There is no place like [the poetic] home.
The poetic home is a place where a narrator can take their metaphorical shoes off and unwind—ambling across structural floorboards; nestling up among the threads of stanza and verse; warming their hands around a nice big mug of imagery, all while gazing at the fire blazing before them—one created by the poet and fueled by the pen. A place of inner- and outer-reflection. Of peace. Of turmoil. A place where the narrator, the poet, and the reader can find comfort and solidarity even in discomfort and isolation. A true, complex, multi-faceted, literary home.
As a poet, I aim to unlock the doors of the poetic home and welcome readers in—allowing them to join me in the overt personal (say, the living room) through translative and understandable expression, but also keeping them at somewhat of a distance from the covert (say, a bedroom) through conceptual transference.
Complete transparency and, yet, semi-transparency.
Thinking over my own poetic work and approach, I believe that the domestic space can be a poet’s greatest inspiration. Sitting at home with one’s thoughts, gazing through windows with tied-back curtains, listening to the world within and around—from behind closed doors and through open ones—there is an endless amount of possibility to be explored or re-explored. The poem written through a domesticated lens holds (and harnesses) great power when it comes to creating, exposing, and confronting one’s most intimate dynamics and the musings that influence them.
The poems’ form, words, devices are all centralized around the concept of building. And belonging. In a poem, each and every piece plays its role in constructing the bigger picture; they all fit in, they all have their place, they all belong. The poem can provide a poet (and their readers) with a blueprint to newfound understanding and expansive unity, even while considering the variance in our own definitions of ‘familiar’ and ‘home.’ And, of course, what is more familiar than one’s own domestication? The place you eat, sleep, laugh, repeat.
Again, the poem has the power to give new purpose, new meaning to all the little things (especially those singular, personal moments) that one may take for granted in their all too familiar environments—things that are done or experienced each and every day and, yet, never really given the time of day. Through my work, I aim to shine an introspective light on those familiarities. On the ordinary. The mundane.
In a way, my intent is to not only explore the domestic space with my poetry, but to construct it. To consider its impact. I want to plaster its walls. Furnish its rooms. Get to know its inhabitants—closely and from a distance.
To me, poetry is a home—one that can be stagnant and still, but also one that can be carried right along with us.