There are a lot of poets on WordPress, a lot of them are very good, I’m always impressed by people who write poetry, you really have to put it all out there. I think it is great that blogs allow people to write and more importantly share and publish their poems, cause let’s face it, poetry is as good as dead, not many books of poetry are published and even less sell enough to warrant to be published, though I think the self-publishing revolution of blogs and Amazon has given modern day poets an opportunity they would not have had otherwise. I mean let’s face it, the likes of me would never get published through the traditional method of a literary agent and then hopefully a publishing house/company. Most of us would end up in the slush pile. So we do it ourselves, although I think the majority of us know that we are not fooling ourselves, we know we will never make a living from it, we stick with the day job, a novel/poem/short story won’t get you on the bus when you’re broke.

We do it because we love it and that is the best reason to do something in my opinion, unless you are a serial killer.

Anyway I have strayed from the point of the post, poetry, I love it, especially the old stuff. But this poem by Sylvia Plath has always stuck in my head, it was the first poem of Plath’s that I ever heard when I was 13 and my English teacher read it aloud on our first day of secondary school. I became immersed in Plath’s work after that. And I think Child is a great poem. Plath wrote it for her newborn son.  So here it is. If you don’t like poetry, look away now.

Child

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new
Whose name you meditate–
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

-Sylvia Plath