Liberation to Write Poetry (Bad or Good)

by Sasha Cagen | Sep 4, 2012 | Advice

the bounty of life

Once upon a time, in early 2011, I was living in Buenos Aires with my Belgian best friend and conspirator in life Griet. Mostly we were obsessed with tango. Griet got me writing poetry. We would go to a cafe and each take a notebook, write a poem and share it with each other. Neither of us write poetry, so we had an untrained, silly, beginners-mind joyous kind of feeling writing poems. Then, if memory serves, we would actually clap!

I never allowed the possibility of writing poetry into my life. I submitted a poem to my college literary magazine in my first year of college and the poem got rejected, so I got the idea in my head, I am not a poet. But those afternoons with Griet were so fun. They gave me a novelty feeling, a no-pressure feeling, a kid-like feeling. I am at a point in my life where I want to cultivate that no pressure-feeling again, to make creativity pure fun again without worrying so much about whether something is “good.” So today I start with a no-pressure ode to heirloom tomatoes. I invite you to write your own no-pressure poem in the comments.

An ode to heirloom tomatoes

The Internet is full of life lessons
And I hate to write another
But there is a succulent juicy suck in an heirloom tomato
And you can even suck on one on public if you are brave
I like seeing people
Eat a tomato like a fruit
Break the rules of polite society
The boundaries between fruit and vegetable
The borders between public and private
The line between sweet and sour