In the first ever creative writing class I took, we had an assignment that entailed copying a stylistic poem from our text books.
I knew most people were choosing haikus, sonnets, and limericks, and I wanted to try something different. After flipping through, I found something called, “the braided style,” where you took three topics and wrote about them separately, but with a theme that braided them together. Simple enough, I thought. The style itself was a little different, because it was written in more of a lyrical paragraph style, but I was up for the challenge.
I completed my work, a piece about family, and turned it in. It was well received and I scored perfectly on it. However, as I was reading sections of it out loud to the class my teacher stopped me. “I did not realize it until now, but I think the style you chose was actually intended for short stories or personal essays. The way you wrote it is poetic though, and because you called it a poem I guess it counts.” This was my first experience with poetry as something other than a highly literary form of writing.
I stopped writing poetry for a while after that because if the only thing that makes a work poetry is me calling it a “poem,” then it did not seem like something worth focusing on. The next creative writing class I took was taught by a professor who like obscure literature that rarely made sense with broken lines and non-sense metaphors as well as very little punctuation or capitalization.
I wrote very traditional style poems which scored well, but did not receive great feedback on personal levels. At the end of the class, the professor read some of the stuff I wrote outside of class. He liked it much better than the “literary” stuff I had turned in, but he still thought that I should “give myself the freedom to write as though I was not reading my own work.” When I asked him what that meant, he told me to just write what felt natural and not to try to give the works a grand meaning or purpose.
It’s been two semesters since I took that class, and I still send my works to that professor occasionally. We still disagree stylistically, but I am beginning to realize something…
Poetry is truly whatever a person defines it as. A poem can be two lines, or it can be twenty pages. In today’s society, art is branching out in new directions and taking on forms never previously considered. It is filled with more pain and anger, frustration and despair, love and joy, and independence than ever before.
I may still write poetry with a capitol “P”, but I am learning to appreciate lowercase “p” poetry. I am beginning to see the artistry in that form as well. Everyone has a poet in them, and with a few lines that poet can be released.
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