POETRY & PROSE
The book that started my interest in writing and poetry...
I embraced the art of poetry during an english class trip senior year of high school. I attended a poetry fair at Waterloo Village, and it was there that I bought my very first book of poetry (SLAM) by various authors, foreword by Tori Amos). It was this single event that kind of fueled my passion for expressing myself through words, and eventually paved the way for my career as a singer-songwriter. Lyrics and Poems are very different in the sense that you are very limited in song (in a pop sense anyway). You only have so many verses, choruses and a bridge to tie your story together, which also have to flow cohesively with melody and chord progression. There are many structural guidelines and also length restraints when writing lyrics for a song with pop appeal. With poetry, there really are no guidelines per say, and I feel more free to express ideas in ways that I can’t express through lyric in song. I think in training myself to predominantly write lyrics, it enabled me to be able to write poetry much more easily. I used to wrack my brain for inspiration, but if you can achieve the seemingly impossible task of writing a great song, then you can most certainly write more free flowing poetry with the greatest of ease.
