How Do I Write Poetry?

Someone asked me how I wrote my poetry at New Year. I suspect that it wasn’t supposed to provoke a thoughtful blog post but it did so here goes.

See the stuff that goes up on the writing page is not the stuff that finds its way to publishers. Even the prose that I write that way is my rough draft stuff. It used to be that I found my rough stuff really difficult to show people, the things that I consider myself to have actually written have often taken years of editing and re-editing, thats definately the poetry and usually the prose as well. In fact my method for writing poetry is to write it, come back a week later and rewrite it usually using a formal structure (set metre or rhyme scheme or both) appropriate to the style of the poem and then come back and rewrite that one more loosely. The Nymph reckons that this really ruins my verses, the Non-Poncey Goth reckons my poetry improves under it… personal taste n all. But anyway, my writing page I set up quite deliberately so that I would try and write something everyweek, I’m going to try and up that to everyday, not sure if that’ll happen or not but I’ll try.

Anyway I don’t think that this really answers the question. Why the hell do I sit down and write the poems that I do? How do they pop into my head in the first place. Certain situations, certain people inspire me and I need to write/ paint them. (I feel like some sort of mention should made here of FoxyJonno since he’s been inspiring me pretty much consistently for three/four years now in both pictorial and written form). Anyway, I write down what I feel, what got said, what happened that made me need to write it. The feelings themselves that get provoked are not usually rational, understandable, or even necessarily actually related to what happened, they are almost certainly not polite. I do edit to an extent what goes up on the net poetry-wise because some stuff you guys just don’t need to know! The poetry I write I guess can be a little bit much, like I said, my feelings are not polite and they do seem to be a bit on the intense side because I write the momentary reaction rather than anything too considered. It’s my way of getting to know myself really, which is one of the reasons I don’t consider myself to be a poet, if I was a poet I’d have something important to say via the medium of verse rather than a need to splurge my personal reactions out that way.

I want desperately to be a writer, if I can describe my own feelings, if I can describe these situations in poetry and thus understand them then maybe I can use them, write them, describe them better in prose. Thats my rationale anyway.

Yeah, for all my last posts suggestions I might be growing up it looks like I’m still an adolescent at heart.

4 thoughts on “How Do I Write Poetry?

  1. I forget who said it, but poetry has been described by at least one poet as ‘moments of great emotion recalled in tranquility’. You probably fit that, by the looks.

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