Tag Archives: poetry

I am an almost entirely self-taught writer and artist, I have never received proper formal training in my creative endeavours; the closest I believe would be the English Literature GCSE I did in distance learning college when I was twenty one; I am never sure if my grammar or punctuation is correct and I have little confidence in how professional I come across.  I am confounded when I hear that many writers will edit and reedit their work even before they blog it, to me, every blog post, every blog poem and story is a first draft – is this really so bad to confess?

I never really had proper schooling as a child either; my time within the educational system was sparse with long bouts of home education where my very dyslexic and sheltered mother would be my only teacher.  Even as a home educated child, I was mostly self-taught via books from the library or videos and magazines – I never got my hands on the internet until my seventeenth birthday and I only got it because my mother was pushed into it by both my brother and society as a whole – because when I reached college age, most things I needed were online and hard to find offline.  My pleads with my mum for the internet were only heard when several times we entered stores inquiring about college books and other things I needed for my studies and was told to go to the web – which for several weeks my mother thought was some new brand of shop and she kept looking for it everywhere, until my teacher explained to us both the web was actually the internet.

I never learned, even to this day the difference between poetry, prose, rhyme, haiku and song.  But I am starting to learn – better late than never, eh?

Rhyme and poetry, are they the same?  I don’t know yet – but it is prose that throws me.

Haiku explanation is the simplest of the lot – but what makes a song?  Is a song really a long poem that repeats itself?  I think it is, but not clear.

This is why I lump all those things together in tags – most of my things are rhyme or poetry I believe, though I am not sure I quite understand how to create a stanza – what is a stanza?  Is it just a paragraph?  I don’t know, I am still learning.

This blog is as much about my learning of the craft as it is my doing of the craft.

I must admit, other than just doing the craft, I don’t do much learning of it.  I never actually went out of my way to read books about how to hone my craft and understand the terminologies – the only exception to the rule are the books I read on how to write fiction and how to write generally – such as Stephen King’s On Writing and Julia Cameron’s the artist way and that sort of thing.

It is only recently that I learned to try and not to write numbers down like this, I was 21yrs old and I ate 5 mouthful of peas – instead I know that I should write I was twenty one years old and ate five mouthful of peas – it seems rather basic, but they are important things to learn.

I consider myself an artist, though I have never sold a piece of work purely on the base that I never know if my work is finished properly enough to sell – for example, do I have to varnish a painting or preserve it in some way and if so how and what do I do?  I have researched this online and I don’t find the kind of help I need.

So this post is just letting you know that I am still on a learning curve about what a poem is and what is prose?