A poetry essay

A Story by Ben Robinson

Thank you x

It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon when I got the email that said KDP wanted to publish my book, it’s safe to say I was ecstatic, and I felt feelings of pride I’d never felt before. However, it also struck me that my time with WritersCafe was coming to an end, in ways it felt like the end of an era and I was on the precipice of a new beginning. I felt so many emotions that shouldn’t be all happening at once. I wrote my debut collection with WritersCafe, a book that will hold the most special place in my heart.

I realised that I wanted to do a little farewell essay for WritersCafe as a goodbye (for now) and thank you! So it was the decision that I’d tell you a little bit about how I write or perhaps have wrote poems in the past. As a help to anyone else who is an aspiring writer or is just wanting to pen some feelings.

As I sat down to write this essay I realised just how much I had changed since I began writing. So I say we start back at Serpents? I was fifteen when I began writing Serpents, I was a literal child. The way I used to write poems during this time was by physically sitting down and writing on a piece of paper! I know, shock! When I actually look back at this it makes me remember how emotional these poems really were, I poured my soul on to paper and showed you all my personal diaries. That’s really what the first two books were, my diaries through my mid-teen years, something I’m so glad I did, as I can see the change in the world around me. Another thing I used to do different was I would wait until the poem was one hundred percent complete before picking the titles, I just can’t do this anymore, i have too many creative aesthetics going round in my head (not that that’s a negative thing.)

When it came to Daydreaming, I approached it very differently. I knew I had to follow up to this large success with something different, but with hints of my style showing through. I chose to visualise imagery this time round, I really wanted readers to be able to picture snapshot videos of what the poem was telling you. So I wrote these poems like ‘fairy tale’ and ‘Road to NY’ wanting people to visualise how I felt in those moments. For example, I might have seen a movie, take Cinderella and I went, okay, I want to write a poem that will create this fairytale wonderland in peoples heads. And if it didn’t and it created a different image, then great, we all have different interpretations of the same poem.

I knew that after Daydreaming I really had to look at my style and direction again. The third collection was always going to be a big one, I’d been in the game for 18 months now. I began to play with aesthetic imagery and creative concepts such as colour visualising or mood and atmosphere that surrounded poems. I can’t go too much into this because it hasn’t been released yet, however when it has a promise to go into an in depth follow up to this. You’ll see what I mean by creative aesthetics from the pastels in ‘My life’ and the 70s theme with ‘Hit and Miss’. There’s a poem on the third collection called ‘Wine drunk’ about an old friend who I’m so glad I left as I could see them spiralling into a place I didn’t like. This is one of the imagery concepts of darkness on one side of the fence but when you cross it the grass really does grow, almost like a snow globe split into two, that’s an example of it.

So yeah, there’s my little essay on poetry writing. Thank you to WritersCafe and all the readers, you make all of this possible. Big things coming soon! Thank you for everything.