Whenever I do get the chance to hear someone read out their poem on dying love or life’s long journey let’s face it…I want to run for the hills.

I know, I KNOW! It’s cruel, but hey I’m a writer and I’m an introvert. How else am I going to feel other than awkward? As much I like to poke fun at this idea, I do actually love writing and reading poems. There are some things a great poem can do that a novel just can’t and, as if you didn’t know where I’m going with this, here are three of those things.

 

1. You don’t have to care about the characters.  Still trying to work on your characterisation skills and looking to write without the issue? No problem! With poetry, it always seems personal even when the world described is as far from our own as it can possibly be written. Poetry is great because it turns the voice of writer into a character itself.

 

2. No planning? No time? No problem! Inspiration can hit at the worst of times. It’ll likely be when you’ve dedicated all your free time to one story that you’ll get a whole tonne of different ideas for other stories. It’s frustrating when you have two good ideas and you’re already, and continuing to, go one with the one. Poems are great because they hold stories within them and they can capture those emotional scenes and characters you can’t give a novel too.

 

 

3. Quick impact.  Sometimes you don’t want to go on a long journey and meet a whole bunch of new characters and all you really want is to hear a good story, hear about a specific emotional experience,  or hear something that plays the right tune you’re looking for at that time whether it be sad or happy or whatever it is your looking for! There’s a poem for that!

At least from my own perspective and experience with poetry, I’d say those are the best things about sitting down to read/write a poem even if I’m surer now than I ever was that I’ll never be a poet.

 

 

This guest post was contributed by Chloe-Anne Ross. Chloe-Anne is a student in Glasgow, a recovering coffee addict with a good imagination.