We all have a creative side. Most of us have been pushed to or encouraged to be creative and unique, in whatever medium or fashion. That portion of our brain gets developed early in grade school by doing simple things like picking what color we want to choose from the crayon box. It’s easy: We do what we like because it is visually pleasing to us or maybe it soothes part of ourselves.
Some people continue to pursue their creative motivation as their life progresses and unfortunately others do not. I’m grateful that my high school experience was a culmination of experimenting my creative spark. I tried exploring all types of mediums that I liked doing, but that does not mean my talents could be found in them. In other words, I sucked. Drawing, painting, and dancing were not my cup of tea. I found myself in a composition notebook and a ball point pen. Scribbled upon pages of torn up and smeared half written words were the early stages of my evolving poetry.
I have trouble with my words a lot of the time. Public speaking is not my strong suit and whenever an oral presentation is assigned in class a knot feels like it’s eating my stomach. It’s not that do not enjoy speaking because I do, but it’s knowing that I have trouble with it that gets me down. Or it could be the fact that I do not have a passion and a drive behind the topics in which I am discussing. In that position, I have to be someone I’m not and do not want to be. Nobody wants to seem passionate about something just to get a good grade.
The useful thing about poetry, for me, is that you don’t have to make sense. Your sentences do have to have basic syntactical structure to them, but they do not have to feature a cohesive black and white story for the reader to automatically pick up on. Anything can be said as long as it is true to you. There is no correct way to do it. If you try too hard to make a piece of poetry function, then that is the ultimate failure. The failure of luring away from yourself. You’ll know it feels real and true to you because it will flow out of you like exhalation.
Having been writing for the past three years, I haven’t found anything else like it. It creates a strange internal balance of somehow being the force that tears me apart due to the subject matter in which I am trying to transfer onto the page, but it glues me back together because of the constant ability to scream a little bit into a piece of paper or computer screen that occurs with every word that is typed or scratched down. Yell sometime. It helps. Writing poetry is an emotional process in itself. It will bring back a lot of unpleasant, familiar sentences to the surface. What starts as a torturous flashback can be transformed into a work of art that is 12 lines long. An emotional process is what a writer needs to be fully cathartic.
