Writing Poetry & Sharing With The Public

Over the past few days, I've started writing again for the first time in a while - and by that I mean writing something that I can stand to look over later. It would seem that I have started to find my flare for words again, which is kind of nice because, for several months there, my depression was drowning out everything that was even slightly useful.

Anyway, the other night, I pulled up a new document and began to write strands of words that had popped into my head when I saw a photograph. At first, I thought I would set the words aside and incorporate them into something later. Which I did, only, later was about fifteen minutes later, instead of several weeks.

What started out as a line, slowly twisted and turned until it became two, then three, and so on until, by the end of the evening, I had written over half of a quite decent poem.

I cannot properly express my joy over this occasion.

Poetry, supposedly, doesn't make anyone any money. So, I'm sure a lot of people I know will be confused over why this is so wonderful to me. But writing, to me, has never been about money. And poetry has a special, if not strange, place in my heart.

In college, several semesters back, I took a creative writing course. Experience has taught me that a lot of creative writing courses begin with a poetry section, so I can't say that I was entirely surprised when the course I was in started that way, too. The only problem was, at that point in my life, I didn't write poetry. It wasn't my forte (a point which my high school creative writing teacher would probably protest, but that's another story). I only wrote poems when forced, and in my opinion, all of them were awful. I didn't even read poetry, because if it was anything like mine, it couldn't possibly be worth reading.

So, when it was announced that we were starting with poetry, I panicked. Certainly that meant that I was going to fail that part of the class or, worse yet, the professor would like my work again and the class would be as good as useless to me. But, you know, the funniest thing happened. With this poetry, I decided to try something new and I actually tried to care. We wrote our first poem sitting outside on the campus grounds, flinging the words out of pens carelessly. And then, under the trees, we edited our words a bit before handing them over to the professor. She sat with us, went over our papers with her pen, and pointed out all of the bits that were awful. Then she sent us home to edit our work and instructed us to bring it back during the next class. When we came back, we wrote another poem - and this one we read aloud to our classmates, then edited. And this process continued through out the semester until, slowly but surely, I learned to write poetry. I began to excel in it. And, after a couple of weeks, I even learned to like it.

But for all that I like it now and for all that I understand it, poetry still remains one of the most difficult things to write for me. Writing poetry is - for me - a process that requires a lot of care and attention, and it requires that I be attached to my work.

So, after months of detachment and depression in various stages, I'm finally starting to feel what I'm working on again and I'm finally pleased with it. Hence, this means a great deal to me.

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There's another thing that makes this special to me, though.

I haven't been writing just any poetry. Currently, I am working on a small collection of poetry centering around people I have seen or met recently. And, since this project has an idea behind it and a defined number of poems within it, it's actually going to be seen by the public - which is pretty cool if you ask me, because it'll be the first time that any of my work has been viewed by someone outside my family, close friends, and creative writing classmates. 

I'm a part of a couple lovely writing communities over on Livejournal and, at the moment, I'm only participating as a reader. But this collection is going to mark the first change in that, and I really don't think I could pick a better piece to start with. 

Signed, 

Mildly Excited