What I Love About Writing: Poetry
Part 1 of the Genre Series
Poetry was my first love. I have grown to love many genres, but poetry was my first. And before one starts writing poetry, one must be in love with poetry.
Poetry can be intimidating for those new to it. I first started writing poetry in high school as a hopeless romantic for that one girl in class. My poems were mostly inspired by the love poems of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet I studied in a Spanish Literature class. I never showed that girl in class any of my poetry. The poems were mostly for me to express what I was feeling, as most poetry is, and art in general. I wrote them for me, and only I got to see how good and bad they initially were.
I stopped writing poetry for a while after leaving high school. I hardly wrote it during my undergrad. However, I then took a Poetics class at my MFA program. Despite focusing on writing my novel for my thesis, my instructor advised me to take the class. And they were right. It did me a lot of good. The class revived my interest in poetry, and I started writing more of it again. Even more than that, I started reading it much more seriously and began to appreciate the genre more than I ever had. Even though I wanted to be a novelist, I started becoming a poet again.
Then I moved to Los Angeles after grad school. I continued to write poetry, but was shifting my focus towards screenplays instead. Whenever I felt like taking a break, though, I’d write poetry. I’d scribble whatever I’d come up with in my notebooks and leave them there until I could type them up on my laptop. I didn’t think too much about my poems, other than that they felt liberating when the other genres did not.
And that’s what I think I love the most about writing poetry: it feels like freedom. Poetry is the play of language I seek the most as a writer. It is the genre I turn to whenever I feel stuck and have to remind myself why I’m a writer. I’m a writer because I love to write and create. Art is freedom, and I feel freest with poetry.
Fast forward to the present day: I have my first self-published collection of poems. It is a book filled with poetry from the past 6 years. I was feeling frustrated with my progress with other genres. My screenplays were not getting attention, and my novel/ fiction writing had stalled. But poetry was there for me, like it had been for the past 6 years. If my collection was a sign of anything, it was that poetry never abandoned me. It stayed with me, and I intend on staying with it too.
Poetry was my first love when it came to writing, the love that has supported me from the start. I turn to poetry in my times of need. If I ever need to remind myself why I’m a writer, the first genre I will turn to is poetry.