Lyric Essentials: Juliet Cook Reads Tory Dent

On The Sundress Blog's Lyric Essentials, I talk about poet Tory Dent and read one of her poems, "The Part of Me That's O".

Thank you to Riley Steiner for inviting me to participate in this project.

You can read and listen here -
https://sundressblog.com/2019/12/18/lyric-essentials-juliet-cook-reads-tory-dent/
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"I have tended towards over-the-top and negative in a lot of my poetry, largely because that’s how my brain works—but since I also tend to enjoy reading that sort of content, it has probably influenced my own creativity over time.

To me, Tory Dent is an example of a poet who says what she needs to say, for her own personal, inward-focused reasons, but also broadens her personal reasons into a large scale.

With me, most of my poems are inward-focused, and part of me likes that; but another part of me might like to be able to broaden them out a bit more, without dulling them down. I don’t want my poems to be overly obvious, but I also don’t want them to be so abstract or so stuck inside my own brain that they only make sense to me.

When it comes to poetry by Dent and others I admire, I love it when uniquely original work that emerged from another writer’s brain is able to strongly resonate with my brain, too.

There are many people for whom poetry does not resonate much at all, but for me, it’s a primary form of expression, both reading-wise and writing-wise, even if a lot of people don’t relate to it."