Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Bridges

I often joke about the poet in his garret, partly because I have been there and I knew amazing poets who were there. Sometimes it is easy to stay within the closed confines of our private thoughts, afraid to commit those thoughts to paper as words. Fear of any kind is the raging torrent and we need a bridge to take us over to new thresholds of understanding, seeing, experiencing, then, having left the garret behind, new worlds become ours.

The poet has many bridges to cross and each one leads to new vistas, new opportunities, new possibilities and, even a new self. For T S Eliot modernity, the carnage of war and the death of God saw the bridges falling down, old hopes crumbling. In Hart Crane's poem The Bridge, the emphasis is not on what is lost in modernity but what is found or what might be:

New thresholds, new anatomies, wine talons
Build freedom up about me and distill
This competence to travel in a tier
Sparkling alone within another's will.

Why not read it and become inspired to cross the bridge between your mind and the page, your world and the world of the other, your circumstances and what you see on the other side...and any other bridge you need to cross. Poetry will elevate you to that tier and the sparkling of another's will.

I look forward to your posts and your poetry.

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