Why Do I Write Poetry?

My friend Artemis Shishir asked me a question. And it wasn’t easy to answer.

“Why do you write poetry?”

To begin to answer this, I must go back to when I was a child. I learned to read when I was four years old. I was enthralled with the worlds that opened up to me, and I devoured every bit of written word I could get my little hands on.

I don’t remember the first poem I read, but the first time I recall poetry really caught my heart was in Madeleine L’Engle’s novels, which I first read somewhere between 11 years of age and my early teens. While the books themselves are prose, many of her main characters are poets, and their work is reprinted in the text.

Of course, I knew that L’Engle was the poet, not her fictional protagonists. This mattered not at all. I was enamoured.

I remember creating songs when I was very young — I can’t remember how old I was, but it was before I turned 10. They were very simple, and I still remember them even though I never wrote them down. Writing poetry was a very natural and organic continuation of this. While I have no idea when I began to write them, poems are my first writing love and my favourite thing to write.

My favourite classes in school were music and English. And my favourite part of English class was studying poetry. The way a good poem plays with words and uses things like rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration to create a tone or feeling appeals to my soul.

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” — Rita Dove

During difficult times of my life, writing poetry helps me to get through. During good times of my life, writing poetry helps me to express my joy.

Words have always been my art: They dance for me and sing for me; They laugh for me and cry for me; They are my paint and brushes; They are my clay. — Esther Spurrill Jones

Some create art with their bodies, moving to music and telling stories with their flesh and bones. Some create art with colour and pigment, or with stone or clay, telling stories with pictures and shapes. Some create art with costumes and stage and props, telling stories with lines and gestures. Some create art with notes and chords, with strings and air, with drums and cymbals, telling stories with the sound of music.

I create art with words on a page. I sculpt and shape the words, and they dance and sing.