How do you write poetry?

How do you, personally, go about the business of writing a poem?

(Sorry if this is not appropriate/in the wrong subforum/just plain stupid. Curiosity killed the cat, I guess.)

I do not know....it just happens....I honestly don't know how to answer that question.

Poetry is like... breathing. You do it because if you didn't, you wouldn't be able to breathe. O_o

Personally, when I'm feeling some sort of emotion and the words align themselves right, I write it down. Then, I'll edit it until I like it and it makes sense to me.

But it really varies from person to person.

I get random lines in my head, and continue them. Or maybe I have a general idea/thought that I want to express. They come to me...never. Hah, my poetry only gets written rarely. *shrugs*

I realized that this could sound a little ... irreverent? I don't mean for it to be, I'm genuinely curious.

I'm with you, Claudia. I get a line or two and work from there. It's the same with my prose. (For whatever reason, I write my best poetry in the shower.)

I know! I hate it when it comes in the shower, though, because there's nothing to write with and sometimes I forget it when I finally wash the shampoo out of my hair and get out of the shower.

I usually speak my poems before I write them down (hence all of the italics and indents and weird line breaks), so coming up with them in the shower isn't a problem.

I didn't do any revising on paper for "exquisite." I "wrote" and "edited" the whole thing in the shower.

And satisfaction brought her back.

Well, very carefully I suppose. I usually am inspired in someway, by feelings or nature. I'm queen of weird wording so I word what I'm thinking differently. Then I work around the line and make it into something unique.

~[~Lupe~]~

Personally, when I'm feeling some sort of emotion and the words align themselves right, I write it down. Then, I'll edit it until I like it and it makes sense to me.

that sounds familiar. Usually when I have some feeling or idea and I can't quite nail what it is I write poetry until I figure it out. And then quite a lot of moving of lines and stanzas ensues, because I write things sort of in cycles and not straight through and everything gets mixed up in the process.

Sometimes I get a really cool title in my head and devlop a poem around that. Others it's a general idea or theme and then there's always the times when a line comes to me and the rest seems to fall into place. Also, I've been inspired by an event a few times like hurricanes and such.

Basically, whenever I have an idea, I scribble it down on a piece of paper (I'm the sort of person who always has a pen and a piece of paper near by. When I go out I tend to have them in my pocket and at home I have them scattered throughout every room of the house.) and then I work on it when I have the time until I'm satisfied with the finished poem.

I get an idea in my head. I tie it down to a few expressions which I usually jot down. Then I write it, allowing the lines to break when they feel natural and the words to come to me. Sometimes I wait until inspiration strikes me; however, this happens rarely, so often I just go with an idea and try and make something of it. Often it doesn't work. But many times it works well.

I find mine from real events in my life. Sadly, they aren't very happy, at least some of them. Now though Nature and music has inspired me, but it's not working to well.

When I was younger, I'd just spout stuff---things that sounded good, neat phrases, intriguing words--and write it down. These"poems" weren't very poetic; they were more like thoughts on paper. Now, I find myself looking at them and thinking--man, it I rewrote this, it could be really cool. So I take that prose and give it a structure, trying to keep the feeling/meaning.

This is how it normally happens for me. I write a thought, then I edit it into a poem. I usually end up writing 3 versions, each one getting more "poetic". Or, occasionally, it all just comes to me, but that happens rarely.

Like most people said, I usually just get a word, phrase, or image stuck in my head, and then I work from there. Sometimes I feel the rhythm before I start working, or I'll just start with two rhyming words. It differs from poem to poem. Usually, though, it's an image - some picture that's baked into my brain for one reason or another.

I don't write the stanzas in order. in fact, sometimes I'll start from the end and work backwards. I often can't come up with words at first, so I just put in squiggles or something like "[two-syllable word here]" rather than sitting around and mulling over one line for an hour. I figure when it's ready to be written, it will be there (which is why I hate doing poetry for school assignments). I rework and edit my poems a lot - I'm not one of those people who writes the entire thing at once and never changes a word. Quite the opposite, really.

Usually, at the weirdest times, lines come to me and I make a note to make a poem out of them later.
This usually results in me forgetting the lines, but sometimes I remember to use them, and the work I post is my finishing peice, probably written over the course of two days of editing and re-reading and editing all over again, until I'm happy with the results.
Sometimes, I wake up with an extraordinary set of words stuck in my head, and sometimes, they turn into a poem in my head that day. I know, weird, but yeah, dreams inspire me simply because they're so random.
I can't possibly write a poem in five minutes or so, it would kill me. I never like my first few edits because they're so plain (except the lines that I started out with), and so I nitpick and tear them apart so many times the finished work does not look much like what I started out with.