Context
Some years ago, when I was younger (?) I was in a literacy club where I started to write articles more like non-fiction writing about politics, social development and economics. My main focus was the story behind people, how they feel, smell, lived and point this out in 500 words or less. My teacher always said that it doesn't matter 30 words or 8.000 words, your audience feels what you write. Don't feel nothing? They either.
I didn't understand at that point but keep writing until one day, something hit me up really hard. He challenged me to write about food but with poetry.
I don't do poetry, I said, I need to write about the food, was my reponse. Not really because people don't describe the food as it was a culinary book or with an essay about meat, my teacher said, they say things like yummy or yikes.
I was more inspired for Gusteau1 than Bourdain so to speak and asked how to write something like that. This context provides you the rest of my writing.
Behold, my annotations of how to write a poem by yourself:
Step 1: emotion
Understand what is surrounding you and know that all your emotions have names. Even if they don't have, the don't haves is something unknown. Catch it, write it down. If you think someone is going to write even similar things like you, you're simply wrong because we all feel different things. It's literally impossible to feel the same.
So, example: confusion
Step 2: Start your emotional engines
You don't want to make a briefing, you don't need attention, you want experience. So, look the emotion you chose and feel it. So, for instance, the confusion.
Let's talk about confusion.
- How do you see confusion?
- What's the sound of it?
- How do you smell confusion?
- How it tastes?
- How it looks?
- You see someone confused, what do you see?
Step 3: Write the answers
This is the easy/hard part because that's the problem, you already have the answer but must choose the best pick for you and what are you trying to do. So, here are (some of) my answers about the confusion
- Sounds like a person screaming in a empty room with no answer whatsoever
- Smells something bittersweet
- Tastes like an exotic dish
- Feels that my heart is speeding up with no reason
- I see a person with a lost look
Step 4: Clean the answer format and start your poetry
My poem was in spanish so, I'm going to write it down in spanish because, trying to translate was futile:
Un plato exotico Mi nariz grita agridulce El paladar necesita respuesta Escuchamos el pedido Y nos traen placer en las papilas El plato perfecto según mis pupilas Placer relleno de confusión
This is my first draft, probably I posted somewhere the last version but couldn't find it.
So, that's it. Those are the steps to write your own poetry. Publish it, always. Stop pretending you're less.
Footnotes
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Always remember his masterpiece ↩