Do you prefer writing poetry?
Posted: January 13th, 2011, 3:34 am
I'm good at writing it and I enjoy it, but the only poetry I've ever liked that's not my own, is from modern songs, like White Rabbit, Purple Haze, Time, No Quarter, or some of the lyrics Jim Steinman writes. Anything else, I can often see that it's good, and that the poet probably found the perfect word for what they were trying to say, but to me it doesn't seem very nice at all. Whereas with my own, I can find the perfect words for what I'm trying to say, and arrange them all to suit the visualisation in my mind, but I can't see how anyone else would be able to read that and enjoy it, because whilst the words are great (for me), they're not precise. So the reader probably wouldn't get the quality of image that I get, right? But then, a few people at school read a short story I wrote for an assignment, which was more just a poem without verses and stanzas, and they liked it heaps. I myself can't even enjoy it as much now when I read it again.
So how do people enjoy poetry so much? Do I just need to keep looking to find something that'll assume a colourful little spot in my memory? That's sort of how I think of all the poems, books, songs etc that I really like, and so far there's only three written poems that come near to that; London 1802 by Wordsworth, the 7th stanza of The Soul's Traveling by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and perhaps Bright Star by John Keats. But even these, I only really like because I'm desperate to find some poetry that I enjoy reading. There's some authors who I like for their tone and language, which is what makes poetry good (C.S. Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge), except neither of them when they write poems, keep this tone; it's only used for prose.
So how do people enjoy poetry so much? Do I just need to keep looking to find something that'll assume a colourful little spot in my memory? That's sort of how I think of all the poems, books, songs etc that I really like, and so far there's only three written poems that come near to that; London 1802 by Wordsworth, the 7th stanza of The Soul's Traveling by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and perhaps Bright Star by John Keats. But even these, I only really like because I'm desperate to find some poetry that I enjoy reading. There's some authors who I like for their tone and language, which is what makes poetry good (C.S. Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge), except neither of them when they write poems, keep this tone; it's only used for prose.