Never Thought I'd Write Poetry

I've always hated writing, and that dislike was reinforced by my schooling. My teachers taught me that my writing never fit their preference, that there was no right answer (but all my answers were wrong, and so I lost interest. My writing has always been direct, and that wasn't what they wanted to read. So I had built up some resistance to the idea of writing, a resistance with which that I am still struggling.

I've always been a very digitally minded person and only in adulthood have slowly gained a respect for the importance analog modes of thinking. I have, on MANY occasion witnessed first-hand the efficacy of illogical intuition; enough to recognize that there is a means of knowing truth that is outside reason. This is a fact that was confirmed for me (much later) in a logical fashion in the book "Thinking Fast and Slow". This chipped away at my firm adherence to a logic-only worldview and towards the idea that inarticulatable knowledge and profound wisdom can be found in seemingly illogical sources. To be clear, logic is still my primary mode of thinking, but I acknowledge that other modes of thinking are not necessarily wrong, merely because they are unprovable, and am actively striving to develop that skillset.

Although, it is not obvious to me, I have also come to know from various sources (including first-hand) that our brains do not process everything we experience logically and that we tend to think through our problems BOTH consciously and subconsciously (apparently that applies even to me). I have always been a huge fan of argumentative dialogue, as I grew up in a family that debated any (and every) topic. This taught me to think thru matters very consciously via internal dialogues (in English). However, I have learned to trust my subconscious to play a role in both those internal and external dialogues as an information source, mostly as a means of directing my conscious attention towards what needs focus. In recent years, I have been baffled to learn that not everyone even has an inner monologue (let alone an inner dialogue) and that they need to speak aloud or write down their thoughts to think thru their problems. I have discovered that writing is at least a slower way for me to think; slower in that I have to edit my words and that gives me time to consider more perspectives.

“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick” -Kevin Malone

This is a long winded way of saying that I've been attempting to change my habits towards writing more so that I have another avenue for thinking things thru. (That's one of the primary reasons for creating this website.) Also, I am growing more and more aware that life is shorter and shorter as the days pass... therefore I am wanting to be intentional with living up the remaining time left to me and have a nagging desire to leave a permanent record of my existence. These ideas merged strangely last week and I began writing Haiku.

I've never been one to read poetry and never even dreamed of writing any. The ambiguity runs counter to the structured way my brain generally operates. However, over the past few years the idea has been (very) slowly catching hold in my brain. I can't even begin to put the pieces together, except perhaps the last few.

• I have been journaling on and off for a couple/few years (not sure when I started).
• I am listening to Cryptonomicon, and 2 of the characters write haiku. This is not a primary point in the story, but this put the idea into my head recently.
• I am reading What Have We Hear in the evenings, Billy Dee Williams is a very artistic person, I think he had mentioned poetry.
• I am researching other websites, some of which have this strange feature called a microblog. Do I need/want one? What could I use it for?
• I recently read a book called Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks. I attempted to follow his instructions, but didn't always find a storyworthy moment in my life each day, at least not something I'd be willing to dedicate very much time towards writing a 5-10 minute story about.
• I do want to capture my life in words, preferably on my website... how do I limit the friction as much as possible, so that I actually do it?
• Most of my time in a given week is already accounted for and I am unable to easily rearrange it for such daily activities as writing stories about my life (and telling them on stage), or even writing journals/blogs-posts every day. Also, I don't think I want to make changes like that, especially not to squeeze in a new task of writing documentation on my life... I want it to be a nearly natural output of my life.
• Having some of this in my conscious mind, I actually looked up simple poetry styles recently... I found the 5-7-5 rule to be intriguing, but did nothing with it.

One evening last week, laying in bed I found myself writing my first (terrible) haiku. I think I said the first line to myself, realized that it was 5 syllables, then pushed myself to complete the rest. Shown below in it's original form:

The T.V. is on.
Laying beside her in bed,
Tired but content.

Published version after editing:

TV on, mere noise.
Laying awake, her sleeping;
Exhausted, content.

I wrote 3 more that evening. I even found that my previous journal entry just happened to fit the 5-7-5 rule. This was an interesting discovery to me. I liked being able to focus on the syllable count rather than wordplay such as rhyming, alliteration, or the flow of the words (all too ambiguous for my brain). As a complete beginner to this realm, the specific length of each line allowed me to focus on retaining the message thru brevity.

Syllable count rule: 
Utterly irrelevant?
Generates focus!

I've written at least 18 in my first week (not all will be posted in any form). I've also researched the various rules for writing them... and although I now know that it's not required, I really like the 5-7-5 rule as a constraint since it makes me think thru many possibilities of saying what I want to say, so that I can pick the best fit. I'm beginning to shift away from "me-centered" phrases and toward "moment-centered" poems. Also, I'm finding that by editing/processing I can discover metaphorical meanings to the moments and coax the poem to reflect that to some degree... In other words, I can already see that I am not quite as terrible as last week.

This is also a writing technique that can do in my head since I can retain an entire line of words in my short-term memory long enough to edit it and also store all three lines for an extended period of time. So, I've found myself working on a poem while driving, during boring meetings, or when performing other menial tasks that disallow me to listen to a book (or something similar). I am really enjoying this so far.

I really like that it enables me to document the little moments in life that are easily lost. My favorite moment captured so far:

Little brown ducky
Clutched tightly in little arms
Sheer joy, infectious.

I will definitely be writing more of these. Check out my microblog, which I created specifically because I needed a place to store whatever haiku I write.