Riffing Intellectual
How The Medium Poetry Community Quickly Nurtured Inspiration in this “Newbie”
~Inspiration can oftentimes come from the strangest of places, and other times, from precisely the place you'd expect. I have been writing poetry for as long as I can remember (strictly in a hobbyist capacity so far), and as a 39-year-old single father of 1 living in Southern Ohio, poetry isn't quite the most bustling of businesses. I'm not saying that poetry is much of a vocation in ANY part of the world today, sadly, but I'll be damned if I didn't come to the right place to not only find inspiration but a community of friendly and engaged artists etching prose galore still, compensation not required.
Flash to the summer of 2020, and after a decades-long sabbatical from writing, I witnessed the same news that we all unfortunately did with the George Floyd killing in Minnesota by a police officer. If by some chance you’re not familiar with the case, I’d caution that watching the video is hard to stomach, but almost necessary to feel the weight of the rage that so many across the world felt that day, and to understand what ultimately thrust me back to my quill with a vengeance. You see, politics, religion, addiction, and more recently fatherhood have all been my specialties when it comes to writing poetry, so obviously, the political upheaval that orbited Mr.Floyd’s untimely demise was exactly the fuel THIS poet needed.
Prolific may not even be a big enough word to describe how ravenously I’ve been writing for the last year. Along with that sudden influx of new material, burning a hole in my laptop (so to speak) though, I needed an audience of more than just my Facebook “friends” to share it with. In the world of political poetry, activism is the rub, and there is no activism without an audience. So, I sought that type of audience (online of course, ya’ know, covid-19) for the first time in my life.
Luckily, a Google search quickly led to a great article on Medium.com by Sarah Baylor talking about 8 proven websites to read and share poetry, which then led me to peruse them all and realizing that, for me, the very website I started on was the right one. That sentiment has only grown as I’ve been posting and meeting the great folks and brilliant artists in every nook and cranny of this site. This brings us up to the present, dear reader, and after approximately a month on Medium, I was recently asked by an editor of Illumination, (also here on Medium) Marcus, to share the upcoming poem for publication.
We have now come to where the beautiful ironic happenstance of fate to our story is triggered, and it’s one that I love. The poem in question is NOT one that I self-published in my rage-writing tornado of the last year, but one that I wrote in a comment reply to Marcus directly, in the comment section under a completely different poet’s excellent work (shout out to Dr. Fatima Imam)! Remember I’m new here, and I’m not sure how proper or improper it is to practice such random acts of instant improvisational reply, but the original writer’s fantastic work inspired me to give it a try.
I ventured into those comments, in the first place, to applaud and commend the doctor on her beautiful work entitled Togetherness, where I found Marcus and his comment about a section of her poem referencing mundanity in love. Marcus was also impressed with her work, but more specifically the highlighted section (“there is satisfaction in mundane”) because in 2013, yes 8 years ago, he also had explored this timeless concept of the moments, dullest, between two human beings and their importance informing AND IN forming what we call love (‘’more important than sharing our highpoints, I want to share the mundane, and each other’s pain. That to me is true unconditional love’’)!
All of this thrilled me because carrying such anger for a year can weigh on a person emotionally, regardless of whether they are getting it down on paper and turning tragedy into art, or not. For the first time since my return to poetry, I was taken away! Of all the topics in all the world, love, had been one that I hadn’t, in a literary sense, explored (outside of my paternalistic love and even that wasn’t as fiery and frequent as when she was newly-born)! Love had wings again, in the doctor’s words, when placed in that particular order, and so too did it when reading Marcus’s beautiful quote! Inspiration may not be a big enough word to describe how high I was on those words, in that moment, and so I just went for it.
I began by praising the two poets and expressing a type of confusion that only passion can cause, because I felt something profound was at just the next step in the evolution of the concept! I didn’t know what it was, and I certainly didn’t know if I was going to find it feverishly scratching out, while simultaneously calculating, the word math that only a great flow state can provide as I riffed this poem:
Mundanity lends sanity to our intangible tangle, our blah-filled moments UN-mangled, right before our bored eyes. Torrid sighs, tell sordid lies, to ourselves, about how best to occupy the shelves inside our minds intertwined as we be. At least these days, ya see. See, the mundane is our secret fun game wherein the clock struck 12, but in a timeless realm. One that WE helm the ______…EXACTLY! Fill in our blank and you’ll still not find us, lost in each other in another dimensional space, like a plotline chased only to erase the reason you ran in the first place. You’ll never flow, in this state, in which we partake, because the trick is a treat, and it’s on ‘Nothing St.', where the ‘nothing’ beats, everything else. It’s us to ourselves, in the most useless of cells, for they have no restraints on our love and no directions to taint it with others mind-framing it, and thus stealing away its ultimate ‘unique’ we lazily lay upon, whenever the heart beat, falls under our feet, while our feet retreat, from the floor, for higher shores, and our higher scores, are scored light years away from his, hers or even your doors.
Simplicity…
Quiet… Doubt…? No.
Wow. Just wow.
Thank you Medium, thank you Dr. Fatima Imam, and thank you Marcus
Sincerely,
PoetChris
