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Do you like poetry? Do you like writing or reading them? In this blog, I will share my experience on how my journey of hating poetry shifts to loving and enjoying it. All my life, I hated poetry. I had to write or memorize poems when I was in High School. I used to feel so bored and stressed out because I wouldn’t put my focus on it. It was a lot of pressure to write or memorize them. It was also compulsory to do poetry because they were big grades assignments. The more pressure I had to memorize/ write them, the more I hated poetry.
My love for poetry changed in my third year of University. I had to take a Creative Writing class. One of the assignments the professor assigned was doing poetry. The assignment was to write four poems. The professor gave us the freedom to write the four poems on whatever we wanted, but it should follow the guidelines she assigned. I sent a draft to the professor of my poetry for her feedback. She said it was "ok", but I need to add more feel to it. I have to admit, I was writing them only for the sake of getting grades. I didn’t care much whether the poetry was good or bad. So, I wrote my second draft putting some more effort into it. When I again showed it to the Professor, she told me that my poetry is not working. They don’t have feelings for it. I was writing poetry related to my personal experience, but in the poetries, I was hiding things (I am a shy person and I don’t open my feelings to others). The Professor said to let go of the feeling that I am hiding inside and put it in poetry.
Therefore, I decided to do one final draft and if it doesn’t work out, I decided that I am done with it. So, the next night, I sat at my study table and started writing my first poetry for the assignment. promise to put the feelings out as much as I can in the assignment. I decided to share one of my experiences in one of the four poems in a poetry form. I started my paper with a flashback on how the event all started. I just kept going with writing all the emotions I felt in that one experience without looking back to what I wrote. When I came out of the flashback and saw my writing, I was astonished. There was so much about the experience I didn’t notice before. The best thing I found in that writing is that I didn’t have to explain things in detail. It was just some strong emotional hints for the reader to understand what my experience was like. I repeat the same thing in my three other poems describing different experiences. I did some editing of the poetries to make it presentable.
When the Professor read it, she loved it because it wasn't just poetry. It was poetries filled with every bit of emotion. The Professor asked me to read out to the class and my classmates loved it. I felt very good, relaxed, light, and cheerful from inside and outside. It was not just because of the compliments I got, it was because I poured my heart out in my poetry that lightened me from inside. That was the moment my heartfelt love for poetry. From that day, my love for poetry only grew.
LESSON: Poetry is not about writing from your mind. It's all about writing and reading from the heart. Expressing and sharing the depth of emotions in order to understand and make others understand the experience. Once you do that your love for poetry will only grow more and more.
Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash
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