Who Says Poetry Is Dead
“Poetry is dead”, they said.
Tell that to the woman who doesn’t have time to read a novel.
Tell that to the woman that would give anything for a thirty second read that makes her feel something other than the hustle of trying to be #allthethings
With the recent release of my debut book, SHE: A collection of you, me, her, the two most common questions I get asked are: where did the idea for SHE come from and how did I manage to write her while living this crazy busy life of being a full time worker, mother and a wife.
The truth is, I did not set out to write her. SHE (for short) was not some epiphany I had before bed one night. I didn’t spend countless hours of writing and scrutinizing in the dawn before my children woke and my day job started. No. SHE was birthed by my blog Fly In My Wine in 2014.
Fly In My Wine started out as a simple blog. I had no idea what a blog was but I wanted a creative space to motivate my instinctual desire to get back into writing.
I don’t know what it was that I thought I was going to “blog” about. I wanted to start a conversation with the women in the world. I wanted to talk about the big issues and pretend I was at some sort of virtual Eat Pray love (the Italian chapter) long table with a group of people drinking wine, eating carbs and obsessing over the wars and wisdoms of the world.
That’s not quite what happened.
What came out of me, are vignettes. I didn’t know it at the time. They were small moving pieces of writing all written in the third person: She smoothed her skin; She waited on the edge of his kiss, etc. A vignette often described as emotive writing that can fit on a vine leaf, that’s what I was scribbling down emphatically.
Back in 2014 my writing was often inspired by anxieties that fuelled my depression, and vignettes would fly out of me as a form of exhalation.
I wrote freely (and still do) about my functional wine life.
I found ease writing about love in third person (she) so as to keep myself just that little bit safer; not quite ready to be vulnerable and put I in front of my words. I wrote about the dreams I still had of passed loves, and the safety of loving a soul mate.
Once I became pregnant, and then a mother, the theme changed immediately. Vignettes were screaming out of me the way a baby does when it takes its first breath. I was using my writing as a therapist through the journey of trying to figure out what motherhood even means.
After my first child turned two, I was ready for another baby and unsure as we were about whether a second baby would be a good idea, I found the wonderer in me. I wondered what I would be if I chose to stop procreating, or once I ticked the boxes society had made so appropriate, who would I be?
I spent five years writing vignettes and posting to my blog, throwing them to the wind or the world to read. I did this in between working and becoming a mum. I did this when I travelled or moved around the country. They were just thirty second snippets of what I was feeling in any given moment in time.
Last year in 2019 during my Bachelor of arts degree, I had an assignment to write a book, or keeping to the word length of the assignment, provide chapters of a book. This was my chance. I collated the pieces of my blog and in doing so discovered that over the last five years I had experienced and written a journey of four major female roles in a woman’s life:
The wanderer: Finding herself in newfound freedoms
The lover: moulding her heart by way of trial and error.
The mother: becoming a new version of herself.
The wonderer: she is not finished yet.
I used my university assignment to build the book I had been unknowingly writing. I submitted a full-length coffee table styled book that if published, would include and be complimented by feminine sketched illustrations. The remarks from my professor were, ‘this is ready to be published’.
That was when the fear kicked in. Publish a book of poetry? But poetry is dead, isn’t it?
What I thought would be my biggest challenge, finding a publisher, turned out to be the easiest step. I found a publisher whose website spoke to the tone and desired audience of my book. I fumbled my way through the submission guidelines by doing a lot of googling (how to write a synopsis), and I submitted my manuscript.
I only used the P word (poetry) once in my entire submission.
One week later I was contacted by Natasha Gilmour at the Kind Press and was soon after offered my first publishing contract. The Kind Press nurtured SHE and I through the publication process and together we redesigned the way poetry can be seen in our world.
What I’ve learned is that poetry is not dead.
It just needs to be dressed well.
Tiare
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Bio – A mother of two, wife, fulltime mine site worker and creative writing student, Tiare is the Author of SHE: A collection of you me her, and has been published in multiple online and print journals including When Women Waken and The Vine Leaves Journal.
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