About Project Poetry

I love words. That's the short of it. Here's the long:

In my life I've considered being  a composer, a virologist, an investigative journalist, a recluse, President of the United States, an astronaut, and perhaps least realistically, a writer.
Well to be an astronaut you have to have 20/20 vision, so my coke bottle glasses and I had to cross that dream off the list. As a virologist I could travel to Africa and help track down the origin for the Ebola virus, exploring mountain caves and flirting with death on a daily basis! I took a course in Human Biology and decided that I would be better off just reading The Hot Zone instead of living it.

With every dream deferred I crawled back home, disheartened, and lost myself in a book or vented my frustration through a journal entry. After every disappointment I would throw myself more enthusiastically into my own poetry or the idea for a novel I'd been kicking around for years.
I'm a little embarrassed at how long it took me to figure it out.

Words had always been where I found the greatest joy. My favorite high school memories included discussing Ozymandias in English and performing a particularly moving monologue or solo in theatre. I fell in love with V for Vendetta the moment V started talking about the power that words have and how an artist uses them to express truth. I even started a poetry club once with a good friend of mine. A group of us would meet up underneath the stairs in the math hall or at a coffee shop somewhere and share our favorite poems.

Honestly it's pretty obvious that I should have been a writer from the start. I guess I just took the long way to get here.

Once I figured out what I want to do with my life I devoted my time to writing and reading like I never had before. I devoured Classic Literature and YA Fiction with equal fervor and began to purchase books of poetry. Here is when I realized that something was missing.

I would read a poem, deconstruct it to see what it meant and what it was made of, and then put it back together to appreciate the poem as a whole. The books I owned were covered in scrawling notes and highlighter marks, more annotations than actual printed word. Once I understood the poem I wanted to talk about it, to share what I'd learned and how it had affected me.
I wanted to hear what other people thought and start a conversation, something that I could not without being in an actual English class.

I looked online for what other people thought of the poems I had read, and found little. There's no place for open communication about words and their meaning.

Thus Project Poetry was born. If nothing else, maybe I can offer a point of view on these poems for other people like me to find and share.

As I read poems I'll post them here along with my thoughts. If you have any insight or thoughts or observations I encourage you to leave a comment, start a discussion, and get involved.

Words are meant to be shared.

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