These train conversations are passing me by...

Five words, as provided by Mr attack_monkey. Going to do them as five separate entries as it'll be a bit long if not...

Poetry
I usd to write poetry when I was younger. Not, as most people did, in my teens, but when I was about 5 or 6. My mum was immensely proud of it and bought pretty books for me to write in. It was the sort of thing you'd imagine, lots of simple lines going ta-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty-tum, ending in neat little end rhymes - best and rest, way and say, street and meet - in other words pretty much on a par with the average chart pop song. Much as you'd expect. Within a few years I was looking back on this as being unbelievably childish and naive and left poetry behind me forever. This feeling was strong enough to save me from the temptations of bad teenage poetry, even after I discovered dressing in black could be a lifestyle thing and not just a way to try to look slimmer.

I signed up for an Open University poetry course this year mostly as a way of improving my prose writing. After the short story OU course, I was very conscious of how much I tend towards over-writing, and thought poetry would help me hone down my language and make better word choices. And I was aware that some of my writing does rely on repetition and rhythm (this or this for example. I'd even produced the odd accidental poem while trying to do other things (such as short stories, artwork or sleep). But I never really thought of the course in terms of actually wanting to write poetry. I mean, I'm not 5 anymore, am I?

But I surprised myself by how naturally I fell into it. And part of that was how different the act of writing poetry was from what I'd imagined. Because I studied English Lit I was used to deconstructing poetry, picking apart and analysing all the metaphors and themes and literary devices. So I'd always thought that poets started out by putting ALL that stuff in intentionally, logically, right from the start. And I couldn't imagine how anyone could even begin to do that, so I'd always steered well clear. But I was wrong.

I learnt that the root of poetry, the way into it - for me at least - was simply the rhythms of words. And not in a forced way - it was more letting the words play amongst themselves until they made a coherent pattern, which then formed a framework into which everything else got weaved, layer by layer. But that underneath all was always that rhythm, even if it ended up broken and abused. And that rhythm was based on natural speech patterns. I'd always thought of poetry as being a pretentious way of saying something you could just as easily put in good old-fashioned plain, simple sentences. Now I'm starting to see it as something far closer to natural speech, with rhythms and patterns and pauses and layers of meaning tripping over and merging into one another and half-formed phrases abandoned partway through. Sentences and grammar and paragraphs and one-thought-per-sentence, one-idea-per-paragraph looks pretentious and alien. Nobody talks like writing, unless they're giving a speech. People talk in poetry. And I do like talking.

So that's about where I am with poetry right now. Oh, and I got back my results for the short course and got 85% - not perfect (and I am a perfectionist, even when it's impossible) but not bad at all.

There will be more poetry writing. Some of it may appear here.