Creating Without Suffering

Anger can be intoxicating, a fire that burns you from the inside out until your nothing but barely flickering embers, but once you're whole again, you miss the way your insides prickled and you seek and seek until you find a lighter and can ignite your stomach again, inviting the flames to consume you over and over again until you don't remember what it's like to be content. Sometimes I miss getting so consumingly angry like that.

Anger is what I feel in this poem, "Like Dogs They Ran Towards the Lord". Katy Hargett writes concisely, without "and"s because they waste space, but instead with &'s. It's a tool I love and once used in probably what is one of my best poems to date, a poem about a long gone father and bluebonnets and a forgotten love. I wrote that poem when I was forgiving my anger, when the pine heart in the pit of my stomach was smoldering and beginning to be doused, but not quite enough.

I believe that some of the best art is produced from suffering and strife, because that's what people resonate the most with. Try it; the next time you have a conversation with someone, tell them about something you've struggled with and they will almost always have a similar anecdote of their own struggle. Tell them next time, however, that you're now the happiest you've ever been, that you've found peace in where you are now, and it is the very rare person who will offer their own joy they've found.

It's sad, because I've found myself struggling with the notion of writing without struggle. I don't believe you have to be unhappy and suffering to be an effective artists, as is the consensus, so now I just have to find ways to channel my own way of connecting with an audience.

Hargett, Katy. "Like Dogs They Ran Towards The Lord." Cargoes. 2016: 58.

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