How has poetry helped/ changed/ affected you

[Leanne]

I make a living writing trash.

Poetry for me is like the antidote to that.

Though I have written poetry all my life, I am still very much a learner. I am currently wrestling with some of Lianne's excercises to further feel my way around the environment. I think these various, quite rigid formats are going to be good for me to dance with whatever is going around my head at the moment.

I don't think poetry has changed me, but it does help me understand how I have and continue to change. I love the way it develops my various styles. I am less pleased when the trash enters the poetry, but no matter. It is what it is.

I think revealing my poetry has changed me. I love to meet other funky thinkers.

Trash poetry has its place too Personally, I love poems that give me an insight into the poet -- not their history or personal life, but the mind behind it all. I love seeing unique word choices and interesting little turns of phrase that tell me there's a real person behind the pen (or keyboard, whatever) instead of just someone going through the motions.

I've been called many things... and I suppose, if it was muffled, one of them might have sounded a bit like "funky thinker"...

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Rose, your story touched several nerves. Except for a few things that my parents kept from school, I have no poetry or any other kind of writing from before I was 26, as my ex burned the lot of it. I stopped writing then, until I was 30 and decided to go online so at least some of it would be safe. The interesting thing was, I couldn't write about how I actually felt -- when I was the most miserable, I wrote comic poems, to the point when that was all I was known for. I didn't write about any personal stuff until more than a year after I'd finally left him and I felt comfortable enough to purge it all.

I've always written with rhyme and meter, though I didn't always know what I was doing until someone said "that's perfect iambic pentameter" and I had a baseline to work from. Although I studied poetry at university, it was simply not done to use any kind of structure and rhyme was anathema -- but my tutor was such a tosser that I figured learning all I could about forms was a kind of revenge. Now that I know the purpose behind each element of a form, I love to play around with them and find that matching the vessel to the poem is very rewarding.

I do hope you stay. It sounds like you'll fit in perfectly.