Poetry as I see it

I enjoy writing of almost all sorts, and I want to learn to write better material. The only way to do that is to write! Go figure. The problem is that there are some days when I do not feel like trying. So, in an attempt to keep myself accountable, I've decided to turn this blog into a sounding board for my writing.

I never truly enjoyed poetry until last year. By way of scheduling circumstances, I wound up in a course on 20th century Irish poetry, and I was not excited about it. When we started off the semester with W.B. Yeats, I came to dread class even more. (Since then, I have come to appreciate Yeats, but I still cannot say I particularly enjoy his poetry.) As the class wore on though, we started reading such poets as Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney, and thus began my love affair with poetry.

During the same semester, a few poets who are most often classified as "Spoken Word" poets, and have appeared on Def Poetry Jam, visited our campus. I had heard of their form of poetry, but had never really experienced it. After hearing Liza Jessie Peterson and Steven Connell perform and talk about their philosophies of poetry and art, I knew poetry had taken me. In class, I was reading poetry by "academics," and then I had been exposed to this more relaxed, yet highly skilled, form of poetry, and I found a connection between the two of them: poets like Eavan Boland and the Spoken Word poets were affirming life. Neither of their art forms were about using their academic prowess to confuse ordinary people, and neither of their forms were about diminishing the value of the ordinary person's life. Their poetry was not filled with the things that make "traditional poetry" beautiful, things like unfamiliar words or complicated meter. It was filled with simple observations and descriptions about life. I could dig this!

Since then, I have been trying to read and write more poetry, both Spoken Word and, for lack of a better classification, "traditional" poetry. Most of what I post here will probably be poetry, and I tend to write more "confessional poetry," so some of it may be pretty intimate. Don't let that scare you, though! If I am not afraid to share it with you, you should not feel uncomfortable reading it. And feel free to ask me about it if you want to! But please, be respectful about what you read here. I also have a strong interest in writing fiction, so hopefully, I will manage to post some of that as well. I want to hear what you think about it! Please be honest. (That is not a license to be unnecessarily mean though!) Enjoy!