Writing Poems - Painting with Words

Poems are images, paintings and drawings. The only difference is that your brush is a pen, and your lines are letters and words.

Have you ever read a poem that didn't conjure up some image or feeling inside your mind? It's just what poems do, even more so than stories. A poem has to convey its meaning with much fewer words than a story. Thus, each and every word holds meaning; the writing is much denser. It is really like drawing or painting an image. You have only this one chance to strike home. A story, on the other hand, is more like a film. You have a flow of images, none of them carrying so much weight as a single image would have.

I don't write poems regularly. Most of the time, they are just feelings which want to get out of me. I take a pen and the words just pour out of my head, my heart and my soul, right onto the sheet of paper in front of me. Those poems are true soul images. They ban my feelings, my state of soul onto paper.

Other poems just "happen". They are never planned; I just can't plan poetry. Either I'm in the mood to write a poem (or two, or three), or I'm not. Sometimes, my poems get a voice. That's when I write a song. More often than not, words and melody go hand in hand, evolve hand in hand. The last sond I wrote, however, was one of those true soul images. After the poem was banned on paper, this tune kept probing into my head. I knew: This one's gonna be a song; this one wants to be a song.

Of course, there are as many ways to write poetry as there are poets out there. I can only write about my own way and hope that some of you can relate to it. However, I would love to hear about your ways to write poems as well! Feel free to share as a comment.