"What is so good about writing?" I hear you ask. It is a beautiful art just like painting, you can use it to paint pictures in the reader's mind, and because the English language is rich with different meanings for many words, you can choose how to express yourself.
Writing is therapeutic, in the way that you can express yourself by either explaining what you mean straight out, or having the reader to explore the meaning themselves (that is if you are talking about a delicate subject or having to find their own meaning).
When I first started writing poetry, the richest compliment came from my dad who wasn't shy about giving his opinion. So I had one particular poem that talked about how I would get a new body when I got to Heaven, but first I would get rid of my earthly body at the Gates, before getting in with the new one.
Sadly I lost that poem, probably when we moved and I was particularly sad because of my dad’s high praise and I didn’t know if I could repeat the same effect. The same goes for prose. As I have mentioned before in this blog you can be as descriptive as you want to be, as I have found out in writing my own life story. But it’s important to be more descriptive in prose; otherwise you could bore the reader very easily.
So I guess poetry is where you have more of a choice to describe or not.
I love writing poetry because you can pour your heart out and choose whether or not to let the reader know what you are talking about, by direct or indirect language.
As you may or may not know, I have suffered from chronic pain after two accidents in 1997 and 1998 and in the beginning I was looking for a way to describe the pain in non-medical terms, so I chose poetry and I had heard about this couple who were both writers, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and one of them had described creature from Greek mythology called the Minotaur, half man and half bull. This was a great way to describe the pain and spasms. I have since gotten a pain pump inserted which has made a great difference but to anyone who has chronic pain, poetry is a way to describe what you don’t choose physically and emotionally; in my view that is.