Tom Sheldon

Take a poem and look very closely into it…the vowels, the letters. Study it closely….It probably can replicate itself (though not easy) you are my eyes. Directing your voice without distraction in it. Sense and feel the difference between the visual informational moments the image, the personality, the personal history, hurt, anger, etc. A separate reality more real than sun on skin, with the indefinite power of wind and stars. Far more reflective than a pond of still water, more substantial than a rock.

Poetry has allowed me to diffuse my fears, express disillusionment, and be heard. To differentiate between what the mind and the eyes see. To love long after the partner is gone, to mourn, to connect tickling and telling the reader the truth. Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.  Write for yourself and celebrate writing. It is one of the oldest most sacred connections with self. A ancestral  journey through time from your eyes down the arm via the hand and pen onto paper then back through the eyes.

Poetry Reconciles Us to the World. Poetry has always possessed the deeper roots and the larger promise. The arts are not reductive, but seek pattern, order and consistency in the very midst of variety.  Poetry may not change the world — much though Marxists insist that it should — but it can enable us to see life whole, with clarity and understanding. The great theatre of the world is written in language, and its poetry reconciles us to the manifest absurdities and cruelties of our natures.

Art can set aside the struggle for individual preeminence, said Schopenhauer, and learn to see life as it is directly given to us through timeless ideas.

Poetry makes the world more visible and  can capture ‘wonder.’ Ordering thoughts and ideas, we choose our words with discernment and fit with a sense of proportion. Shadows are brought into the light echoes traced to their origin, muddied streams run clear again. Like following a trail to the summit like tracing a stream to find the source. Words, the travel sometimes level and easy the simple becoming difficult, the difficult easy. Words calming the hearts dark waters: dredging from the depths the proper name of things.

“From the eyes

to the mind

of the pen

down the arm

to the heart

of the hand

in the paper”

© Copyright  Tom Sheldon