Hello dear readers, and welcome to my new subscribers and followers!
I’m so pleased you could join me here at Tender Rebellion. This post is mostly for those of you who don’t know me from Instagram, but I hope that those of you who do won’t mind a little retrospective.
I’ve been writing poetry for about five years now, and I’ve collected some of my favourites in two themed booklets. Today, I’d like to share two poems, one from each booklet, with you. And then I will link to the booklets, because you can download them as a PDF file FOR FREE!
Sylvia Plath as an early inspiration
The first booklet I made—sort of a chapbook really, that’s what they’re usually called in the poetry world, chapbook or pamphlet—so, the first one I made consists entirely of golden shovel poems inspired by the works of Sylvia Plath.
Here’s my personal favourite from the chapbook titled Digging for Sylvia. The poem is called Pieta. It is inspired by Brasilia, and the last words of each line form the opening stanza: “Will they occur, / these non-people with torsos of steel / winged elbows and eyeholes.”
Pieta
If I bore up hard, if I will
the thing to happen—my eyes they
burn with martyrdom—and you occur,
what will come of it except these
dark spaces filled with non-people.
Because it is not embrace with-
out pain—head against stone torsos—
that you offer, your wings made of
spiders' webs, a new kind of steel
to go on forever. Then winged
I lose with knees and elbows
scraped on sandpaper wishes and
dark boring into my eyeholes.
These poems are quite dark in nature, because in my early writing I was reacting to living with a disabling and misunderstood chronic illness. Later on, I learned to be more forgiving.
Writing love poems? Me?
I would never have guessed in those early days that I would write many love poems, although I wrote a couple of anti-love poems! But in time, I softened a bit I guess. I actually ended up writing a small collection of them.
Now these aren’t the sappy type of love poems. You won’t get that kind of writing from me. Here’s my favourite from the booklet—sorry, chapbook—titled Beautiful Precipice that I released as a free PDF last month. The poem is called Cathexis, a word I learned by reading bell hooks’s All About Love.
Cathexis
Sun rouses me, calls me to the window
where she stains low-hanging clouds like tea
steeping in boiled water.
I feel fat with love today
after waking from a uncanny dream
where streets lined with radiator brush trees
led me, Panglossian to have been seduced on a Friday,
to you.
While sun leaps softly out of the tree tops
and plays an angelic note or two, and seagull wings
beat the grey tapestry to rid it of dust,
I wear him
like a cashmere scarf that I have to wash by hand
to keep it lint free.
When I start feeling a little full of myself,
I remind myself that I must POP!
Swelling like a warm loaf, this day
is already an eager jumble of hand and tongue
salving him, the subject,
the depicted object in the mind of an artist.
But it won't do, I cannot
contain his boundaries, we are not
one, and I
cannot lay him down.
Thank you for reading this far! It’s now time to share the link where you can download both of these chapbooks. The link will take you to my Linktree page. If you scroll down a bit, you will find the links to both chapbooks near the bottom.
When you click on one of the links, it’ll ask you if you want to open the PDF file. You can read the whole thing right there, but you can also download to read later. Feel free to share the files with friends. I released them under a creative commons licence.
And now the link: download Digging for Sylvia and/or Beautiful Precipice.
In the next post I will share my favourite poem from my poetry collection Waking up to Thrutopia and the erasure collage from The Summer Book project that received the most likes on Instagram.
I hope to see you then xxx
Conny, beautiful work! I’m glad I stumbled upon you this morning first thing from the mountains of North Carolina. I checked your profile and saw that you were from Belgium, and, having lived in the Netherlands for a few years, I thought I would give it a read! (you’re country’s is way too strong, but since I don’t drink anymore, I forgive you)
Your poetry is different from most that I read, and I love the cadence of it (I’ll be honest and that I have no idea of the other poets you referred to) I just started dabbling in poetry— but mostly I post one original song a week. This is my first attempt at any kind of social media, and I try to limit my time online, but I will try to keep up with you as best as I can. I just wanted to say that you write beautifully, and to thank you for your gift!
You’ve certainly mastered the golden shovel. I’m still struggling with it. Sigh.