Welcome to Returning to My Inner Poet

I used to write a lot of poetry. I had a journal in high school that I would write in nearly every night. It was filled with the start of short stories, silly poems, and nonsensical doodles. I still have this journal and occasionally have a good laugh going through it.

I wonder if he ever regretted any of his early poetry?

Poetry was a fun hobby in high school. It was part of my whole: "I'm going to be a famous writer/artist someday" shtick that I try to pretend didn't exist (yeah, high school me was an interesting person). They were short, easy to write, and my creative writing teacher always wanted poems for the literary magazine. I think I had four or five poems and a couple of drawings published before I graduated.

Then I just stopped writing poems.

I don't really remember why I stopped. I think I took a few years of writing off all together in college, until I was blackmailed talked into writing fan-fiction.

I seem to recall having a poetry writing assignment my freshmen year of college. I was pretty sick when I was told to write a sonnet and don't remember many details. However, I do remember my professor saying that the poem I wrote was prefect mathematically, but otherwise sucked.

Meh, I was never a huge fan of sonnets anyway. I liked haiku and limericks a lot more. They're playful and funny.

So nearly a decade has gone by and I haven't written a single poem. And then I have a really bad month. Not bad like bad things keep happening to me, but bad as in my mental health wasn't in the best shape. I keep trying to find the right way to describe what I'm feeling and I lost a lot of interest in writing.

Finally I managed to put some thoughts on paper. Just a couple of rhyming lines that wouldn't make much sense to someone casually glancing at them. A few more weeks go by and I go back to those lines and add a few more. Suddenly I had a poem that helped me describe what I was feeling.

I didn't do anything with the poem. It's been sitting in a notebook for the better part of a year now. I've been focusing on short stories and novel writing.

Then I make a new friend at one of my writers groups who loves to write poetry. We actually have similar stories when it comes to writing poetry. We wrote a lot in high school and then stopped writing for one reason or another only to start writing years later. They've asked me to help out proofreading some of their work that they have on Wattpad (a website where you can post original works for people to read).

When they started sharing their poetry with me, it was like a switch had been flipped. I started writing more poetry. It's still slow and they probably aren't the best poems (not by a long shot), but I'm finding that I really enjoy it.

I might do a few more posts on poetry and see about posting some of my poems here. April is National Poetry Month, so I'm either really late or seriously early to celebrate. But why should I only celebrate poetry once a month?

Until next week.

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