An Unpopular Poetry Opinion
Poetry is not fiction, so don’t treat the two forms the same.
I read a decent amount of poetry. My love for this creative form of writing started in high school and has only blossomed since my teenage years. In college, I studied classical literature extensively, finding certain poets to fall in love with and others who I believed were overrated (perhaps another topic for another day.) I took many creative writing classes in college, too, and began to try my hand at poetry again and again, despite my feelings that I was never quite as good at writing in this dramatically shorter form as my classmates.
Then, my senior year of college, I took a collaborative poetry class that, to put it succinctly, blew my mind. I was exposed to different methods of writing poetry, and the delightfully nonsensical ways that poetry does, in fact, make sense. I was thrown together with other writers who were the exact opposite of me and forced to create something beautiful out of the endeavor, and it incited a new level of love for poems in my heart.
Fast forward to today, where I still write poems and serve as poetry editor for the literary magazine borrowed solace. As poetry editor, I read a lot of poems. I’ve even read poetry collections and written reviews for The Adroit Journal. I have numerous poetry collections sitting…