You may be thinking that I've not been writing any poems of late! Not true at all! The truth is that I was given three beautiful notebooks for writing poems in, for my birthday, and this has dramatically altered the way I write for the moment... Instead of writing straight on to the computer, and being able to cut, paste and delete etc, I've been filling pages with messy crossings out and numbered syllables. It's very interesting to have an "archaeological record" of the thought processes, but it's also depressing to see how bad my poems look in my apalling handwriting!
I'm not at home at the moment, so am hardly accessing any computers, so probably won't have time to type up all the recent stuff today, but will start with the oldest, which I wrote on the 16th. I'm also aware that at least 3 of my recent poems refer back to earlier poems, and (as a friend said!) I'm rather arrogantly assuming readers are familar with my oeuvre!
30 July 2008
About Me
- Shieh Jen Li
- I'm a time-rich/money poor, single mother. I mostly write haiku, because I like the discipline of the form. I had hardly written anything for years, and it took some terrible events in April 2007, which led to the end of my marriage, to start me writing again. That was the start of a sequence of poems about my divorce, which I have called "Separate Ways". I think each poem can stand on its own, but it is also an unfolding (and as yet, unfinished) story. I have found the haiku form stops me from getting over-emotional and "gushy". It took several months before I wrote about anything else, but when I did ("Summer Solstice"), it felt like a really big step. I think the style and subject matter of my "non-divorce poems" are also influenced by the fact that I am quite a keen photographer, so a lot of them are purely observational, and are about things that caught my eye, because they were quirky or ironic. I believe that my poems are carefully crafted, and I think very hard about every single word (well, you have to, when most of them are only 17 syllables long!). By the way, the photo was taken, while I was actually writing the poems on 8 October 2008!
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