Poetry Over All

Written 5 December 2016

This post is actually being written at the time it is posted. I have been thinking lately on what it means to be a Creative Writing major with a concentration in poetry. I chose to study poetry not because I enjoy it more than fiction or nonfiction, because I am not so sure that I do. Rather, I chose it because I thought it was the most applicable across the board--I chose it to obtain a mastery of language that I could use forever and for everything, whether it be in my future novel(s), papers, essays, cover letters, proposals, handwritten thank-you cards, blog posts, etc.

There are a lot of expectations when you say you are a poetry major. People automatically assume you are a poet, which is actually different in my humblest opinion. Then again, I think everyone is a poet whether they are aware of it or not, so my credibility may be diminishing. However, these expectations drive me toward writing better, smoother, using more action verbs (the daily struggle), fewer adverbs, fewer run-on sentences and lists (whoops), which I may not have faced had I been a fiction or nonfiction writer.

I am quickly learning through my Creative Nonfiction Writing class that nonfiction is very much about the self--or at least my class is. It is incredibly introspective and forces me to examine myself in ways poetry may not always do for me.

From my experience in my Fiction Writing class, I learned to take critiques when characters and plot lines were not as exciting and dynamic and complex as they could be. That was a highly critical class altogether, and I came to see exactly which elements of a story people liked, and which--no matter how unique and life-changing to you--were flubs.

But poetry taught me how to be different, how anything goes (but not really because there is an invisible line you cannot cross but you won't know until the feedback is terribly negative). That is exactly what I was hoping to take away from the concentration.