On Writing Poetry

I have talked as have many others about Writers Block and related problems, and people are often shocked at how much I actually put out.

I often feel maybe my quality is not up to much as I seldom get a Top Story on Vocal, but in any evaluation process, you should never use one measure. If we produce a piece of work it is good to have someone completely separate to overlook what you have done, but you also need to be able to trust them as well.

I use native spell and grammar checkers pus Grammarly to check my work but sometimes find that they get things wrong or make life awkward, but essentially do help towards producing a correct and readable product.

I do not trust that Vocal Moderators have a chance to fully appreciate my work but I do know that my Vocal Facebook audience can evalute my work and give me feedback.

Some of those are now close friends so may be biased, I seldom get anyone giving me a bad review, but I do get the odd direct message if I make spelling or grammatical mistakes, which I welcome and I always want to make sure what I produce is right, so please tell me if I am wrong.

So how do I get inspiration to actually write poetry? I had written virtually nothing since school, only one or two free-form poems, and then I joined Vocal. There was a challenge for a Summer Sonnet (which you can read here) so I researched the form of that and created my first sonnet, definitely this millennium.

Although I usually rail against regimentation and rules, I actually liked that I had some rules to follow that were also malleable. The sonnet has become my preferred form, but I have tried other forms and I like the challenges they set me.

The next defined form I tried was a villanelle, but I actually got it wrong treating it as a normal poem without repeated lines but maintaining the rhyme structure. My second villanelle was a correctly formed poem.

When I start a poem now I generally choose a defined form, there is the odd time I go free form, but that is not my usual path. Here is my write-up on poetic forms.

On Vocal I believe a lot of people choose to write poems because there is a one hundred word limit which means you can submit six poems in the number of words that make up a standard post.

But how do I get inspired?

Well, the inspiration for this piece came from reading an alphabetical list of Vampires in Fiona Macdonald’s “Vampires, A Very Peculiar History “ which you can read more about here. I saw that list and added it to the spark that comes from my Muse in my heart. I thought maybe it’s time I said how I create poetry. There is no logic to that but there it is.

So a lot of my poetry is inspired by song titles or lyrics. That sometimes makes it a little difficult because I think the original lyrics are the definition of that. But I take my spark, then kick off the title and then I let the words flow.

I decide on the format and then it’s a case of fitting the words into the format and a rhyme sequence if required and eventually end up with a finished product. The subject is often my Muse and my love for her, but there are more general subjects but she is always in there.

I have over 150 poems and just over 50% are for my Muse so subjects are varied, including tributes to many friends, challenges I have set up, and general observations. I think I even did one berating Vocal for their editor not working on phones.

My real poetic inspiration is that my Muse frees my mind to be influenced to write about anything and that is what makes me a poet.

Thank you to everyone who reads all my work.

Oh and almost every one of my Vocal stories leads with a song. So I'll go with a real poet Leonard Cohen and the appropriate "I'm Your Man"

This is my directory of poetry