this darkness with me, say nothing, and just let me feel them with me. There’s nothing you can solve. What happened was Tom Fuckery and I will be struggling to get back on my feet for some time.
I want to teach but I don’t even have the energy to get up.
I want to provide spaces but I don’t want to be in my own space.
I want to be what I was but that is never going to exist again.
It’s okay to be different versions of ourselves. Who I was as a teenager is vastly different than who I am now. I think there’s always an essence of me, a spark, that is inherently me throughout the years. But everything else shifts and changes.
Poetry changed me, having friends across the world these past two years changed me, having everything taken from me recently changed me. My home: gone. My life: gone. What I was before: gone. Feeling secure: gone. And a part of me feels like the amount of happy I was will be gone. It’ll be a different sort now.
I keep going in my head “next month” for getting back to at least once a week of offering classes for you. But, that means advertising and social media. And I do not have it in me to be that. To do that. To even be present some days. I won’t send this newsletter for weeks if maybe ever.
I’m not writing. I don’t have it in me to write. I’m not interested in it, inspired, and nothing is coming to me. Just a huge, blank, empty space that won’t be filled.
I’m not safe enough mentally to write, to dive in and come out the other side.
It’s funny, when something traumatic happens you didn’t expect people will tell you, if you’re a writer or poet, “at least you can make a book out of it / a poem out of it.” But, for me, the difficult times don’t mean a wealth of writing. It means it shuts down in me because I don’t feel okay enough to write. It means my body becomes static noise, a TV that isn’t hooked up and keeps repeating snow in the background.
Holy shit, I lied, I am doing something
Something I will be in that just happened is Desiree's "Kin Keeping" in November. As a poet/writer who exclusively writes about family all. the. damn. time. I've been interested in Kin Keeping since the first time it came around. I set up a payment plan since money isn't really a great thing going on right now for me with getting pretty awfully sick and now trying to recover from that.
I wanted to get into "Poems that don't suck" since I've heard other poets having a great time with this workshop series but couldn't with timing, money, and all those lovely things. I'm hoping a consistent schedule of deep diving into family during Holiday season which is always so much fun for me will be beneficial to how I use my past in my poetry to try to rewrite my future.
Maybe, just maybe, I can bring back my holiday workshop, but I feel like I keep not holding up my hope of facilitating writing spaces again. That workshop is "Hold Holiday Hope Here" about how to respin the dialogue of difficult holidays if the season brings less than merriment to your door.
I don’t know when I’ll write again. I don’t feel like a writer or a poet. I’ve always been admired for being prolific but this is the other side of it. When I’m not okay, I can’t write. When it hurts so much to feel anything, my mind and body goes blank and numb. It can’t describe this. It doesn’t want to describe what this is and that's okay. I'll write what I can know right now if my body wants to do that. If not, we can wait.