Writing Poetry, Or Taking Up The Torch.

Four or five months ago I started rereading my poems because I thought it was high time to send some out to magazines. To my surprise, I remember distinctly being overcome by a sense of discomfort about everything I had written. Some of it was barely acceptable to me. Yes, there was sentiment in my poems, but I realized somehow that I lacked something.

What was I lacking? After pondering over it I concluded that there was no purpose in my lines. No sense of direction. No message. I was mostly writing poetry for poetry's sake. So, I started giving a different shape to my ideas and writing poems with a more distinct edge. Or, so I believe. I felt I had to write about the "hic et nunc", the here and now, the present times.

I'd love my poetry to be like a torch as Jean-Paul Sartre suggested in the following quote: "every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry."

Several of my poems have been rejected. But, two of my poems have been accepted and published by Zouch Magazine lately. There's hope. I shall fare forward.