No ideas—but things. Focus on the things so the ideas can come.

Poetry is language we already know being reused or misused.

Apparently, sometime between the ages of ten or twelve and now, I was taken out to the alley and beat up by poetry. I completely stopped reading it after a romantic poets class I took at North Central back in 2002. But it wasn’t that class that did it, I wasn’t happy about having to take the class, but it was one, or the only, English class that would fulfill my requirements and still let me leave with my associates degree at the end of that semester.

I have no idea where my fear of poetry came from. As a kid, I loved it. I published. Fairly often. And then…It must have been very traumatic. I guess I’ve blocked it out.

For my MFA Core class I am required to write in all three genres taught by our program: Poetry, Creative Non-Fiction, and Fiction. Fiction is going to be my focus, and therefore, I’m the least worried about that project. I did a CNF essay on thyroid cancer for my first project. So, for my current project, I need to turn in poetry.

To help with my fear, I went to Prairie Gate Literary Festival a few weeks ago and went to a workshop with Matt Hart (the above quotes are from him.)  The whole focus on the workshop was getting writing— we specifically talked about poetry, but his methods could be used for any type of writing — and we wrote five poems in the class. And each of us read at least one out loud.

Of course, the one I was picked to read was the one I hated the most of what I wrote.

But it didn’t matter. The whole point was to write. In an hour and fifteen minutes, I, I who hate writing poetry, I who can’t write poetry, wrote five poems. Writing that much that fast, it’s not all going to be good. But it got me writing again. I came home and started working on my poetry project the next day.