WriYe Blog Circle for May:

How do you feel about poetry? Do you write any? Do you see the significance of it or do you think it is a waste of time?

 

Bonus: What is your favorite poem? Tell us! (Written by you or another great writer!)

Poetry… some writers love poetry and other writers hate poetry.  I think it gets a bad rap because too often the sort of poetry people read (particularly on the internet) is the trite sort of thing that written by people filled with angst that are super impressed with their ability to rhyme.  Such people will often pour out their poems onto the page.  It’s filled with raw emotion and they feel that editing it would somehow detract from the power of it.

As someone who has written poetry since I was twelve years old, I have to say… that’s a load of bull!  Poetry is just like any other writing.  Get it out there – pour your emotions down on the page, by all means.  Then, put it away in a box for a week or so and come back to it.  Read it again and edit it!  Sacrilege, some poets will say.  However, the first impulse when writing a poem is to get tangled in clever rhymes or metaphors.  A second glance at that poem might show you that the metaphor you thought was clever initially is really terribly cliché.  Those brilliant rhymes are, in reality, trite and predictable.

Poetry, even more than prose writing, is about saying as much as possible with as few words possible.  I think writing poetry can be a great exercise for prose writers.  It can be used to let a writer that is usually concerned with progressing the story release that inner desire to wax a bit purple about their favorite character.  It also can help a prose writer who likes to be wordy find the right metaphor to bring out a situation in a concise manner.

Mostly, though, poetry is a different form of writing than prose writing.  It has significance, because it’s an artistic expression.  Reading and writing great poetry is never a waste of time.

My favorite poem… is Sonnet 18, by William Shakespeare.  It’s just so romantic and so very true to life.  Whomever it was written for, it seems clear that Shakespeare deeply loved her.  It’s simple and so stirring.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.