Last night while getting ready for bed, I was recalling how I came to write “They’ll Never Write Songs About Me.”
The title had come from an incident from when I was 17 and pregnant for the first time. Bill and I had gone to a concert at Canobie Lake with our friends, the Stanleys. We managed to get right up to the edge of the stage. At one point, the lead singer dedicated a song to my friend Carole. I was happy for her, but I remember thinking, no one would ever dedicate a song to me.
Upon returning home, I’d sunk into a depression that lasted three months. Then, at a retreat, “They’ll Never Write Songs About Me” just poured out of me. And when I read it aloud to the group, almost everyone present had tears, even the guys. (To this day, my eyes well up whenever I recite that poem.)
That experience woke something within me. I’d written a few poems over the years, but this ignited a new kind of fire in poetry writing as sometimes, the words just pour out of me … faster than I can write them down. It was, and is, kind of magical. This mostly happened when I was out walking in nature or during times of emotional stress. Now, poems come a little more slowly – maybe because I don’t get out in nature much anymore.
Since then, I’ve had a couple chap books of poetry printed and a book of poems accompanied by photos I’d taken. I have another book of poems ready to publish. (Sadly, I’ll probably never get around to taking that step.) Plus, there are hundreds of other poems.
