How has poetry helped/ changed/ affected you

[Rose Love]

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.

Wow, what a horrible situation you were in. I think I would die if I were in a relationship so smothering that I couldn't even write. Thank goodness you got away. I suppose I was lucky in that my parents never paid attention to anything I did when they weren't yelling at/lecturing me (and I never had what I would call any real relationship with a guy...maybe ½ of one though). I have always been free to express myself in writing. I was always pretty socially inept, quiet and shy, so I had to have some outlet...

When I burned my diaries etc., I'm sure you know it was a completely different situation than what you described, not one that is easily explained. I think I'd have died if someone else had done it prior to then, because I always knew, if my apartment caught on fire, what was the first thing I would want to save? My 26+ diaries, poem books--my writings. Then I end up burning them myself in a big outdoor fire in the dead of the winter darkness. I'd do it again too. There is just one poem I would save before doing it again though...

Well, I like it here so far. I don't usually get along very well with people, especially ones on the Internet...so I hope this isn't a dream