Post about Poetry

I am a little bit drunk, so I don't know how much sense this is going to make.

It was my mum's birthday party, please don't judge me.

I'm currently listening to Myles Dyer talking about writing poetry and lyrics and he said its a good way to put your thoughts down on paper (or a screen as it seems) and I can't help but agree with him on this.

I write poetry. A lot of it tends to come out sounding really depressing and cliché but I do my best. I like to try and look at the horrible things in the world and particularly upsetting things from my life and write them into something beautiful in the hope that this will help me to catalogue what happened in my life. Looking through my anthology is like looking through a diary of the things that have happened (only my old diaries are awful to read!).

When I write a poem it is like I'm immortalising what is happening in a way that lets me leave it in the past (such as bullying or unrequited love - both popular topics during high school) but a way that it will never be forgotten. I always date my poems as well, so I can look at the date and know how old I was and what stage of my life I was in at the time.

I often look back at old poems from a few years back and think how rubbish they would be to anyone but myself. I only still enjoy reading them because they invoke memories of old times and I feel like to anyone else they would be meaningless because they just don't have the same experiences I do.

But when I think about it and as I learn more about literature and the way critical reading works, I realise that I could show these poems to the world and although the reader doesn't have my experience they will draw on their own personal experience and apply it to what they are reading and interpret their own meaning from my words. When I studied Carol Ann Duffy in High School, I thought it was pointless to be looking at these poems and that it wasn't possible that she put as much thought into any of this as my English teacher thought she did, but after you write your own poetry you realise. No matter how bad you think it is when you read it back after a few years, it was once your best work and it once meant so much to you.

I don't think I'd be the person I am now if it wasn't for my poetry. So, even if I only like a few of the old ones now, I'm proud of everything I've written.

On a side note, I also met Carol Ann Duffy while I was in college and as well as being a very funny woman, it appears that she did put that much thought into her poems, and my interpretation was very different to her mindset when she was writing. But that's just how literature works I guess.

Another point I'd like to bring up is my muse. I never really thought of him like that at first but in the early days I was pretty much head over heels in love with him (infatuation, I'll admit) and I guess it was sort of pathetic, but it did inspire one of my most creative times and two of my best poems. One of these poems was destroyed (because I am an idiot) and I spent a lot of my time slagging him off with my best friend at the time. The other still exists and in my mind is one of the best poems I've written.

I didn't speak to him for almost two years and only wrote one poem in this time - for a competition at college - but after reconnecting a few months ago I wrote two and have another two in the works.

One of the written poems is about the destroyed poem mentioned earlier and my own melodrama and the other is inspired by my growing up and having to try and find myself as an adult in a new place, maybe I will share them at some point.

I guess the whole point of this rather extended (and possibly nonsensical) post is to thank Adam. Although he feels that he's not done much, he has helped to drive my creativity and make it worth writing things down. He is always the first to read my work and I think this is something he will always have privileged access to, as long as he wants to of course.