My Creative Writing class is almost halfway through. The first two modules, Literary Nonfiction, and Fiction, were exhilarating. In six short weeks, I discovered that I still can put the occasional subject and verb together to create, much like a child realizing that snapping a few Legos together makes a wall. More often than not, though, it felt like a psychological exercise to break open the stony ground of my psyche in order to resurrect long-buried dreams and desires.
In the process, I also unleashed repressed emotions and memories into my general consciousness. I often found myself startled, wondering where a particular thought or idea had come from. Instead of self-censoring, however, trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle before it could wreak any damage, I let the inner voice find expression through seemingly random words and phrases that nonetheless began to flow into a strange but familiar order.
Module Three, which officially begins on Saturday, is all about poetry. I’m a bit nervous about this one, as I’ve previously dabbled in fiction 
and nonfiction. My past poetry efforts, on the other hand, have resembled Vogon Poetry in their sheer wretchedness. As is often the case with particularly bad poetry, however, a couple of my ‘works’ were used as lyrics by a friend’s rock band. Keep in mind, this was the 80’s, when the ‘bad sound’ was all the rage.
Okay, that last line was an inside joke…
The last three assignments of the week all lead up to next week’s dive into the wonderful world of poetry. So, yes, today I wrote my first poem (all six lines) in several years, and no, I will not be sharing it here.
I’m just afraid that I’m going to fail so epically that whatever poetic license I have is permanently revoked.
Everyone who writes poetry thinks their poetry sucks, except for the people whose poetry really does suck. They always seem to think it's the best poetry ever, for some reason. You'll do fine, I haven't a shadow of a doubt.
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