The Poetry Foundation has put up an immersive interview with Margaret Atwood today: "The World We Think We See Is Only Our Best Guess: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood", which touches on the various recurring themes in her poems: politics, power, aging, and even death.
But it's her perspective on poetry and language as a means of exploration that causes me to contemplate my own attempts to make sense of it all and how those attempts might recur in the themes in my work were I to really look at them.
It's a short read and it might help in the exploration of themes in your work, too.
Not all poems are political, though some are, and some of mine are. But you can’t be prescriptive towards poets about their poetry without echoes of dictatorships past and present. And there have been so many attempts to make poetry into something socially useful, going all the way back to Plato, but continuing into our own day. Once prescription starts, denunciation and censorship are never far behind. Lyric poems (as opposed to epic or dramatic or narrative ballads) are meditative.
But it's her perspective on poetry and language as a means of exploration that causes me to contemplate my own attempts to make sense of it all and how those attempts might recur in the themes in my work were I to really look at them.
Poems do not assert. They explore. One of the things they explore is language.
“If there were no emptiness, there would be no life” is literally true of the universe, but figuratively true of psychic states. We know the positive by the negative. We know fullness by emptiness. We know day by night, and vice versa.
It's a short read and it might help in the exploration of themes in your work, too.