This is not spring and this is not a poem

April 10, 2018. Snow everywhere and it’s miserably frigid. The calendar says spring arrived twenty one days ago but this is not spring. So here’s a poem for questioning how things ought to be in light of how things are and vice versa.
Christine Klocek-Lim’s nuanced poem, “This is Not a Poem,” is an ars poetica — a meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem. 
“This is not a poem,” the title insists with Socratic irony. The poet’s feigned ignorance adds satire to the poem. Dickens and other writers used this technique to point out injustices, to make false assumptions apparent.
The poem invites me to be unsettled, to accept the little bits of my life I can’t control, to embrace ideas that seem strange.
The way that travel has opened and expanded me, a poem does important work when it subverts my expectations, when it argues against what I know, causing me to see a notion or a memory in a new way, to revise myself, to reconsider where I’m going. 
Jump over to the website “Escape Into Life” to read “This is Not a Poem” and more by the editor of Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Christine Klocek-Lim.

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