Corkman: I disliked poetry, now I’m a published poet!

WHEN I started writing poetry, I didn’t even like poetry.

I didn’t read any, had no grá for the vague obscurity of many the poems I had to rote learn in school.

Poetry didn’t feel accessible. It felt elitist, pretentious - for people that led different lives to me.

In many ways, these feelings still reside. While I know, appreciate and read poetry, a lot of it still feels inaccessible, uninviting.

I started writing poetry to try and figure out my emotions. Coming out of a four-year depression, emotions were vague and far away. Indecipherable for the most part.

But then I found that, if I wrote about the small emotions I could feel, they began to grow, and eventually, I was able to feel them more fully, in 3D.

It was as if I had the spark of an emotion, and writing poetry fanned this spark into a flame. Suddenly, I understood the value of poetry.

At age 21, I began to scribble these verses anywhere I could in order to engage with my emotional life - something that other people seemed to be able to do instinctively.

Words have always fascinated me. How they feel in the mouth, the emotions certain words illicit. They have this inherent power. Certain words, spoken at the right time, can change your entire life. And yet, we use them every day, casually, thoughtlessly. But our words have power.

Throughout my life, I’ve kept incessant lists of words I like. Lists of my favourite words, like odyssey, necessary, enigma. I’ve started tattooing my favourite words on my skin. They give me a sense of comfort in a way.

I often ask people what their favourite words are, and they respond with confused faces, wondering why anyone would keep track of such things.

Enigmatic is a collection that marries my need to explore emotions, and this love of language. As least, that’s what I hope it does.

I’ve always found it a little difficult to exist as easily as other people seem to. I’ve always watched, often with a hint of jealousy, as my peers and friends seamlessly created and enjoyed their lives. In this sense, much of life has been enigmatic to me - mysterious, hidden - a riddle I needed to solve.

These poems reflect this desire to figure life out. The poems are at times observations, reflections, questions. Other poems deal with the challenges of maintain relationships.

All of the work, I hope, is relatable, as these are problems and challenges we all face at one time or another.

And, like all of my work, the goal is to assure the reader that they are not alone, despite how it might feel, that someone else, somewhere else, has felt exactly as they have felt.

In a recent TEDx Talk, I spoke about how poetry can create connections between people. Poems reassure us that the way we are feeling is not unusual, the worries we have are not uncommon, the experiences we’ve had are not unrelatable. We are together in this, inherently.

In the world we live in now, making real connections is harder than ever, so in this sense, poetry and writing may be more important than ever, because we are all craving real connection in a world that is eternally digitally connected.

Enigmatic releases on November 24 with Sunday Mornings At The River, and will be launched from Cork City Library on Wednesday, January 10.

My hope is that you see yourself in these poems, that you realise you are not alone in how you feel, and that it is okay to feel this way, that it is okay to be.

Below is one of the poems in the collection.

Prayer Before We Begin

I’m writing this now to remember this feeling,

of being on the cusp,

caught between worlds,

old life fading,

no longer welcome to return.

New life expanding,

like the light of the torch before me,

as I walk Lexi on the same

country roads, all green and obvious.

I’ve walked dogs here

for two decades or more.

This is it now.

This is it now.

No going back,

nothing will be the same.

Are you ready for this,

as the clouds break apart

and acknowledge me with rain?