Writing
How Images Help Me Clarify Abstractions
An idea for poems, essays, diary entries, and more
I wrote a poem the other day I liked so well that as I reread it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it.
So often I’ll have an idea in mind, but as I try to write, the idea doesn’t come through in my poem in the way I’d hoped (or at all, really). But this time, just the opposite happened: the poem helped me better understand the idea my mind had been trying to grasp.
OK, what’s the idea?
In recent days or maybe even weeks, I’d been thinking a lot about an idea that felt important to me. I wanted to write a poem about how we might find healing by forging loving relationships with our childhood selves.
That’s pretty abstract, right? And how do we even do such a thing as to heal that way? Was I wanting to write a poem about an impossible action?
But I kept coming back to it. I had a couple of ongoing conversations with people close to me about related ideas. We can’t revisit the past, of course, but can we recover or reinterpret it with our art? Can other people help us heal by wanting to know us and our life stories so intimately that their love in the present might reach back into our past?
