When reflecting on writing about poetry informed my own writing of poetry in learning about what actually goes into creating poetry. For instance, I was writing certain kinds of poetry, such as an ekphrasis, before I even knew what that was. I just wrote what was in my head. I had self-studied poetry in around 2006, but I forgot most of what I learned. So learning about and analyzing poetry is really important to actually creating poetry and recognizing what you are doing, whether a poem is written naturally or with technical knowledge.
When reflecting on writing poetry informed me about writing about poetry because I am already a poet, so when I have to analyze a poem for a class, I pretty much get where the poet is coming from or why they did a particular thing in their poem. I feel like I see what they are trying to express from inside their heads and feelings. There’s a certain feeling when a poem begins, and I have to catch it before it disappears. Sometimes I just look at something or hear a word or phrase, and suddenly my mind is hearing a phrase of poetry.
What I learned from this experience of writing and performing poetry that I could use in future teaching is the value of prompts. I had already learned this before, but it’s a very valuable tool for a poet. Back in 2005, I took a creative writing class at Pierce College. Somewhere in the week we wrote poetry, I was suddenly inspired, and became a poet, and was writing poetry all the time. That lasted for several years, and then I just stopped, from lack of time, or lack of inspiration (such as being miserable about romance). And, sometimes I have simply been too busy to feel creative. So, I wanted to take more classes in writing, and so I was inspired again. But when the semesters stopped, I suddenly stopped for the most part. So, I figured out that having a prompt will kickstart a poem and creativity. So, as in the exercise of the two poems that we did for class, prompts can give a poet the inspiration for a poem, even if one isn’t “feeling” it. So the value of prompts is important in future teaching in that the student can create a poem from a prompt, as we did in class.
