Intro to Poetry

I have just posted my first poem (which I wrote yesterday), so feeling proud that this blog has now had a complete makeover (huge thank you to my beautiful friend Sinead over at sineaddreamingagain.blogspot.com - head over and check out her amazing blog!) and that I have posted my first poem, which I hope will be a core component of my blog. So I wanted to follow up with an explanation of why I write poetry and what it means to me.

When I was five years old, I wrote my first "book" - which was a story about a little butterfly who got lost and had an adventure trying to find her way home. Complete with disproportionate illustrations. I don't remember much about the storyline, but I do remember the very last page, where the little butterfly had a cup of tea with her mother in their "home" in a tree (where the butterflies were the size of half a tree - what a terrifying prospect) and the little butterfly was purple (my favourite colour at the time). I vividly remember asking Dad for a stapler to staple my book together and his surprise at my casual, airy "oh I just finished writing a book".

I grew up learning to read at an early age, and after that "book" I remember my main dream in life was to be an author. I spent endless hours reading books and writing short stories and planning novels. As I got older, I turned more to poetry and my reading horizons expanded and dominated my academics as well, flourishing in written subjects more than logical sciences or maths.

Even after I put down the pen on regular personal writing, writing and words has remained important to me. I studied English, Classics, Anthropology, History and Ancient History in my Arts degree at University. My law degree seeemed a natural and obvious choice for someone with a penchant for word-smithing and wanting to help people.

Poetry to me, even when I haven't been regularly refining my craft and writing as much as I used to, still speaks to me. There is something in the craft of fitting words together like a puzzle, in striking a balance between simplicity and thought-provoking that I find so rewarding. It is a therapy for the soul, the search for words helps me to express who I am, what I am experiencing and trying to put even the raw and painful moments of life into something that exudes beauty. I like practicing different poetry, from ones whose purposes is to evoke or portray a singular emotion and the turbulence that sits underneath one emotion; to a poem with a plot line which involves more of the senses and tries to create a vivid visual image in the readers mind, to tell a story. I love being able to share my imaginative stories, but also connect on an emotional level in a way that is both personal and disconnected - as poetry is at it's very core something that comes from the heart.

A part of this blog is to enable me to share my poetry with the online world, but most of all to encourage me to write again, in whatever form that ends up taking. I hope some or even just one of poems strikes a chord with you or speaks to you in some way.