Spent all of yesterday (except for time out playing cars with my nephew Marcus) reading through the poetry submissions for the Blackmail Press: Crossed Cultures edition. Probably read around 300 poems, and now feel slightly drunk on it all - poems being (often) concentrated little pieces of emotion or story. I find I go through a roller coaster of experience and feeling when reading a lot of poetry at one go. Kind of like watching three superb films back to back (only better of course, because it's poetry :)).
Today I've been reading two recently published books by NZ doctor-poets(yes, there's a rash of us at the moment, heh heh heh): Echolocation by Angela Andrews and Tributary by Rae Varcoe. Once again, I'm pondering what drives doctors to write poetry (or play music, or join national sports teams, or complete long PhDs when they should be thinking of retirement): a ceaseless search for meaning, for clarification, or is it relief from all the proffered emotion of others? Or maybe it's just a relentless masochistic streak? There should be name for the disease we've all got.
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