This blog is now about poetry

Early days, have been writing poems for pleasure for a couple of years and started to get more serious.

Have read James Fenton's book and done a bit of internet browsing, am looking to read Stephen Fry's "The ode less travelled" plus have a poetry techniques book to work through too.

I am interested in other people's view and contributions as my personal feelings, reading about iambs and feet and metres and all different poem types are why? Surely the important thing in a poem is that it stimulates a feeling in the reader, and the form is irrelevent, and to try and write to a pattern can only constrict and obstruct the flow. I appreciate there must be a form to a poem, but that comes as the poem progresses.

When I write, I start with either an intense emotion that I need to address, and a poem to me is the most cathartic way of dealing with such things, or I see something that moves me and I wish to capture it in words, the way an artist does with paint. What I am saying is there is always some form of spontanaity to my poems.

My belief is that a poem, however technically well written, will suffer if it does not come from the heart. Sometimes yes, you have to look inwards and prod and probe, but when the feeling is found the words will gush out. They then have to be sorted, to paraphrase Coleridge, to find the best words then the best order for the best words.

Why do we as humans have this drive to categorise and box things into neat order. To me a poem is a poem is a poem, and a good poem, once written is like a thing alive, driven by the heart beat of its metre. Poems to me are to read and shared, to be heard and enjoyed - ones that can only be enjoyed on the page though valid art are to me one dimensional