Weekly Creative Writing Tip: Cure Your Writer’s Block and Don’t Go Crazy, Write Poetry Instead

May 24th, 2008 · No Comments

Got Poetry?

Typewriter Just as milk helps create strong bones by adding calcium to your diet, adding a little poetry into your day can help get rid of the dreadful writer’s block and help you live a happier life. Yep, I said it and now you’re thinking to yourself, I write fiction, to hell with poetry. Well, think again.

Writing poetry has several benefits including… Therapy?

Yep, maybe the reason you have writer’s block in the first place is because you haven’t resolved something in your life. Poetry can be used as a way of expressing yourself and dealing with your issues. (If you say you don’t have issues, well, your full of shit.) If you won’t take my word for it, then read these quotes from well know poets:

Poetry is the response of our innermost being to the ecstasy, the agony and the all-embracing mystery of life. It is a song, or a sigh, or a cry, often all of them together.

–Charles Angoff (Lerner, 1994)

Poetry humanizes because it links the individual by its distilled experience, its rhythms, its words to another in a way which no other form of communication can. Poetry also helps to ease the aloneness which we all share in common.

–Myra Cohn Livingston (Lerner, 1994)

I believe that a poem is an emotional-intellectual-physical construct that is meant to touch the heart of the reader, that it is meant to be re reexperienced by the reader. I believe that a poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms. I also believe that a poem is a noise and that noise is shaped.

–Stephen Dobyns (Dobyns, 1997)

Not convinced?

Well, Time quotes Yale Psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg as stating, “a patient who suddenly deciphers the message of a great poet may experience a flash of understanding similar to the dramatic insight that can come to patients in ordinary psychotherapy.” A repressed person can actually show a doctor what the problem is by the expressions they may use in their work. Rothenberg says Poetry, “is even more revelatory than dreams.”

Or is creativity what make us crazy in the first place?

Others believe that there is a link between the creative mind and mental illness,

Popular culture has long stereotyped poets as depressed and creative scientists as mad. In fact, the idea of a link between creativity and mental illness goes back to the time of Aristotle, when he wrote that eminent philosophers, politicians, poets and artists all have tendencies toward “melancholia.”

–The ‘Sylvia Plath’ effect by Deborah Smith Bailey

Personally, I don’t buy it. I think Sylvia Plath was depressed and found poetry writing therapeutic. Maybe it even kept her from committing suicide even sooner. This seems to be as debatable as the argument over which type of writing is more therapeutic short story or poetry.

So which is it, short story or poetry?

There have been several studies by University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker, PhD, founding

“positive health and mental health benefits from writing.”

However, the theory is that this occurs only when the writer creates a narrative, making a connection of thought and feelings. As poetry does not always follow a narrative, it is thought that this writing form does not have the same benefits, but there is no hard data that proves this and if poetry isn’t about connecting thought and feelings, well, I don’t know what is.

To me poetry is a subliminal way to express feelings that I may be unable to openly describe to others. When I write poetry, it’s a riddle and in my mind the reader will never really know what I was feeling and expressing in the work. They can only theorize.

On-the-other-hand, Fiction allows me to substitute myself and my position as a character and determine how that “character” deals with the predicament. Knowing historical criticism, having studied literature, I am more hesitant in expressing my personal feelings as I am conscious of the fact that future critics will try to make that connection between my fiction and my real life. At times I may not want them to assume the connection and misinterpret my life and my work.