I don't know if I was ever in love with poetry but, if I had been, the feeling disappeared a long time ago. I remember way back in high school or even college, that I had some slight attraction to the "Romantic" poets Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Keats being my favorite, although I'd be hard-pressed to recite a single line of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," or come up with a second title of anything he's written.
The last poem I recall reading was probably a few years back, when I was greatly interested in the life and work of Oscar Wilde, and read his Ballad of Reading Gaol.
But there has always been some spark that draws me to poetry, just to tune my nature to the power and beauty that can exist when two words combine to create resonance. I fear, as I work on my novel, that there is a feeling that if you shovel enough prose into a book, your point will definitely find its way in there. And, admittedly, there is more opportunity within the long expanse of a novel to get away with such transgressions. Although my preference is to tighten the book and trust that fewer, more carefully chosen words will always serve me better.
So, my interest in becoming a better student of poetry is to serve my desire to write novels and reinforce the notion that less is almost always better.
OK, I was going to do this project for me and my own personal growth, but then I decided: why not make it something a bunch of us can do on the site?
