Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

I should have known that for a woman who bites instead of kisses, loving was the same as lashing out.

To a poet, the subconscious is a repository of knowledge, artificially distorted by an ancient imagery with which he must become familiar—he must dare to decipher it because it contains a truth about himself that can only make itself known in a hermetic form. No one else dreams your dreams.

Poetry often comes into being despite ourselves, a truth that escapes us, that forces its way out between the selected concealments. It doesn’t heed our desire to cover things up.

brave the step toward the unknown and unpredictable, toward the wounded child, the furious woman, the writer.

Memory is literary by nature. It takes factual events and gives them a metaphorical charge, lending what really happened a symbolic weight, persistently in search of the security of a story.