Why did/do you write poems?

Senna Jawa

Literotica Guru
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I am curious about your reasons. Here are mine:

  1. to induce a profound feeling in thoughtful readers;
  2. because I am lazy;
  3. to understand poetry;
  4. to meet certain challenges despite my original shortcomings.

About [3], to understand poetry without writing my own poems would not be the same.

Have fun,
 
1. I love to play with words
2. I love learning
3. Poetry is like jazz to me--improvisational
4. I'm also lazy. The thought of writing a novel makes my eyes cross.

My numbers 5 and 6 are the same as yours, SJ, because I cannot improve upon those sentiments, especially that last one. :)

Oh. I forgot 7.

7. I seem to have a lot to say. :rolleyes:
 
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1. I love to play with words
2. I love learning
3. Poetry is like jazz to me--improvisational
4. I'm also lazy. The thought of writing a novel makes my eyes cross.

My numbers 5 and 6 are the same as yours, SJ, because I cannot improve upon those sentiments, especially that last one. :)

Oh. I forgot 7.

7. I seem to have a lot to say. :rolleyes:
Thank you, Angeline. But I don't have any [5][6], I have only [1]-[4].
 
i did because:

a) i had to - my mental health may have suffered if i'd repressed their expression; too much 'stuff' in my life that had no outlet prior to writing. a dam burst and i wrote an awful load of nonsense interspersed with some stuff i'm still pleased by.

b) playing with words - and allowing words to play with me - was enormously rewarding at the time; it meant i was able to explore certain intricacies of the english language in a way i couldn't in prose.

i do because:

a) it's as natural and necessary as breathing - a way of life now; it's 'what i do' in my spare time.

b) now the flood's abated and gained a little more control, i'm able to explore the nature of words, their interplay, their effect on others . . . the secret life of words.

c) it's a challenge - to hone how i use words to best convey/communicate/even manipulate; previously, the process really didn't take anyone else into account - now i do try and consider the reader, try to see what i've written through different perspectives/eyes. Ultimately i'll still write what i choose to, but if i've managed to make the reader see/think/feel/remember things they've either never experienced, or experienced differently, then i feel more satisfied with the piece i've written.

d) i write wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more concisely in poetry than rambling prose. :eek:

e) it's still fun!
 
I wrote some horrible verses when I was 22 that I liked because, well, I was 22, and I thought I knew more than I knew.

At 62, after a career in public service dealing with a dark side of human emotions, which was was for me the prison system and the abnormal psychology of it, I retired because of medical reasons and decided I was going to "follow my passion," to borrow a phrase.

To that point in my life, I had written perhaps 20 poems. Quite coincidentally, I came across Literotica something short of five years ago. I liked it because it accepted and, at least in the PF&D, made no judgments, except to provide constructive criticism. It seemed like a good place to learn from more accomplished poets, including you. Indeed, it has.
 
I wrote a few poems for the hell of it and thought that is was a great way to hone my long fiction writing which was my dream career.

And now I can't see myself writing anything but poetry and lyrics for the fun of it.
 
Primarily I suppose I found something I was good at and was praised for, something that was very scarce in my life, and praise where none has been before is very heady.
*sounds like there could be a poem in that!*
 
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I did, at times do write poetry because:

1- It's in my head and it won't go away or I don't understand it unless it is written.
2- I want to convey a message to be understood or not.
3- I want to share something I've seen/heard/tasted/smelled/felt.
4 - It's better than Xanax and Lexapro.
5 - I'm not lazy. I've written hundreds of poems and there hundreds more left to write.
 
I did, at times do write poetry because:

1- It's in my head and it won't go away or I don't understand it unless it is written.
2- I want to convey a message to be understood or not.
3- I want to share something I've seen/heard/tasted/smelled/felt.
4 - It's better than Xanax and Lexapro.
5 - I'm not lazy. I've written hundreds of poems and there hundreds more left to write.
Neo, I have written hundreds of poems in English, and more in Polish (mercifully, most of them are gone...; actually, I am sorry for this). It's still laziness in my case. Poetry gives an illusion of a quick result, of a quick feedback, of a quick success. I should be committed to some long range projects which do not provide any fast partial results but I was tempted by poems. This is what I mean laziness. I'd like to stress however the term illusion in the case of serious poetry. And occasionally my head would get tired after intensive writing almost like in the case of mathematics (well, almost :)).

BTW programming can be as exhausting as anything or more but in a different way. Actually, programming can play a role of a warm up for more creative efforts (I am still far from putting programming down).
 
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I wasn't picking at you Senna (or Ange). I just saw "laziness" as a reason repeated for writing poetry and it struck me until I wrote my own reasons. You may say you're lazy, but I differ. I've seen otherwise in the poems you've just posted here at Literotica.

By the way, but not on the subject of this thread, I read about your night walks in Lit Blog 2014 and I found them intriguing. I do the same, walking for couple of hours late at night. I recently had to quit since everyone here has put out their dogs with warmer weather. It's a sign of spring like robins and tulips.
 
1)to try and convey emotion, for people to see feel or experience empathetic reactions possibly similar to senna's comment about profound

2) it is a mental release that unclutters the mind for me

3) the diversity of poetry in all it's intricacies is vast so much to think about that it challenges the mind in different ways

4) eroticism is so human that we often take it for granted but to pen it out and try to convey thr humanity in sexuality is liberating
 
1. To amuse myself.
2. To amuse others.
3. To express emotions that are better said in a formal structure.
4. To prove that I could.
5. To get some feelings out of my system - once written down I could move on.
6. To discover that I am better writing prose than poetry.

Unasked Question. Why did I stop writing poetry?

A. Because one poem has remained without a single vote for years; the attention given to a new poem by someone who isn't an acknowledged poet is even less than that given to a new story.

B. Because I found that I could achieve 1, 2, 3 and 5 above in prose, and that my fifty-word stories are my preferred form of poetry.
 
Somewhere between did and do I found it was amusing to use poetry to tease trolls that were bothering other poets.
 
That's an intriguing statement, please tell more.

And one that leads to a very long and boring story.

The condensed version of which is that a fellow poet out of Australia started a forum and invited me along to be co-captain. It attracted a handful of trolls who played a significant role in the demise of the Pink Palace Of Poetitude, which was for most of its existence an unmoderated poetry forum belonging to the same person who owns PFFA at everypoet.net.

They flamed away at a handful of us on a daily basis - ridiculing our poetry, accusing us of being the ones who caused the Palace to be deleted, labeling me a pedophile because I operated several adult websites at that time and blaming us for stealing away the friendship of a nice young woman and her friends who they had been manipulating ( rather cruelly I might add ).

They were never banned from posting at our forum. We just laughed, wrote poetry meant to piss them off even further and criticized what little poetry they had ever written - in a fair and just manner. We told them the forum had absolutely no outside readers, but they refused to believe this. And if it appeared as though there were dozens of active poets and participants, it is because the Aussie and I had numerous sockpuppet accounts.

All of this sunk in after several years. That was how dense these trolls were. They finally gave up trying to make us look foolish and disappeared.
 
Why do I write poems?
  1. I find it enjoyable, though sometimes frustrating. I’ve used analogies to crossword puzzles (poems require working out word and rhythmic relationships) and golf (a pastime one can find quite rewarding, even if one isn’t very good at it, but still something one can aspire to, and even expect to, improve at, though real mastery is unachievable). And it satisfies my intellectual needs as well as my aesthetic ones.
  2. To understand poetry. I had played around at writing poems but only became serious about it when I decided that I might understand poetry better if I tried to write some myself (and learn the techniques of it first hand, of course). This has helped some—I certainly understand much more about poetic technique than I did ten years ago—but it has not made me anything like a “real” poet (because, frankly, who is?) nor really helped with my understanding of poetry. Yes, I understand “Ozymandias” or “Leda and the Swan” better than I did ten years ago, but it’s, all in all, a pretty thin “better.” But (rhetorical question) does anyone ever truly get Botticelli’s Primavera, either? (I’ve been thinking about it lately.) Or some Beethoven string quartet or Eliot’s The Waste Land or anything that reaches for art?
  3. Because it’s something I can do with some level of competence, despite my wretched poetic output. I write not very good poems, but I’m better at writing poems than I am at golf, for example. And (see 1) I enjoy it. So I almost don’t care what anyone thinks.
So let me go back to shanking iambs way into the deep, deep rough.

At least, I’m not holding up a foursome.
 
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