Alchemist's Pen

Katrina Moran

My poetry “adventure” stemmed from an ill-advised challenge made in jest by my then-partner. I love writing, but have always sucked at poetry (based on the very few times I ever attempted it), so it was a surprise to us both that I accepted it and then actually followed through. But I guess we underestimated the mental impact of a year in quarantine…

Turns out that I do indeed suck at it, but that I also love the wordplay and the word-puzzle of it all, so I kept going. It’s why I wrote out explanations for some of the non-personal ones though… I’m hoping the genius (no, really!) of the wordplay offsets the cringiness of the lines, and I don’t want a single bit of cleverness to go unappreciated (or at least unknown)- it has a lot to make up for. 🙂

I am not normally quick to share my writing with people, but I spent way too much time on (some of) these to not do something with them. Also, the wordplay is genius (no, really!) and I can’t win the Pulitzer Prize for puns if they remain hidden in my Google docs.

On a random note, I can’t seem to break away from the simplest of rhyme schemes… that’s a sorcery that I’m not sure I will ever be able to wield.

And for the record, should anyone (my mother) become concerned, for my personal ones about my eventual break-up, I made a very one-sided Everest out of a two-sided molehill as far as the dramatics of my emotions and the situation go. Break-ups are good source material and I often wrote entire poems just to use single lines that popped in my head but couldn’t make fit with the others. But they were often basically different-ish ways of saying the same thing and so I recognize that the poems are, as well, rather repetitive in several aspects. But waste not!

I do appreciate the “poetic” justice that the one who launched this endeavor ended up becoming the “victim/villain” of it all, even if he will never know to regret it. 🙂

But for the record, the western-themed one was about a different past pardner.

Oh, I should call out that it was Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore albums that sparked my memory that I love to write, so she was an underlying influence in both getting started and in my actual writing. So knowing this, a sub-challenge, also issued in jest by my partner, was to build in a reference to her in every poem, after I did in my first for him, and I also accepted this one. Some are very obvious and some very subtle. And some are blatant rip-offs of her lyrics, but I notated where that was the case, and the intentionality of the near-plagiarism was part of my creativity. Same goes for a couple of lines I lifted from other authors.

Also, while I am at doling out credit, I love Garth Brook’s song Ireland and have really embraced the one lyric of “rolling fields of green and fences made of stone”. Which is pretty much a literal description and a fairly common one, for the landscape, but I like the way the phrase flows and that landscape is also one of the things that I love most about the UK and, indeed, Ireland. So some form of that line appears A LOT. Especially as my ex was English and I spent a lot of time there, and that clearly influenced a lot of my poems as well.

My apologies to all creatives for dragging down their names by association here.

But, incidentally, I have also intentionally worked in a reference to ghosts in every poem. I can’t remember why I decided to, other than I love ghost stories, but I did so I’m sticking with it. But I underestimated how easy it would be to come up with new ways of doing that, so they also often make for some repetition.

Also, I am compulsively adamant that all lines only take one line of the page. So I have had to throw out a lot of punctuation and words that would have been very helpful in dictating the flow and/or meaning of them. I have tried to lift this self-imposed rule when it breaks my heart to throw out a liked/needed/helpful word or two for it, but I can’t. It pisses me off that my effort here is for naught when the poems are viewed on mobile screens. But I’ve gotten around this in some of the poem with the added photos allowing for different formatting. Also, I tossed out punctuation in some cases when leaving it ambiguous allowed for lines to hold more than one meaning.

And finally, many of my words were carefully selected for them or the lines they are in to hold multiple meanings, though in many cases, they are nods to personal experiences. I prioritized wordplay, even if I’m the only one who would ever understand it, over the sound of the lines every time, and sometimes the sacrifice was pretty great. So if anything reads as particularly clunky, that’s why! The photos included are often clues to at least one of the meanings, but sometimes just tie to the literal words and/or were associated with the experience that inspired them in some way. A few also added their own layer into the mix.

I don’t know why I am writing all of this out. I don’t expect that anyone will read my poems (I’ve struggled to even get my family to read the couple I’ve shared with them and they are by law, biologically bound to) let alone my “About Me” section, but boredom struck when poetic inspiration didn’t, so here we are all the same.