"The Meaning of Poetry" by M Sarki

"The Meaning of Poetry" by M Sarki The Meaning of PoetryThanks for reading Rogue Literary Society! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. A number of years ago there was a period when I engaged myself in a contradictory struggle over feeling my life had no meaning. I say contradictory because I had no reason to feel this way. I was happily married to the woman of my dreams, our children had all completed college except for our youngest son who was enrolled at NYU, my wife and I both had decent jobs, we lived in a nice home with a dog and a yard, and I was writing poetry under the tutelage of Gordon Lish. I felt guilty then for feeling so poorly about my life and the awful truth that it certainly didn’t feel like all that much to me. I brought my problem up with Gordon on one particular visit to New York, a city my wife and I loved to visit, and for a time even had two children living there. And ever since 1995, when I first began attending his fiction-writing classes in Bloomington, Indiana, I made a point each trip to hook up with Gordon somewhere in Manhattan. He was always a kind and gracious man with both me and my family, always arranging the time to either have lunch or an evening meal with my entire family at some restaurant of his choosing. He treated my adult children with the greatest respect and listened to them attentively. He added lively performance art to many of his personal anecdotes none of us would ever forget.