How My Writing Style Has Changed

Through my junior high and high school years, my poems were very religious, reflecting my strict Catholic upbringing. My senior year creative writing teacher pointed that fact out to me after reviewing my portfolio. She also ridiculed one of my religious poems in front of the class. Being the subject of her harsh criticism changed something in me forever. I didn’t resume writing poetry until my sophomore year in college when I wrote “Position Embracing Itself,” which I considered at that time to be my most sophisticated poem.

The next significant group of poems I wrote concerned my mother’s sudden and premature death in 1976. The first one I wrote was “The Money Tree,” which provided a stark contrast to a series of angry poems, one of which is “Survivor.” Having moved out of my mother’s house three weeks prior to her death, I had guilt dreams for twenty years. Then I encountered an inexplicable experience in that surreal state between sleep and awakening, as portrayed in “The Dream Twenty Years Later.” After that catharsis, I never dreamt about my mother again, sadly realizing that “she was lost to me forever.”

Before that twenty-year dream occurred, however, I went through a very bleak period characterized by loneliness, depression, anxiety, and insomnia. In the middle of the night, I would put pen to paper and record the stream of consciousness lines that flowed from my mind. Most of these obscure and highly esoteric poems, written between 1980 and 1982, appear in the section The Art of Darkness.

From the late 80’s to the present, I sporadically wrote a series of poems about the love of my life and the best person I know, my husband Bud. During these decades, however, my creative output was meager. I attribute that fact to falling deeply in love and being fulfilled emotionally.

Inspired by my editor’s desire for me to have “readable” poems in the manuscript, I began writing a good number of poems in February of this year. Pieces such as “Bubbles,” “Full Circle Farmhouse,” “Siblings,” and “Trolling at the Jersey Shore” are the result of this resurgence of inspiration.

I hope that each of my styles speaks to someone out there who has experienced loss, loneliness, and love.