Drip Castles

What poetry is to me

Image from Marian Fink. She wrote a great blog post about how to create drip castles here!

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Back when I was in college studying English, I wrote a blog post about a thought that struck me: that poems were like drip castles.

When I was little, playing with buckets of sand at the beach, my grandfather took me by the hand and taught me how to make drip castles. Ever since then, drip castles have become my favorite kind of sand sculpture.

These creations are no ordinary sandcastles, they are organic spires formed from a mixture of sand and water that drip and drizzle from your fingers and grow to great heights. Each drip castle is purely unique and cannot be copied, no matter how hard you try. But I think this is what adds to their whimsical beauty. Each drip castle is grounded in a specific time and place, formed out of its own unique mixture of sand and water.

The other day, as my mind wandered while writing a paper, I had this thought:

A poem is a drip castle of words.

As I have discovered poetry and all its various forms, I have realized that a poem begs to be written out of a specific time and place. It is rooted in a moment, a realization, a truth, an emotion. Because each poem is a unique combination of these elements, not every poem will look the same or have the same structure. Some are organic, some are complex, some are bound, some are free.

I have always loved this image, which felt both universal and uniquely mine. I wanted to put that description into its own poem somehow, and as I thought, the only form that suited the idea was literaly the image of a drip castle made out of words. And so this concete poem was born.