All posts by Traci Barr

Traci Barr is a passionate lover of words, a chef, an answer seeker, a skeptic, a producer and a consumer of mental health services. She is on the Board of Directors of the Greenville Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

traci barr shares her creative process

traci barr

The poem “Seeing” popped into my head while I was reflecting upon the way I felt about a man who told me he loved me…and then who chose to not act upon his feelings.

I eventually came to believe that he said he was in love with me just for the “thrill” of it and in order to stroke his own ego.

Because he speaks a lot about the subject of love, I wrote this poem in response to what, I thought, was his hypocrisy. In the relatively brief interaction I had with him, my own ideas about love changed quite a lot, and I began to think of him as a used-car salesman.

Sometimes an idea for a poem will start rattling around in my head in a way that becomes very, very distracting.

The only way to make the rattling go away is for me to…write the poem.