All my life I’ve felt the need to express myself through literary lenses.  Before I could even read, indeed, I dictated stories to an older sister which we collected into little booklets, later illustrating them together.  Stephen Dobyns says that one writes when one can no longer be silent, and while subject matter changed over my two decades of life, the phrase still best applies to me.  Silence is not something I was ever good at.

Before my adolescence most of my stories and the few poems I wrote built a façade of sugary sentences.  Behind that, however, lay something much deeper, darker, and just plain fucked up.  Those dreary ideas wasted no time in springing to light shortly before my thirteenth birthday.  From there, my pens and pencils bent under near constant abuse writing poetry, as only an angsty, Linkin Park listening youth can give.

I vented many hundreds of pages of pent up Catholic anger and guilt.  I discovered new friends, friends who helped me develop both my writing and my personality.  And again, I was off.  I began to understand metaphor on a closer level, I realized how to use line breaks, I developed my own rules poetry and left prose on the curb.  While I made poetry my main mistress for the past seven years, my education has been rather brief.  There are many vital questions I should know, different forms I should be able to write, and meter I should understand.

Stepping back to sit in the stands changes the view drastically, and from this vantage I see the whole vista of colors and shapes that compose the world of poetry.  I can’t afford to ignore those poets who went before me.  All the essays in the world, no matter who wrote them, substitute reading poetry.  It’s something so basic, and yet so constantly over looked. I must read all I can; I must dive in, and find something that stirs and warms my soul, something that rips apart yet heals me, something visceral and inexplicable.  I must find meaning. I will ask of myself and of my sources the answer to all the questions, both spoken and unspoken.  I will find the answer to the most paramount question of all:  What is poetry?