In my (mere) six months blogging about bipolar, I have noticed a lot of poetry being written. Now, I am a lesbian and the song of my people is free verse, so it’s a familiar environment to me. The difference between bipolar poets and lesbian poets, is that the bipolar ones rhyme much, much more. What they have in common is that there isn’t a lot of evidence that work and editing and bleeding, sweating and tearing took place. Stephen Fry informs us that this is not a phenomenon limited to bipolar, lesbian and bipolar lesbian poets and that it is in fact, infesting the entire modern poetry scene. He wrote a book about it.
A tour of the poetry archive with Stephen Fry.
Book: The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry.
Before you beat me up, please remember that I didn’t say all – and that for all you know, you might be one of the poets I like (Alex, for example). And quite frankly you ought to have enough confidence in your work not to give a damn what I think anyway.
Haiku for the Bipolar by Roland Frye. I’m linking you to that because it exists and maybe it’s your thing. It is so not my thing.
A bipolar sonnet by Steve Huff (I do like this one, effort has gone into it). If you want a forensically diagnosed sonnet poet, try Gerald Manley Hopkins.
Here is a sonnet about Facebook by native american bipolar poet and author, Sherman Alexie. More of his poems here and here’s his official website.
Here’s a good ‘un, by Spike Milligan, that gets spread all over the net without his name on it.
It doesn’t take much google fu to get lists of famous bipolar poets; there’s lots to learn from and enjoy. By the way someone needs to write a limerick about bipolar.
