T.S. Eliot said immature poets imitate and mature poets steal. Well, sometimes, they just put pen to paper and and come up with something that not only captures their view of the world, but does so in a way that captures the attention of others.
Avlynne Wolverton of Soldotna will be named the winner of a statewide poetry contestfor the high school division this weekend. The contest is put on by the Fairbanks Arts Association. She came by the KDLL studios to share her work and talk about writing.
‘In an alternate universe where I can fix things’
In an alternate universe where I can fix things, I change nothing.
I always swore that if I got the chance, I would rewrite everything. I’d make everything so much less painful. But,
If you erase so many words from a sentence, you no longer have a sentence. You have half a story.
I guess somewhere along our generational lines, our families started having children fathered by the names they didn’t want to remember. The had one night stands with their mistakes and no one has a life that’s one hundred percent consensual.
We wrote swear words into our bibles and now, they’re a part of our salvation. Our present day gospel is just a littering of things we’re not supposed to talk about.
The cups in the sink and the unwashed socks are half the reason we exist.
I can’t unwrite scars from your skin without taking the chance of never meeting you. So, as much as this hurts, a universe in which I could fix things is not one I could live in.
“I actually started writing that poem a couple months ago and it was actually a month-long process. It was inspired because I’ve had a lot of friends and their stories just really touched me and I wanted to be able to go back and kind of change their history and their upbringing and all these different things. I started off the poem with an opening line and I was like I would just change all these things. I just made this big, long list of all these things I would change in the world. And then I started to think about it and...if I made the world a perfect place, then it would change so much. Because all the good things come out of bad things and it’s so interwoven that you can’t just have the good. Because if you take out all the bad, then the world would be a totally different place and then I wouldn’t have my friends and I wouldn’t have my family and I probably wouldn’t even exist. So, I don’t remember what day I came to that conclusion, but I wrote in a process of about 15 minutes after I’d been pondering it for a couple of months.”
