Reflection

My time in the introduction course for Poetry has been a very interesting journey. I have always dabbled in poetry, but I never really thought I would do much with it. I usually like to write long works of fiction, but with this course I was writing more and more poems. Before this course, I wrote mostly free verse poems, mostly because I didn’t know about many other kinds of poems. My lines would very much vary in length and detail; I wouldn’t say that they were very good at all.

For me, what it took to want to write a poem was mostly a quick way to remember a scene I had in my head, whether about a novel I was working on or something to help me get some pent up feeling out of my head. I never really used poetry for any real writing. I mean, my mother said she was a poet when she was young and had written a lot of poems, so maybe that’s where I had gotten my influence, but I never really had a true interest in poetry until after I had graduated from high school.

And sure, my father has also told me he wrote a few poems, but I do not believe a few poems a poet make. What I believe makes a poet is a person who has a desire to write poetry, in whatever form that they wish, and a desire to share those poems with the world. This is probably why I always feared being a poet, I fear the outside world, the place where my poems are taken through the torrent and if they survived, they were a frame of their original form.

One of the hardest things for me is changing my poems, when I write them, they come from the heart, so revising them to me seems like I ruining something heartfelt and personal, which is partially true, in the sense that every poem is personal. But after this course, I have discovered that revision can also mean revising the poem into something closer to what your heart was meaning to say. So now, whenever I’m told to revise a poem or anything I have written, I will see where in the work I have slightly missed what my heart was trying to say. Yes, I know that poets shouldn’t always write from the heart, but for me, it’s where my creativity lives and breathes.

Though I have found myself more and more poetry, I still have a lot to work on. Sticking to form can be very hard for me. I also have a hard time being a visual person with my poems, where mine tend to be emotional, part of being heartfelt I guess. Perhaps if I were to try write more about the scenes around me or perhaps writing about a picture or artwork of mine, maybe, just maybe, that would help me be a more visual person in my poems.

But I won’t say I am only weaknesses in my poetry, I obviously have some strengths. Something that comes with writing heartfelt poems and other works of writing is that they are very emotional and evoke that emotion in those who read them. I have also found that when I understand a form of poetry and wish to write in that form, I can do it fairly easily, even if the poem itself doesn’t end up all that good.

In the end, I am a writer, a poet, a creator of pieces of writing that make my readers understand the emotion I want them to feel.