The beauty of the mundane
Your weekly dose of fresh poetry #122
I search for
beauty in the mundane,
extraordinary beauty in
ordinary objects,
love in all.
I will not
assume you see what I
see, have read what I have read, have lived
what I have lived. You add
to my world.
We do share
many things, but also
bring our own perceptions, own stories
to the game, creating
new canons.
It's us three:
poet, poem, reader.
Together we will create meaning,
build understanding and
make beauty.
Together,
that's the key. Together
we will bring kindness, beauty and more
understanding. We'll bring
empathy.
This is the final issue of your inbox poetry magazine in 2022. The year is coming to an end. And with a bang. This week I reached 200 subscribers! I had never expected that at the start of this year, so thank you all, dear and wonderful readers of this poetry magazine.
As a nice final note, I wanted to share with you my poetry manifesto. I’m actually not really sure if manifesto is a word I like very much, but making a declaration of intent, explaining why I write what I write, seems to be a good closing of this beautiful year. And that is what you can read in the poem.
The keys are finding beauty in the ordinary, trying to build mutual understanding and grow empathy, and a respect for our diverse world. It’s easier than ever before to connect with someone who is geographically far removed from where you are. For writers and poets, this can make things a bit more complex.
Being geographically spread also often means that culture and canon and therefore reference framework are not the same. A lot of meaning in writing and poetry traditionally comes from a common understanding of references. But with a global community connecting to a poem, it becomes increasingly unlikely that everyone in that community has grown up reading the same books, watching the same movies, experiencing the same historical events in the same way as you have. That doesn’t even take into account that with the amount of data (and information and art) we are creating each day, it is impossible to keep up with everything everywhere all the time.
Taking that into account, I think we can best create meaning together. I see something and share it with you through my poems. You read it and then give the poem that final layer it needs to find the meaning it was intended to have. At that point in time.
That all is what I want to say with the poem above. My declaration of poetry. Yes, that’s it. So much better than ‘manifesto’. This is my declaration of poetry, and I hope it will help you to enjoy the poems even more next year.
Which brings me to… wishing you a lot of love, happiness and health in the year to come. Make it count. Make it fun. Make it together.
Read on for Poetics of life and Poetry elsewhere
The poetics on life
Starting your week with a creative exercise. It sets your mind up for achieving great things. I believe. That’s why I recently started a weekly creativity prompt, based on a picture. This is the first one, the prompt to write a short poem based on what you see. I plan on doing more weekly prompts like this. On Twitter, Mastodon and maybe here. What do you think: do you want to receive a weekly prompt in your inbox? Let me know by answering the poll:
As you may have guessed from previous issues, and the fact that I wrote 11 poems during the last football world cup, I like the beautiful game. Earlier this week, the one and only Greatest Of All Time passed away. The King of the Beautiful Game. Thank you Pelé, for making football so much more interesting. This video is a nice overview:
Poetry elsewhere
Language is not only a wonderful tool for communication, but it can also be a tool for exclusion. Sometimes it’s hard to express yourself in a language that is not yours. With migration, language also becomes more fluid, more mixed, more of a melting pot. When poets manage to mix more than one language into a delicious poemcocktail, I am a fan. Just like the poet(ess) wordstobepoetry did here in || poetry sets us free ||.
Reena Kapoor writes beautiful poetry about arrivals and departures. Sometimes, she shares something else, in this case a recommendation. One that also has to do with arrivals and departures. To keep in form, she has also added a beautiful poem at the bottom of this post. Go read it:
Notice what you see, and always chase your wild. This poem by Roeland Cruys is all about that. Especially the noticing part is something I can relate to, as you have read in my statement of poetry above. Now, read Roeland’s Wild Wines:
As usual, a wonderful contribution to my day!
Happy New Year, Arjan! Here’s to a wonderful 2023!