The therapy of poetry

So, yesterday, I wrote another lyric — 'The Cherry Blossoms'. It is a part of a song-cycle of a dozen lyrics that mark time between Sunayani's journey to Eugene, Oregon (in August, 2011) and her return to Calcutta (in July, 2012).

Over the past seven months, I have written only six of these songs. I intend to write six more over the next three months. In the meanwhile, I have written 45,000 words of my novel and a nearly 5,000-word paper on Jack Kerouac.

Poetry is difficult. For prose, I need to sit down at my desk, in front of my computer and keep writing. But I can't write poems like that. In this series, all poems are inspired by some incident or piece of conversation with Sunayani. The last one was composed a week after she told me that cherry trees beside the road on which she walks to college had started to flower; then the leaves on the tree outside her window would sprout; then she will come back to me.

So, poetry, for me is therapeutic; like the Ancients, I feel poetry can regenerate all those higher feeling which slowly wear away, fade away, die in me as I struggle to stay afloat in the terrible shit hole that this world seems to have become. When I write poems, it is my escape from this cesspit, my transcendence...