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I want to talk about my style of writing poetry recently, and how it’s developed over time. It’s changed in countless ways in the time since I last wrote a serious poem about life.

When I first started writing poetry, I was a complete failure. Too much dry emotion, too many verbose phrases and cliche idioms used to describe simple things in what seemed like an artsy way. It’s embarrassing to look back on my earlier writing, even some of the writing you could find on this blog if you dig deep enough, knowing that I thought it was worth publishing at some point in my life. I leave it up because it represents a stage of my progression as a writer, not that I am proud of them or anything. I feel that I owe myself to keep those poems up, if anything to show that I’m not this type of writer any more. It helps me draw contrasts between my current writing and previous types.

Nowadays, my writing is a bit different. I take time, I read over my words, I pay attention to line breaks and how the words sound as they are read aloud. I pay attention to syntax and diction and grammar and how they can help us manipulate meaning in creative writing. I care about things I didn’t even know about previously. I try to pay attention to them now, as a way of improving my craft.

At my job, I work as a reading specialist and literacy coach. This allows me to listen in on countless conversations between teachers, students, and the like. I like to transcribe some of them and turn them into poetry, using their words without their names or anything like that attached. I try to keep things anonymous so that they don’t interfere with each other.