I have decided to break up with poetry. Oh, Poetry. It’s not you, it’s me.

Now, I’m not expecting a stampede. A chorus of ‘don’t do that’. I am just done with writing poetry and will be concentrating on other writing. At least over the next year or so anyway. I’m going to concentrate on writing other things like stories and non-fiction pieces. (I know that I’m excellent at describing things. Which is, to be frank, a useless skill. Unless I’m planning on moving into the catalogue industry.)

As Marianne Moore puts it in her poem ‘Poetry’:
‘Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in /
it after all, a place for the genuine.’

So, I will still flirt with poetry. Trying to discover ‘the genuine’. I’ll metaphorically flutter my eyelashes at it, offer to buy it a drink. If it’s a fine piece of poetry then I’ll listen to the music of its words and allow myself to sink into it.

Loving poetry is a fine, and perfectly, acceptable practice.

But poetry writing – you and me are o.v.e.r. And don’t you dare give me a “booty call”. . .