Persephone

Abstract

This piece of creative writing is a single piece from a larger collection of poems that explores different sides of love, with a special focus on longing and waiting, but also tackling darker aspects, such as abuse and rape. Using a mythical background and such figures as Persephone, Eurydice, Orpheus, Psyche and Artemis, the collection aims to convey softness and calm, while also representing empowered feminine voices. The poem is composed of varying stanza forms and rhythms mixed with prose and using motifs and colours that also occur in other poems of the collection to create echoes within the piece. It is also part of a wider artistic project that includes paintings, photographs, a short film and other creations, which all work as so many reverberations and refractions of the poems themselves.The project was partly inspired by H.D.’s poem “Eurydice,” a piece that really made me want to work with myth and to give a voice to women whose perspective is rarely portrayed in literature. At the time, I was also working on my doctoral thesis, especially on contact and touch, and on representations of love in poetry. As I kept working on poetic voice and poetic representations of sensations and breathing, I realised that through writing more poetry, I could also get a different hold of the creative process that still nourishes my thoughts on the relationships between poetry, sensation, empathy and healing.