My illicit affair with poetry
Why does it feel so forbidden?
This piece first appeared a few weeks back in Footnotes, my email newsletter.
I’m sharing it here because I’m still sneaking around. The poetry obsession has only grown since I wrote this. The Poetry Pharmacy in London sucked me in, as did bookshops all over London. But this trip, the majority of what I bought were poetry books, rather than novels. Curiouser and curiouser.
Poems have ignited something, and my novelist self is nervous about this. As I slip into a book of poems to explore, is this pulling me away from my novel? Perhaps, in that moment, but does this mean I’m hurting the novel?