Spurt or Practice Writers and Dead Poetry

Really?  I just wrote yesterday, says my spurt brain.  But practice wins.

I was writing on one of my blogs about whether you're a spurt writer or a practice writer. I've got aspects of both, and desire to be a practice writer coming from a spurt background.  I used to write in journals, mostly starting from age 8.  Mostly boring stuff, like how I was doing laundry and my dad and sister coming home from vacation.

I started writing poems with slightly sexual overtones in high school, after making up a poem on the spot about the weather after listening to my sister talk about making up poems for her literary magazine.

"Rain beating down on my heart,
Washing away all of my years,
What did I do to deserve sunny days,
When I could have all of these tears."

I was pretty competitive when it came to English, starting my whole reading career wanting to read stories like my sister.

High school, my poetry career blossomed under the brightly lit lamp of a strong AP English department and literary magazine.

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Then...I fell of a metaphorical cliff in college. Two years followed by 10 years of being wrung out like a rag.  During those 10 years I managed to take several classes at a different college.  Literary Criticisms, History of American Literature, Creative Writing, Topics in Rhetoric, and finally, Advanced Poetry Writing were the few.  Surprisingly, productive, but in reality, not so productive for my poetry, because after that one poetry class, four years ago, I stopped writing poetry. 

Not a single line.  My fight with words hit a crescendo and then shrunk to a point.

I kept journaling, because for me it was therapy, but to pull out the emotion required for me to write a poem better than the last one was impossible to achieve.  I would have to relearn all over again how to write.  Start a new poetic alphabet and I didn't and don't want to waste my time.

Poetry is dead.  No one but English teachers and professors read it and people who are going to die.  It's a harsh truth, but the future is song lyrics.  You aren't going to make money off your poetry, or have it catch on like wildfire and be famous, and in most scenarios you aren't going to even affect anyone with your poetry.  In all likelihood you'll end up like the biggest poet of all, the Bard, dead on a street corner.  Keep telling yourself that you will become an English professor. Please.

So I write.  I blog.  I try to ignore that unused instrument in the corner of my mind.  Sometimes I close my eyes and think about what it was like to strike the chord that pleased the Lord, but then I remember that I'm living a song lyric and that poetry is dead and so is that part of me.

So this is my spurt or practice writing.  I think they can be one and the same.  Practice the spurt.