Poetry is the best genre for beginning writers
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Reading the title of this article probably made some of you roll your eyes, thinking to yourself, “What does the pretentious writer have to say about the art of poetry?” Stay with me, though. I promise you that I will make the case below for why poetry is the best genre to start your writing career with.
To many, poetry is a seemingly elusive genre—full of poem forms with too many hyper-specific rules or a litany of freedom from conventions of traditional English, such as paragraphs, punctuation, or spacing. This is just the effect of a cursory glance at this complex yet approachable genre. In reality, the flexibility of this genre allows for an exploration that can seem a bit more uncouth—excessive—in the genres of fiction or nonfiction. The other nice thing about poetry is that it is a genre with an incredibly varied and longstanding history—going through many evolutions throughout its recreations.
As a developing writer, I began writing fiction as I feel many writers do. I thought that because fiction novels were the most prolific and visible kind of writing, it was the kind of writing I figured I was “supposed” to do. I often didn’t formally understand how to structure a plot or plan out a longer work, so I found the narratives circular, the characters shallow, and the prose repetitive. While comforting in its familiarity, the fiction genre is hard to tackle and overwhelming in a way that I think sneaks up on budding writers. This is where I feel poetry comes in.
Poetry does not hide in its weirdness or intricacy. If anything, it is the first thing one notices about it as they explore the genre initially. I feel it is a genre in some sore need of demystification.
Poetry is often a bit-sized medium that asks for its writers to obtain a very holistic view of the writing process, as poetry is a literary, visual, and oral art—all at the same time. It might initially seem that poetry would be overwhelming for someone just “getting their feet wet” in the writing world. Still, I think it encourages an immediate understanding and appreciation of the rigor of the practice of writing. Also, in the often more sparse medium, writers are given more space to focus on very specific craft elements, such as imagery, enjambment, narrative structure, or metaphoric/symbolic writing elements, because there is no expectation for there to be pages and pages of writing.
Once I made the switch to writing poetry, I truly marked myself as beginning a long-lasting and serious hobby of writing. I found the genre more approachable, less overwhelming, and more evocative for me as a newfound writer. It allowed me to play with rhyme, line breaks, and punctuation in a way that felt wrong in fiction and truly opened my eyes to the fluid nature of writing. While ensuring your foundational skills in any hobby or craft are of the utmost importance, navigating the early discomforts of poetry writing leaves a less overwhelming revision process—creating bite-sized pieces that writers can experiment with, play alongside, and explore through.