The Wright Way of Writing

This blog is dedicated to serve as a crash course tutorial on how anyone can use poetry as an artistic and therapeutic expression of the soul. Poetry has been my therapy in dealing with everything from bad breakups to dark depression to identity issues. You don't always want to talk about things with a therapist or sometimes even your closest friend, but it isn't healthy to let some things stay bottled up inside of you. When you take the time to sit down and write down your feelings, you force yourself to actually process your emotions and put concrete words to those elusive feelings. Something I did learn in therapy is mindfulness. There's so much power and control of stopping to say, "Hey, I am angry, and this is why, and it's ok," or "Hey, I am angry, but I don't really have a good reason to be angry. I should stop being angry." And then you can take those words and rearranging them and create something beautiful. You never have to share it with anyone if you don't want to. There are plenty of poems I may never publish. But you can still go back and read your art from years ago and reconnect with yourself and see how much has changed, for better or worse, or maybe nothing has really changed at all. It's like your own personal emotional time capsule.
And if you do choose to share your poetry, you can see how other people can relate to and connect with you on a topic or issue that you may have thought no one else could understand. And simply creating something out of nothing, turning a void feeling of emptiness into a piece of art, can be a magical and spiritual experience. The word "poetry" comes from the Greek meaning to create. We are creatures of God made in His image, and poetry is the closest thing we can do to imitate His act of creation ex nihilo.

Now you might be thinking, "I can't write poetry. I'm no Shakespeare." I'm here to tell you that anyone who can understand, speak, and write a language can write poetry. You don't have to write Shakespearean or Italian Sonnets. You don't have to know the definition of iambic pentameter, heroic couplet, Shakespearean or Italian Sonnets, blank verse, or anapestic tetrameter. You technically don't even have to know how to rhyme since you can write in free verse. I've written over 300 poems and a book of poetry entered for the Walt Whitman Award, and I can't count meter to save my life. I opened with a poem written in broken meter to the theme of apathy. What I'll be demonstrating and teaching through this blog is what I like to call the "Wright" way (or my way) of writing poetry. Poetry is all about free expression. If you try to write according to someone else's rules, then that's not freedom. If you set your own rules and then follow them, you'll have more pride in your accomplishment of writing your own poetry. And they're your rules so feel free to break them if it feels right to you.

I'll walk you through the PAST of a poem per week. The Poem, the Art, the Soul, and the Therapy. On Sundays I'll start off the week with simply just the poem. It's important to read a poem on its own first and take the time to interpret and decide what it means to you because that is a valid interpretation even if it's not what the poet originally intended. I look back at old poems and find new meaning to them that I wasn't thinking about when I wrote them. Then on Tuesdays I'll give a crash course on the art, technique, and poetic devices that builds the structure for the poem. You'll often use devices that you don't even know are devices. Then on Thursdays I'll share the soul of the piece, the significance to me as the poet. There's usually something special acting as the muse for every piece of art, and here you won't have to speculate based on a dead guy's or girl's biography to understand the meaning. Then last but not least, the Saturday therapy sessions. It may not apply exactly to every piece, but this is where I'll talk about how writing the poem helped me in one way or another and how writing something similar could help you. This will also be the post where I link to useful resources for more information on help for things like depression, suicide, self-harming, eating disorders, mental illness, and identity struggles. I call these issues the Dark Side of the Mind. Like the dark side of the moon, it's always there, but no one else really knows what it's like since they can only see the side of you that you show them.

-David Wright