The Accidental Poet

I seem to have accidentally become familiar with poetry.

I hope that doesn’t sound like some kind of humble brag, because it’s not intended to be. I’m not pleased with this development! I find it mildly infuriating, as a large part of me still believes that poetry is simply dull. I know that’s a terrible thing for a writer to say, but much of poetry has, and continues to bore me to my core. Whilst I have plenty of practice in writing and understanding poetry, I by no means go out of my way to read any of it in my spare time; nor do I have any favourites, know any poets outside the ones I’ve studied, or have any concept of the structure of the poetic world besides what I’ve been told in classes and lectures.

And yet, I’ve been writing poetry for years. Utter rot, most of it. That’s no surprise considering I’m not even nineteen yet; therefore, when I say I’ve been writing it for years, it unfortunately does mean that I’ve been scrawling away at it since I was twelve. I have no idea what set me off, but it quickly became a method of ranting about the pits of my life and developed into a therapeutic way of relieving stress in later years. Naturally, my subject matter was not a broad one. These so-called poems were so full of angst and teenage cliché that I wince every time I remember that these works exist. I should really get around to burning them, but I’d have to overcome my obsession with archiving all content I’ve ever created first. The poems themselves were all over the place, with their author not having the slightest clue about form or structure or even the different types of poetry, such as free verse, sonnets or ballads. Mostly, they were Eminem inspired, and are closer to profane, angsty, rhythmically challenged raps than actual poetry.

When I started my GCSE in English Literature and was forced to actually read and analyse poetry in-depth, my pitiful attempts at writing poems became slightly less embarrassing. That being said, the poems of Carol Anne Duffy never really grabbed me, although Thomas Hardy did inspire me to try my hand at free verse for the first time (not something you’d want to read). We studied Thomas Hardy in greater depth through my A-Level, as well as some other poets I’ve not bothered to remember the names of. And slowly but surely, I came to realise that everything I’d written up to that point had been utter bollocks.

And continued to be utter bollocks.

I have since abandoned my teenage angst pseudo-raps. I did become fairly adept at rhyming and almost decent at rhythm, but it just wasn’t poetry. (I did try to write a new one not so long ago but I’ve lost any sense of rhythm I’d gained and it’s become impossible… probably for the best.) I’ve been experimenting with free verse for quite some time now, and whilst most of what I write is either overly ambiguous to the point of nonsense, or one babbling jumble of words without enough thought put into them, it seems to have paid off. I wouldn’t have believed it myself but for today’s lecture we had to bring in a piece of free verse poetry that we’d written ourselves, and apparently mine was not awful. Not just not awful, but… good. My lecturer who specialises in poetry seems to believe that I’ve grasped the concept of free verse adequately and can write a decent poem. And frankly, that astounds me.

This blog post does have a reason other than me just gushing that I’m able to not suck at poetry. I want to talk about writer’s block for a bit, as I seem to have had it for the past month. Recently I’ve been unable to write any short stories, scripts or even blog posts, which is why content has been pretty dry since Boscastle. However, one constant that has stayed with me this past month is my poetry, which I have for some reason still been able to write. I’d like to reiterate that most of it is still unreadable, but it’s interesting and quite worrying that my most frequent mode of writing seems to be becoming poetry. I don’t want to be a poet! I enjoy writing my poems but that is not who I ultimately want to be. It makes me wonder if there’s any other poets out there who’d much rather be known for some other form of writing. I (hope I) know for a fact that Thomas Hardy wrote novels, ones which weren’t particularly well received. I wonder how many aspiring novelists accidentally become poets, and if that’s even a possibility.

And finally, after having written, polished and published this blog post, I decided to check and see if Thomas Hardy’s poetry actually was free verse just to make sure that I wasn’t being completely wrong. And lo and behold… he apparently never wrote free verse. Consider that proof that I really don’t pay attention to the world of poetry…