Poetry

The road to poetry

My first real go at poetry was in eighth grade English class when I was forced to write a couple poems for assignments. I'm proud of a couple of them. Now that I'm writing about this, I've decided to add the most memorable one (to me) here: Flicker.

After that class, I didn't have much poetry-writing forced upon me. However, the feeling of satisfaction from writing those couple of poems stuck with me. Starting in high school, I would sporadically write short, stream-of-thought (and never edited) poems, usually an outlet for some acute emotion I was feeling. It was fun. Feeling like way more of an edgy teenager than I (retrospectively) actually was, I "hid" these poems (there's only like ten of them) in a Google Drive folder named after a bacteria species that is special to me^[1]. Each doc had a title which was a random phrase that came to mind in that moment and usually had no relation to the actual contents of the poem^[2].

In college and shortly after, (feeling substantially less "edgy"^[3]), I wrote^[4] a couple of longer-form poems... also expressing feelings about things I was experiencing or experienced.

As of 2026 (time of writing this), my current experience with poetry is pretty "casual". I have a OneNote page called "casual" which I will occasionally add a short poem to. The subtitle to the page is "Just for some outflow when needed". That's how I've treated it -- if I feel like I have a poem to write, I open it up and write it. These ones are more varied in topic/feel - they range from short emotional snippets; descriptions of what I'm seeing on a vacation; random low-meaning lines that I think just sound nice/cool.