I got another confession to make…

I’m a fool.

No, this isn’t going to be about my man-love for Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, or sadly missed drummer Taylor Hawkins.

But it is lyrical in nature. Sort of.

When I signed up for my creative writing course at university this semester there was one part I was dreading – the poetry component.

I almost shat it when I found out I had to submit at least 500 words in poetry as part of my portfolio.

My entire poetry knowledge comes from high school, when we wrote haiku and read Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est (which, to be fair, is still a stunning read). And the occasional limerick. Such as:

There was a man from Aberdeen
Who invented a screwing machine
Concave or convex
To suit either sex
And a bucket below for the cream

Don’t ask me why that’s the only limerick I can remember. It just is.

While the majority of my fiction and non-fiction writing hasn’t exactly been life-changing, at least I felt somewhat comfortable typing those kinds of stories into a computer.

Not so poetry, which I think I’ve always been scared of. Or rather scared it would show me up as stupid and uneducated because I just didn’t get it.

And then it happened. My tutor assigned us a ‘poem a day’ prompt and it sent me down a rabbit hole of prose, alliteration, stanzas and more. The poems we read in class made sense, even the seemingly esoteric ones which used to have me running for the hills.

I’ve already drafted around six or seven complete poems. One is finalised and ready to be seen (and is going to be part of my portfolio) while the others are in various stages of work – but it’s the most fun writing I’ve had since I was at school, I think.

Last night is a great example. Normally when I get home from work my lovely wife has dinner ready and then we chill for a couple of hours, catching up and watching television.

After a couple of episodes last night, instead of throwing on some more I ducked out to my home office TO WRITE MORE POETRY! I can barely believe I wrote that sentence.

I’ve also started a file with ideas for new poems and suddenly I’m seeing them everywhere. It might be a sentence I’ve read on Substack, a memory jogged by Facebook or a snippet of a conversation that I overheard, but it’s almost overwhelming. I’ve never felt this free creatively.

There is a very obvious reason for this honeymoon period, I think.

Both my fiction and non-fiction writing has been critiqued in the past and so I know that I have some ability to write. My poetry hasn’t, simply because up until now it hasn’t ever existed.

I’m in that bubble of having so much fun but not knowing if I’m deluded and they’re completely awful or there may be something there. One thing I do know is it’s better to find out than sitting here as Schrödinger’s Poet.

Our opportunity for formal feedback on our writing comes up next week and I’ll be submitting a couple of my efforts, at which point my new-found love of poetry may leave me quicker than the names of my new classmates.

Then, maybe, I’ll throw some out into the ether for others to read.