Poems, poems poems… a busy week! My fiction has been taking a bit of a back seat lately with all my poetry publications. My latest batch of featured poems appear this week in The Sound of Poetry Review.
Are poems really any easier to write than fiction? Many writers I speak to say, yes. As for me, I suppose I’d say not especially so. Whenever inspiration strikes, I usually have to mull the idea over for a while before a poem or short story materialises fully formed on paper. For a poem, it takes a few minutes for me to jot it down and for a story, depending on the length, anything up to an hour. I rarely edit my poetry. No line changes, no vocab changes, no rewriting of any stanzas. Maybe I’m weird like that, but it comes together in my head as a complete piece before I even write it down. On the other hand, my stories tend to go through one or two drafts before I’m happy with them. Every writer has their own style, of course. But what I like most is being able to whip out a notebook on the train and write a poem on the go, or a quick bit of micro-fiction. A flash in the pan equals two poems in the hand… or something like that!
Leilanie Stewart 