diVERSES reKINDLED: In Conversation With Poet Amanda Nicole Corbin

New child, newly sobriety, new divorce, and a new understanding of likes and dislikes have changed how poet Amanda Nicole Corbin not only approaches life, but art. These realizations, though hard when they arrive, are necessary for growth.

In working with poets to edit their work, I often notice the difficulties that come with confronting realizations about who we are, not as artists, but people.

Infallible heroes we are not. The mirror our poems provide do not give dishonest reflections, if we are honest. We do not like what we see, partially because of how unfamiliar we are with truth.

One of the reasons I enjoy making videos for Youtube, recording audio podcasts, and training others with their own videos is because we have a greater understanding of how the world receives us. We cannot escape our own voices. We cannot hide from how we move our hands, our shoulders, our faces as we speak and listen.

These movements and sounds are what people have come to expect from us, but not what we expect from ourselves. But it goes deeper than the physical. Our worldviews, our fears, our pet peeves that can remain secret through silence find their ways onto our media of expression.

So we run away. We end the line too soon. We shift scenes that get uncomfortable. We shift from first person to third, or singular to plural.

What Amanda challenges us to do is find acceptance, not in how others respond to us, but in how we respond to ourselves. Yes, painful as it may be to admit at first, this is me.

The first recording is the hardest. The first apology is the hardest. The first time we speak up is the hardest.

The tenth time gets easier. The hundredth time is easier. The thousandth time goes by unnoticed.

The goal is less to be the poet who lives with the secret, and more the poet who lived after the secret is told.

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Full conversation with poet Geoff Anderson and poet Amanda Nicole Corbin: How To Create Honest Poetry & Art