Should You Write Poetry?
Behind The Scenes of Poetry Writing
Poetry writing is something you might be a little suspicious about. As a writer, you might have dabbled in short stories and novel writing, and have always considered poetry another realm that you didn’t really have any interest in exploring.
That’s what I thought, too.
Poetry is similar to prose in a lot of ways. But it’s also different in a lot of ways. Short stories and novels have structure, they have a way to do things. Poetry can seem all over the place, like viewing the world through a kaleidoscope — everything is so different, every opinion and voice so contrasting.
However, my negative view on writing poetry changed when I joined a weekly writing class. I took it, and for the first half, we focused on writing stories, which I was comfortable with. But for the second half, we wrote poetry.
This situation pushed me to explore poetry, to see if I could write this new, peculiar form of writing. And I could. I did. And I enjoyed it.
I found out that writing poetry was actually pretty fun. It was more fluid, more open, more freeing, than writing prose. I discovered that what I actually disliked about poetry — the all over the place, lack of rules and boundaries — was what I enjoyed most about it.
