Why I Wrote My Book of Poetry

Mitch Ditkoff
3 min readMay 30, 2024
More about the book here

I am a poet. No matter how much I try to ignore this existential fact, I cannot. It is a part of my DNA. A chromosome. The beating heart within my beating heart.

It started when I was a teenager. As Rumi once wrote, there was something in me knocking from the inside out. I heard the sounds echoing off my bones and chose to respond.

It is now 60 years later and I am still responding. The knocking from the inside continues and I am doing my best to open the door.

Last year I published my fourth book of poetry, Unspoken Word: Love Longing & Letting Go. If you’ve read it, I hope you were moved in some way. If you haven’t, maybe now’s the time

Why did I write it?

For the same reason flowers bloom. There is a force of nature within me that begs to be expressed. It’s as simple as that.

It takes many shapes, this life-giving energy. It has many moods, many moves, many moons. On a good day, I let it have its way with me, taking its hand and going where it leads, praying I don’t get in the way of what’s aching to be said.

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Mitch Ditkoff

Co-Founder of Idea Champions and Face the Music. Author of Storytelling for the Revolution, Storytelling at Work, Unspoken Word and Free the Genie. Human being