Remember when I tried writing every day for productivity’s sake? I now bring you the spiritual successor to that piece in which I attempt to write poetry every single day for a week!
Let the record show: I have never claimed to be a poet, nor have I ever thought I’m good at writing poetry. However, I’ve found myself in more than one literature class throughout my college years and poetry has become more frequent than I would’ve liked. Understanding the poems covered by my curriculums has caused a little more curiosity in me about this particular literary style and, as a writer, I’ve been intrigued by the prospect of creating some poetry of my own.
Up until this point, I haven’t really tried to write poetry aside from a piece I started typing out mid-Philosophy class. My only real point of reference then was the word gift, which happens to exist in both German and English. Its inter-language polysemy inspired me to write out a couple of verses in German, with some English sprinkled in for emphasis. Even after this experiment, Gift (my poem) is the poetry piece I’m proudest of creating.
As my previous writing exercise proved, forcing myself to sit down and put pen to paper, so to speak, doesn’t guarantee instant success or any real ease when it comes to writing — especially not when it comes to a literary style that is pretty foreign to me. My initial plan for this experiment was, in the same way artists plan for Inktober and the like, to prepare a list of poem types and rhyme schemes. However, as soon as I started to write, I realized that words can never be forced to bend to the whims of foolhardy souls who wish to constrain them ahead of time. Hubris causes the downfall of Man™ once again.
From the very start, trying to be a poet was an uphill battle. It didn’t matter how much vocabulary my years as an avid reader had provided me — the kind of energy I wanted my pieces to have just didn’t appear and my verses felt hollow. Sure, my words rhymed, but they lacked the emotion I wanted to put into them. Truth be told, the very first poem I worked on was more of a random assortment of words mashed together in an effort to conjure up something coherent. The result was a free-form text with aspirations of being a poem, though it fell pretty flat.
Interestingly enough, it was either on the third or fourth day of this experiment that I had a haiku-shaped epiphany as I drove to work. A couple of syllables about the human body just strung themselves together in a way that startled me. Every other day of the week, I struggled to put words together in a way that made sense, but Apollo decided to whack me over the head with inspiration right at a moment I couldn’t write it down immediately. It’s not even funny how I repeated the haiku to myself over and over until I could write it down in my Notes app. The general takeaway from this week-long experiment is that poetry is complicated, but I’m not 100% discouraged from it.
All in all, I can admit that poetry is most certainly not my forte, but I want to keep trying to put verses together every so often. I’ve also recently made a new friend who writes poetry pretty often, so I’ll certainly turn to them for advice — and even inspiration, if they show me some of their work. Inspiration can be found in literally anything, but it can be difficult to truly encapsulate what I see in the world around me through poetry. I trust that, with time, words might start flowing a little more naturally (like they did with the haiku that came to me while I was driving to work) and I’ll be able to put together a little collection of poems; a small series that is the fruit of my efforts as a would-be poet.