Anne Walsh Donnelly On Experimentation In Poetry

Featured Artist Anne Walsh Donnelly loves to experiment in her writing. She says, “above all else, for me writing is about having fun, running wild across the page. Write what you want to write, not what you think others want you to write. Don’t censor when writing your first draft, you can always go back later and edit the piece.”

Photo by Laura Marques on Unsplash

Today Anne shares with us a previously unpublished poem selected especially for Animal Heart Press.

She says, “this poem is pure daft but who cares. I had great fun writing it and sometimes we have to let ourselves write the weird, funny and quirky stuff.”

An Apology for Poetry

My poems are words
streaming from the shower head.
They whip my nakedness,
push my slippery body
towards pen and paper.

My sonnets are cluttered
with plotted peas,
purple placebos,
petrified peacocks.

My odes are dotted
with magenta magpies
and black doves shooting
scarecrows with AK-47s.

My haiku give green cacti
pink glitter prickles
and sepia skins.

My couplets fuck
the “C” out of culture,
and “V” out of vulture.

I’m not sorry if my poems
mean damn all to anyone
who can read
or if they confuse Plato,
Pythagoras and Poe.

I want them to be
platters of ecstasy melodies
that dissolve on the tongue.