After many years of writing poetry on the sly, a dozen published poems and a couple of placements in “Best Of” books and online digests, I’ve recently joined the ranks of the Kintsugi Poets.

What is a Kintsugi Poet, you may well ask?

Kim Koning founded the Kintsugi Poets Society in 2013. She had belonged to another dark poetry collective called the Undead Poets Society but sadly the Undead Poets Society returned to the graveyard. So in 2013 she decided to put together another dark poetry collective and The Kintsugi Poets Society was born. Pulling in a few fellow Undead Poets from the graveyard, she quickly began recruiting more dark poets who wanted a place and community to pen their dark thoughts. The Kintsugi Poets Society has become a thriving community of Dark Poets.

What is “Kintsugi”:

The story of KINTSUGI may have begun in the late 15th century, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a damaged Chinese tea bowl back to China to be fixed. It returned held together with ugly metal staples, launching Japanese craftsmen on a quest for a new form of repair that could make a broken piece look as good as new,

or better. Collectors became so enamored of the new art that some were accused of deliberately smashing valuable pottery so it could be repaired with the gold seams of kintsugi.

Kintsugi ~ That means “golden joinery” or “golden seams” in Japanese, and it refers to the art of fixing broken ceramics with a lacquer resin made to look like solid gold. Chances are, a vessel fixed by kintsugi will look more gorgeous, and more precious, than before it was fractured.

The poetry shared by The Kintsugi Poetry Society is written by poets who have mastered the art of Kintsugi. Each poet has taken the dark, cracked and broken fragments of their own pain and turned them into golden seams of light.