My grandmother compared me to Hemingway over the phone yesterday. She's reading a book called The Paris Wife which is about his first wife Hadley Richardson. Richardson said that Ernest wouldn't write anything for months at a time, but then all of a sudden he'd be inspired and write for days on end without sleep. He'd take an hour nap and then waken to his alarm, just to resume writing. I think maybe that's the greatest compliment I've ever received. I cannot write like Hemingway, but writing is in my blood. I feel the way he did sometimes. I won't write a single poem for weeks and then someone around me will say something like "he never gets me" and I'll find the tragedy or the joy in it and write. I can spill out three, four, five poems a day...or sometimes just half a poem will come to me and I won't finish it. I wrote a 165 page "book" over the course of three days. I stayed up late, skipped dining out with my family, and worked through throbbing headaches and eye stings.
Writing and poetry are the only ways I know how to express myself with words thoroughly enough. Poetry rips the deepest and concerningly dark emotions from the deepest cavities of my being to the tiny page of my moleskin notebook. My mom feared that I was possessed by Sylvia Plath during the time period in class when we focused on her. I would wake in the middle of the night with words and random phrases pulsating in my brain. I suppose it should be linked to a form of schizophrenia...like poetzophrenia. Instead of voices I hear words. They speak to me only because they want to be written down, but then they go away. Or, at least I can keep them shut between two cardboard covers if I wish to do so. The greatest tragedy of all would to be the loss of creativity. for me it would be as if my voice had dwindled into a weak whisper and then disappeared all together.
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