Sharp Words

“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”
John Ciardi (US poet, 1916 – 1986)
[Quote supplied by the Quotations Page]

Oh, so true – I wrote some poems I’m very fond of, back in my adolescence. A lot of them were about my own personal suffering; it really is that time of life when you feel everything so very deeply, because very often, you’re feeling that way for the first time.

The pain does wear off in time, and you learn to deal with it, current adolescents may be relieved to know (or may just not believe). Emotions are still felt deeply, but there’s an overlay of ‘this too will pass’. That has actually had an effect on my poetry (never mind the fact that I stopped writing it for a few years). If what I write these days contains any sort of suffering, it tends to be about that of other people rather than my own.

I was contacted recently about one of my poems, which might be considered to be about suffering, or at least about being different in an indifferent world. Someone at an online English tutoring service in Australia has decided they would like to use Alice as a tutorial piece. I did some checking on the service, of course, before I said yes – but really, if someone has read enough into one of my poems to think it will be a good comprehension exercise for high school students, then how can I say no? It’s incredibly flattering!