Adventures in Poetry

Nimue Brown

May 4

I've written poetry since childhood. Child me was very much a nature poet. Teenage me wrote a lot of angsty emotional stuff - which wasn't that original of me, but there we go. The habit of using poetry for catharsis and processing stayed with me. These days I try to work it into something another person might find interesting or entertaining before I put it in front of anybody.

For some years, my writing poetry has depended a lot on having an audience for it. I put the odd poem on here, and there's one on Patreon most months. I was at my most prolific as a poet when I had a local, monthly poetry event to go to. There's nothing like the promise of an audience to focus my thoughts and get me interested in writing. Making people laugh is deeply attractive to me. Just occasionally I managed to spellbind hard enough to get deep silence in response to my words, and I find that highly rewarding, too.

Of course lockdown meant there were no poetry events to go to. I rapidly discovered that Zoom events with more than a couple of people stressed me to the point of malfunction, so while there was a big online poetry scene during the pandemic, I wasn't part of it.

I'm currently in the process of reviewing the poetry I've written in the last two years, to see if I can make a viable collection out of it. When I've pulled it together, people on Patreon will get first dibs, and then later in the year I'll put it in my ko-fi store - https://ko-fi.com/O4O3AI4T/shop - where I already have a number of ebooks, and two poetry collections. You can pick any of those books up for free, or pay what you want. I'm a firm believer in gift economy, so if you have limited resources, please help yourself to the free stuff with my blessing.

If you have resources, throwing a few coins in the hats of creators you like is a really good choice. It makes a lot of odds. It doesn't have to be my hat - if you're able to support other creators then that's entirely cool so far as I'm concerned. I also benefit from other creators being able to afford to keep going.

Comment