Poetry – The Thoughts Of Odvito

Perspective. Preference. Taste. Resonance.

These are very personal things. A reader’s experience of poetry and their reaction to it is also deeply personal. What resonates with one reader may not resonate with another. So, who is to say if a poem is bad or not?

If someone were to read an extremely simplistic presentation of words, a veritable “thought for the day” style of poem that, in two lines, does no more than make a person feel…perhaps deeply…perhaps shines a light into a dark corner of their mind…has that piece of writing not achieved something significant?

Must we all be devotees of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Frost? If the rise of the Instapoets has achieved one positive thing it has been to touch the “common person” with the written word in a way that – in the modern age – the classic poets have largely failed to do.

I’d like to think we could all drop our literary elitism at the door for long enough to acknowledge the value in that.

Bad poetry is not bad if it brings a little light to the darkness of someone else’s world.

Michael Cunliffe

Silent on a stool at the servery,
mind drifting upon nothingness,
I am uneasy.
This is so faintly familiar –
a distant grinding, like a coffee machine
I borrowed once –
warm dripping water,
a faintness in my hearing
as dead as a moth bobbing in water
whilst breaths of wind nibble the pool’s edge.
I am restless
in this noiseless vacuum –
relentless –
strange yet strangely familiar –
a yesterday of someone else’s.
Air switched off – a wi-fi of silence –
no device is no device.
I have a distant inclination
of life twenty years ago,
did I live through that?
Now I sit unstimulated,
there are pinpricks up and down my spine,
my fingers twitch, my eyes squint.
My device, my device,
where did I leave it?
I can barely believe this is me –
the same me –
when sound was not necessary,
when silence was not daunting,
when stimulation was not constant.
Is this really me? A gentle sense
of passing time – infectious, how it grows –
is a silence, impatient and deafening,
a yesterday that was not born
to an addiction of stimulation.