Making Poetry — a new found love of words

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I started a free Futurelearn course, How to Make a Poem run by Manchester Metropolitan University and have completely fallen in love with poetry as a form of expression. The original intention was to find other ways of expressing myself with words, but it’s been a surprising experience.

The course starts off gently with a discussion of our favourite poems. I discovered some new poems I really love through reading the discussion thread and was reminded of some of my all-time favourites, too:

Edward Lear — The Owl and the Pussycat
Robert Frost — Fire and Ice
T.S. Eliot — Skimbleshanks The Railway Cat (in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats)
Charles C. Finn — Please Hear What I’m Not Saying

It then triggered memories of Norman Nicholson’s poetry I studied for GCSE English. My teacher taught us assonance and alliteration, rhyme and rhythm, oxymorons and onomatopoeias, all through Nicholson’s poetry. I now have an urge to reread it.

I also love that the course is entitled making, not writing, and the tutors talk about why this is. For me, creating something out of words is making and the process of committing those words to screen or paper is writing, so this really appeals to my creative side.

* Buy Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot on Amazon US | Amazon UK
** Buy Selected Poems 1940-1982 by Norman Nicholson on Amazon US | Amazon UK