Thoughtful Thursdays: A Poetic Column

Since I was seven years old, I have loved the musical tonality of poetry. 

When I was nine years old, I started studying the flute in orchestra after school. If memory serves me correctly, it was that following summer that I began to fuse my love of poetry and writing. Naturally, I became a lyrical poet.

So now here I am over thirty years later in college; reading and writing the Poetry I have always adored. 

What is lyrical poetry?

Lyrical poetry is any poetry that has a musical sound when it is read aloud. Generally, this means that the poems themselves have some kind of timing you hear while it is read, but you can create this very easily for yourself in your own poems. All you have to do is create lines with about the same amount of syllables, and the use of rhyme can also help the listener hear the rhyme scheme embedded within the poem. (Sorry, Dr. Cox: I know you find rhyming an irritating device.)

According to Webster's Dictionary, the word lyrical means the author is expressing feelings or emotions in an imaginative and beautiful way.

Process: Part of the process of poetry borders on obsessive. You first create a poem, and then you are happy with yourself. However, the next day, the self loathing side of the author comes out, and you begin to meditate over your words as if it is your new mantra. You obsess.

Hours later, you may have very little difference in your actual poem itself. You've stared at it all day only to take out a comma. The next day, you stare at it, and put the comma back in. A poet's words are very concise and deliberate. The poet is refining the few lines to the finest detail. Often I have wondered if great poets like Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, or Lord Byron knew at the time how beautiful there words were to us. Did they know what a legacy they were leaving for us?

Eventually, you will have the final product, even if you don't know it at the time. There are many poets who spend the first half of their life writing a poem, and the second revising them. I know that not only can I be classified as a confessional poet, I can also be accused of being a lyrical poet.
That is just how it comes out, and resonates from me.

Enough chatter, time for my own work to be unleashed on the virtual world. The following poem I wrote in 1984. I was sixteen years old, and it resonates my inner self.

Pictured with my mother in 1984

Gloria

I want to tell a story

Of a child deep in me

Although she’s very beautiful

She’s also unforeseen

An incurable romantic

Telling tales of old

Whose biggest dream of grandeur

Is someone there to hold

She’s insecure about her beauty

And everything it seems

When you least expect it

She’ll hide behind a tree

Her hands are always at her face

To hide the things she’s seen

Just to break the silence

You’ll hear her giggling

Because of the pain in the world

She wants to be comforted

And know the reasons why

So if you see her laughing

Or see her shed a tear

Put out your hand

And draw her in so near

 ~1984

Laurie Epps is a non-fiction author, essayist, editor, and poet living in Anderson, South Carolina. A seeker of beauty, her is dream is to travel the world one day and tell the many stories of those she meets. To read more of Laurie's stories visit her Tuesday column dedicated to writing at:

http://thewriteconversation.blogspot.com