the dead kid in me

I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it's also a way of putting it somewhere so I don't always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more l am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky.

Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I've found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing.

Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, "You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read."

I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it's also a way of putting it somewhere so I don't always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more l am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky.

Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief.

The thing that I've found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing.

Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, "You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read."

//

— Ada Limón interviewed by Lauren Leblanc

— Movie: Patterson (2016)

“I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.”

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.

“December. This heart full of tears and of night.”

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.

This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”

She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her, you are her poet. But that's all there's to it.

Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven—waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through.

If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.

The road which leads me to you is safe even when it runs into oceans.

"I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process."

I thought I would be understood without words.

you brought us something, some type of small victory, and for this I say: good and let us grieve no more; like a flower dried and thrown away, we forget, we remember, we wait.