Happy poetic New Year to all the followers and others who visit me regularly or from time to time. Since the opening of this blog, I have explored poetry in different forms, but it has always been, since the beginning, about everyday poetry, so it is, most of the time, short poems that arrive at the turn of a sentence or a thought that crosses my mind, or of  an inspiring photo, sometimes both. I wonder what has occupied my mind on  that day, the nature of my reflections or my concerns, which I then translate into my poetic universe. Visitors  always make me happy, whether it’s a like or a thought, a preference, an inference: thank you. I draw my inspiration from different sources, some of which have been constant over the years, while others have dried up over time (the main one, Kenneth White, whom I no longer read).  I have preferences: generally speaking, I look for simplicity ( Basho for example), recently I added the New Zealand poet Sam Hunt to my readings, but I am still haunted by the beauty of Bo Carpelan’s writing who I want to know better  this year. Among the French, Saint-John-Perse is still there, Rimbaud (even if I don’t want to imitate him). Among the English,  Phillip Larkin, the Welsh Dylan Thomas and Basho among the Japanese. There are many others that I will not mention now. Form-wise, I look for simplicity , something that awakens the soul. I like tortured or overly learned forms and love poems less, but I like love moments. That’s what I do, but at the end of the day, everyone does what they want.

The readers of this blog are great. I have only received three negative comments in about ten years, this may have to do with the fact that the blog is free (I noticed that when an influencer starts to make money with social media, followers feel freer to make comments of their own). The first came from someone who no longer reads me: he told me that my choice of photo was horrible (in fact he was probably right). The second,  did not comment on my poetry but sent me a PM after I liked one of his posts , to express his anger, at what I’ll never know, but  he was not at all happy that I liked his post . I didn’t understand what it was about. I sometimes see him pop up elsewhere but it no longer concerns me. The third reader  wrote to me some time ago to tell me that I was killing poetry because poetry is not about flowers and birds. I found the remark rather odd, since although I don’t mind posting photos of flowers and birds (I can’t help it in fact), I don’t remember ever talking about flowers or birds in my poetry, the simplicity, though is always present and I do not feel sorry for it.  I didn’t please the follower by responding to him, that would be too much honour.

On that note,  I leave you with one of the most famous haikus from  the haiku master, Basho  and hope you will  get the essence of my research below :

The old pond

A frog jumps in:

Plop

Poetically yours

Sylvie G