Once a cheater...

I wrote this for a brief class assignment in 2009:

I wrote a lot of angst-ridden "poetry" in high school. A LOT of it. And I'm horrified now by every single word, but cannot bring myself to throw it out. I have this old earth science binder from 8th grade and it houses every short story and poem I wrote from 5th grade all the way up until computers ruled the world. It was like my blankie.

As a kid, poetry was an easy way to expel my scrambled thoughts in a medium that didn't have to make sense...my purge when I just had to get my feelings out. It was like I had bulimia of the mind.

I'm only recently beginning to appreciate READING poetry, much thanks to the creative writing class I took with Gar Patterson last spring. He is so gifted with the ability to use language in new ways, to take a single word and give it 50 different meanings simply by how he spoke it, that I had him pegged as a fiction writer. Because only fiction writers are that versatile, right?

And then I googled him.

I ordered his books of poetry from Amazon (proof that poets all have day jobs, each of them was less than $1) and started to view both him and poetry in a new way.

Now I'm trying to tear down the "I don't like reading poetry" wall I've built over the years and allow myself to appreciate it's value to me as a writer and a student and a human being.

Poetry is courting me.
 
After two years of this bullshit I came to the conclusion that I still hate poetry.
 
That's probably why I married a gamer instead of a writer.