From Logic to Language: How Poetry Became My Healing Art
- A chapter from How To Write Evocative Poetry -
Throughout my entire schooling career, I was a left-brain thinker. Math made sense. It had a right and a wrong. It felt like the only solid base in a chaotic world, spawned by a tumultuous home life. This was combined with incompetent and out of touch teachers and terrible examples of poetry that I simply couldn’t relate to. I was left feeling that at best the entire artform was beyond me, and at worst that it was a refuge for pomposity and prose, written by people who have experienced less than they would ever write.
Flash forward a few years and life was looking a little better. I had moved out, I was safe, and I had met the woman who would become my wife. She introduced me to her poetry and shock of shocks, it resonated. We talked, shared, and expressed. She taught me the true beauty of poetry, opening me up to an artform I basically never looked at, let alone produced.
During that time, I began writing to heal. First with the book, Under The Influence, Reclaiming My Childhood, followed by a plethora of other titles in a variety of different styles. Soon, the act of writing poetry became one of my core forms of self-healing and therapy. Like the cleaning of a wound, it hurt, but it was ultimately therapeutic. After a conversation with a friend highlighting the potential benefits for others who may resonate with my work, I eventually decided to share it with the world, and gradually the world began to care. Now not a day goes by where I don’t receive a message telling me that my poetry puts words to the thoughts they couldn’t quite articulate or form themselves.
I write to heal and encourage others to do the same. This book is the logical next step after that encouragement. I can get people to agree that they should write, but a lot will immediately tell me that they can’t. The fact is, initially, neither could I, and sometimes I still can’t, not when it really hurt. But I have learnt to keep putting pen to paper because whether I make the words go goodly, the act of writing is healing.
There is a joy in writing evocative poetry. In knowing that your words are moving people, that you are touching upon a truth, so fundamental, so core that it simply must be written, that a blank page must be sacrificed to bring forth such beauty. Nowadays I have almost completely switched to right brain thinking and identify myself as an artist above all else. When someone asks me what I do, I reply with, ‘I am a poet’. Not only does this steer the conversation in interesting directions, but it also cements that identity into my very essence – I suggest you start doing likewise. You do not need to wait until you are living off your work, or made a single dollar, or even really shown anyone a single piece. To be a poet, all you need to be doing is writing.
The Art Of Teaching
The creative and technical advice in this book comes from the intersection between what I have found works in practice with myself and my students, combined with knowledge gained from studying the works and methodologies of great contemporary and historic poets, writers, and artists.
I am a teacher by trade, it is my job to synthesize and express the fundamental aspects of a topic I know in depth and then present it in a way that my students can understand. Like poetry, teaching is an artform, and like all artforms, all you can really do is provide guidance for the student to consider and then integrate into their own unique expressions and world view. The goal is to help the student hone their intuitive feeling for what works, through observation, data, study, appropriate feedback, and lots of practice.
Sometimes the right information lands at the right time and produces a revolution in thinking. Other times, it sits in the background waiting for the final piece of a puzzle to slot into place before it finally clicks. Of course, teaching in real time is different than through a book. Given the limitations of the medium, some of the information presented here may not feel immediately applicable, or may seem ‘obvious’, and perhaps it is, but nonetheless I encourage you to consider it all, try it out, keep what works and discard what doesn’t. Remember, your goal isn’t to write like me, but to use the information here to enhance your ability to write evocative poetry.
This book is my attempt to distil the magic and science of creative poetry writing into easy-to-follow rules that you can apply to your own writing, hopefully giving you the confidence to express yourself, fully, totally, and completely.
This chapter is from the book How To Write Evocative Poetry
