What is Your Motivation?

Hey everyone,

I wanted to talk about what makes us on yws write poetry, so the question is, what motivates you to poet?

Expanding my writing horizons and moving past writer's block is why I write poetry.

Thats a really good reason.

Finding what my subconscious already deduced for me, Stirring that pot of soup, and then sharing it around

But I don't find many hungry minds -- just stomachs

It sounds really sad when I say this, but I feel like the only way I can get people to really understand how I feel is through my writing, whether that's poetry or prose. So maybe my need for someone to understand/my loneliness fuels all my writing. I sound so edgy, haha.

Until last year's NaPo, I didn't really write poetry! Then I was strongarmed into spending 30 days writing poems, and it turned out to be kind of fun. I still mostly only write poems during community events like NaPo, because writing alongside other people is most fun, but I've discovered that poetry is a really good outlet for my love of... well, sentence-craft, I guess - carving out the "perfect" way to say something, clearly, concisely, and with due attention to how the words on the page sound together.

I think @Wriskypump and @marms have similar experiences. I know that when i did a research thing on an author, it was on Margaret Atwood who is both a poet and fiction author, she said that she used writing to talk out all the thoughts of things she wouldn't say in civilised discussions. She was always a bit afraid that someone would start to hate her for her written word because she does such dark things. It sounds sort of like you two.

@Cadi I get so caught up in the word choice and poemey bits too xD

This is such a good question Aley.

This doesn't line up exactly with what I think poetry is or does for me, but I think this is an important part - so I'll share something that Madeleine L'Engle (one of my favorite novelists) has written in the spoiler below:

Spoiler

"Poetry and prayer are synonymous in my life, and because both are a gift, which I accept with joy and sometimes ill. But perhaps that doesn't really matter; the important thing is to be willing - to want to serve the gift whenever it comes, either as verse or prayer.

Usually it teaches me something - something about God and therefore something about myself- because I have come to realize that my search for God and my search for me are one and the same. Or, rather, when I search my own heart, God shows me his instead; and in my search for him I find myself.
...
I have learned that to share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible - and one that makes us the most vulnerable. But if we refuse to take that risk we are less than alive.

My heart's climate is not constant; I doubt if anyone's is. My inner weather shifts with the days. But much sunshine has shone on me through the sharing and giving and receiving.

And so I am taught to pray. And so I am taught to be.
-- Madeleine L'Engle "Crosswicks" June 1978

For me poetry is in a way the quest to find some portion of essential truth (and this truth might be told through fictional portrayals of events, it might seem insignificant, it might just be how I feel on a certain day) but it's some part of that truth that could not be communicated (maybe not even be realized or felt) without poetry. And I think God, who also goes by the name Logos and Wisdom and even Word, is absolutely part of that quest for truth - even the messy dark parts.

Poetry helps you see what could not be seen except through words and feel what you could not feel except through verse. Sometimes truth can only be truly communicated through a metaphor.

So my motivation to read poetry is certainly to get a window into the truth someone else sees in the world, in a way maybe to see what their gods are. And my motivation to write poetry is to better understand my own reconciling with truth and who I am, and to identify how I might be "praying" without knowing.

If that's too philosophical, then I think it's also fair to say that I also write poetry simply because I enjoy it. There is so much that a person feels all day long and cannot share, or say, or process, and poetry is one place you can just be honest and make some sense of it and create art from all that.

Well it's a long walk & the scenery is divine isn't it? Unfortunately my poetry is filled with too many metaphors & trades scenery at too breakneck of paces (funny, just like it slips & sloshes in my mind).

So then I gave it up, realizing I was talking to myself. See what Alliyah did? Writing narration about it is not radiant & can only exude so much joy/ revelation/ Soul Portal

& yet that is the best way to universally extend your message:

considering how few of us are any good at interpreting the symbols that each of our super-unique friends alongside us will decide to Outpulse in their life because bc it is the way they learned to absorb information in their most critical developing stages

I hope you saying that you "gave up" doesn't mean you've stopped writing. Never stop writing @Wriskypump - it might feel like you're just talking to yourself. But your poetry is seriously interesting and thought provoking from what I've read of it.

Sometimes you only need an audience of one.

I guess it's my way of making sense of the chaotic world.

At an early age I was taught that poetry was something that was a creative achievement worth attempting. I grew up seeing my aunt's husband who boasted about his boxing prowess taking great pride in his own poetic writings. Then my mother was also a poet. So my attempts at poetry are motivated mainly by a need to try to create something significant and aesthetically pleasant regardless of the subject matter and occasionally by the need to blow off emotional steam over observed injustices, ironies of life, sweet and bitter memories.

I never plan on really having a career in writing, but I have competed before. I do it for fun and it helps me focus, I just pick up my pencil and wite. I suppose my motivation could be to have fun.

I just try to draw inspiration from life in general and for me poetry feels like a good way to express myself and my real feelings whereas for someyhing like a story i would want to detach myself i think. I also like to try and provoke thought with my poems cause i like to know what other people think!!

I finally published my first poem here too i hope you like it! ^^