The Your Voice section of The Poet’s List showcases articles and blog posts written by poets. These pieces may or not be about poetry. Most often, they are on topics with which the poet finds passion. You can find more of these posts, here: Your Voice.
The below is an excerpt from poet, Donna Pucciani’s piece titled, “Poetry Gives Words to the Wordless”:
When people ask me if I get nervous before a poetry reading or, let’s say, boarding an airplane, I tell them that I was a teacher for some 40 years and am not afraid of anything.
But that’s not entirely true. I started out teaching music, and after four riffs — not the percussion kind — I feared for my future, as do many unemployed and underemployed folks in our less-than-excellent financial “recovery” from the banks’ sanguine indiscretions. Fortunately, I was able to retool, and while teaching high school English in Chicago, I learned the art of poetry with my creative writing students. I’ve never looked back.Poetry has become my way not of escaping the world but embracing it. Fragments written on scraps of paper blossomed into poems, somehow wedged among the many essays I graded during the 70-hour workweek typical of English teachers. It was easy to write of everyday matters while sitting in my car at a red light, waiting in line at the grocery, or waking in the middle of the night to jot something down before it escaped my mind.
Poetry became a way of processing memories of an unhappy childhood in a family fraught with mental illness and substance abuse. Poetry was my sounding board while caring for my father, who was riddled with Parkinson’s disease during his last few years in the nursing home.
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