Poetry as Expression

            As I trudge through a little over two decades of memories cluttered throughout my mind, I wonder which one of these memories include something significant that happened to my writing process.  Questions flutter in my head: “What part of my writing process has been affected, the actual writing process or the thoughts that go behind the writing?  What is affecting my writing process?”  While examining these questions with my memories, I came to the decision that poetry has had a significant impact on my thoughts and ideas about writing.

            Why poetry?  I love to write, I really do!  Creative writing has always been my favorite to write, but poetry has never been on that list.  When I was younger, I used to read a lot and through reading I began to write creatively.  I read a lot of fantasy books and was consumed by the creative ideas and details the authors use in their texts.  I was so excited by this creativity that I wanted to create my own stories to show my own creativity.  I started to write a lot of short stories, but they were usually only one or two pages that I could never finish.  I just did not like the way the stories were going and when I compared my work to the author’s that I read I lost some self confidence in my pieces.  They were nowhere near as creative as those books.

            I still want to express myself creatively, but I wonder how I can express myself through my writing if I feel self conscious with my fiction writing.  How about poetry?  But what do I know about poetry?  It is so different from regular fiction and I do not have much experience with writing poetry.  I guess the reason I don’t know much about poetry is because we do not learn or write much poetry in school and I am personally intimidated by poetry.  I know that might sound silly.  Why be intimidated by some short lines that rhyme?  Well poetry to me is more than that.  When I think of poetry, I think of something abstract that has so many layers of meaning that I can never figure out what the poem actually means.  I guess with my straightforward writing style, I just feel like I can’t write that abstract or layer my poem with meanings.  Even though I have not had a lot of experience with poetry, I have had experiences that shape my views on poetry.

            I rack my brain, trying to think of one of my first experiences with poetry.  Images flash through my thoughts: star, yellow, pigtails, song.  It’s a picture of me when I was about 3 or 4 years old and I was the North Star of the Nativity Scene in a Christmas play held in Monterey, California.  I was wearing yellow footy pajamas, a big star on my back, and my hair was in pigtails.  I’ll be honest; I looked absolutely adorable in that picture.  This picture was the base of a poem I wrote as a junior in high school.  I started writing my poem about me being a star, the Christmas Star that is.

            I was only three and already a star

            Of a Christmas play in Monterey, not far.

            And when I say star I say it literally;

            I was the cutest star that ever could be!

That is a part of my poem that I wrote.  I was so proud of it when I wrote it.  It took a while to start it, as it always does for whatever I write.  The words began to pour out of my pen and onto my paper, only hesitating when I was trying to find a rhyming word.  That’s why I was so proud of my poem, I found good rhyming words for it and it was such a cute poem!  It was one of the few poems I have ever written and I was really happy with it.

            Looking back at this poem and others, I realized that I liked to rhyme my poems.  I know they did not have to rhyme, but back then, they were not considered poems to me if they did not rhyme.  I also realize I wrote very literally I my poems, but as I said before that is my writing style.  I cannot just change it to make it “abstract” just to write a poem.  That changes my writing style and hides my voice from the readers.  I guess I also just assume that writing poetry in a literal voice shows my attempt at writing poetry, compared to the professional poets who are able to write abstract poetry.

            This viewpoint of “abstraction” in poetry I had was changed as I took an Intro to Creative Writing class.  This class is split up into two different sections (which I did not realize as first) into creative fiction and creative poetry.  I was fine with writing fiction because it is what I am used to, but the poetry part scared the crap out of me.  One, I do not write much poetry and was not expecting to take a class on creating poems.  Two, I did not want other people in the class to read my poetry.  And three, I thought everyone would be able to write good abstract poetry and mine would look bad next to theirs.

            When I first stepped into the poetry class, I remember one of the first things my professor told us.  He said “Poetry is not abstract.”  What?  That was completely the opposite of what I had always thought of poetry.  What does that mean poetry is not abstract.  Well, he explained to us that if poetry is abstract, then the reader gets confused because there are no concrete details.  Poems need details just like fiction (which I now notice as true, but then did not realize).  I was surprised about this information because my mind was still molded around the idea that poetry was abstract.  I was happy because I am better at writing descriptions instead of being abstract because that was not my forte.  I was not as scared about writing poetry after that lecture because I can be descriptive, just like writing a fiction story but in a poetic form.  Now this would be the time to put up an example of part of my poems, but unfortunately I do not have any of the poems.  They were on my old computer’s hard drive, but after that computer crashed on me, it took with it a lot of writings I composed for my college classes.  This class helped me realize that I can write poetry and gave me confidence that I can write good poetry as long as it is detailed.

            I was able to use some poetry as a way of expressing myself through prompts in these classes and I was able to use whatever style of poetry I wanted, which was usually a poem with lines of different lengths that rhymed in couplets (aabb) or every other line (abab).  I just needed to write detailed poetry about the prompts I was given.  Even though I thought I understood everything about poetry then, I had an eye opening experience with poetry when I took my poetry seminar class last semester.  Ironic how the class I only took because I needed a seminar would be significant for my comprehension of poetry.

            To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I would have taken this class if I realized what it was really about.  I just assumed that it was another creative writing poetry class where we just wrote poetry and shared it with everyone.  In a way it was; we did have prompts and got to write poems and share them with the class, but we had to write the poems in strict form.  I have never written a poem in strict form.  That means we had to focus on the meter of the lines and each line had a specific length and stress pattern and either rhymed in a certain way or not.  This class made me extremely nervous!  At that time I wasn’t even sure what meter was!  The only poems I had ever written were without form, so this was very different and pushed me out of my comfort zone.

            The wind blows softly, leaving cold remains

            Of loneliness which lingers on my cheeks.

            The creaking wooden swing is rocking back

            And forth.  Companionship is what it needs

            In order to find its happiness.  Leaves

            Fall, dance, and play with loving friends down on

            The playground.  Twirling leaves from up the trees

            Lay memories in my mind.

                                                           Swinging high,                                         

            This was part of our first poem.  That had to have been one of the hardest poems I have ever written, well this poem along with the rest of the poems I had to write for this class.  This prompt has us write a blank verse poem.  I did not know what blank verse was, but I found out it was a poem that was written in iambic pentameter (line with 10 syllables and is unstressed then stressed) and does not rhyme.  The poem was different for me because I had to focus on the actual length of the lines and find the stresses, and also because it did not rhyme.  No one usually does well at something they are uncomfortable with the first time.  What my professor had us do first before we wrote the actual poem in order to help us out with the poem was to write it in prose first before we wrote it in poetic form.  That way we could get out ideas out and understand what we were going to write our paper about, so we don’t have to worry about our ideas and can focus on the form.

            I had an extremely hard time writing this poem, especially since I had not written a poem in strict form before.  I liked how it did not need to rhyme because after you start focusing on iambic pentameter you don’t want to focus on anything else, including rhyming.  That made it a little easier for me when writing this poem.  What I really had difficulty with was trying to decide what syllables were stressed or unstressed.  I know the stressed depend on how the person reads the words/sentences, but some of the words I just could not tell if they were stressed or unstressed.  I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I was saying words out loud trying to hear the stresses.  My friends made fun of me a little bit every time I did that.  I guess it is pretty funny, but it was the only way I could somehow hear the stresses.  That was what I was worried about after I turned in my paper.  I was afraid I had placed the stresses in the wrong places, but luckily when I got my poem back my professor said I did pretty well with the iambic pentameter, which made me happy and boosted up my confidence in that class.

            Rapunzel torn from earthen home, my eyes   

            are they deceiving?  Some intruder not nice

            is stealing from me.  Thief I curse your first

            innocent child to me, so you hurt

            forever.  Crying, after one year along,

            has reached my ears; a baby girl is born.

            When looking at this section of my poem, you probably think this is a blank verse poem.  Does it look like the last words in the lines rhyme?  If I was reading this poem before taking this class, I would have said it did not rhyme, but now I know that they do in fact rhyme.  They are slant rhymes.  When my professor explained slant rhymes to me, I just did not understand what she was talking about.  I had no idea what a slant rhyme was or how I would use it in a poem.  I finally ended up rhyming the vowel sounds together.  So in these first few couplets, I rhymed together “eyes” and “nice,” “first” and “hurt,” and “alone” and “born.”  With each one of these slant rhymes I found the vowel sounds and then found a rhyme.  Even though it took a while (it always takes a while but even more now that I had to do slant rhyming) I was complimented by my professor on my use of slant rhyme.  She liked most of my slant rhymes, which feels really good because I had never tried it before.  I actually enjoyed slant rhyme more than regular rhymes because there are more words that can be slant rhymes than regular.

            Even though this class was a lot harder than I expected, I began to understand the concepts behind poetry and learned the strict and unstrict form of poetry.  All the classes I have taken in writing have been turning points for me.  They all influenced me in some way with my poetry.  I know that my poetry is detailed poetry that can rhyme, slightly rhyme, or not rhyme at all, and may or may not use strict form.  Poetry is now another option I have of expressing myself through my writing and showing the creativeness of my mind.

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