Many people look surprised when I tell them that I write poetry, like it is some kind of disease. It probably is. When you are infected with this virus, it gets into your blood stream and will lie dormant for a while. It slowly takes over your mental system and you feel the urge to do something with it. You read it, you get touched by certain poems, and at one stage you might even want to start writing yourself some poems.

At that moment, when it happened to me, I could do only one thing: start writing for myself. It is the only way to cope with this disease. Although the word "disease" has a negative association, I do not wish to imply that I never wanted to be infected. I am quite happy that I am. I finally found a way to use the creativity that lay unshaped in my being. Now I found the tools to give it form. It will probably never be perfect, but at least I am sculpturing the raw block of creativity.

Poetry comes in many forms and styles. Each related to their time in history and some may be more appealing to you than others. For myself, I prefer a more stricter form of poetry with a clear metrical system and rhyming schemes. I find that these techniques add more power to a poem and enhance the experience of the emotion or feeling.

When writing or understanding poetry, I find some tools invaluable and I feel great respect to those poets who could not use them but were still able to produce some wonderful poems:

WordNet

An online lexical reference system, showing synonym sets, relations and much more. Try it out!

Mirriam - Webster Online Dictionary

The online versions of the Mirram-Webster dictonary and thesaurus.

Semantic Rhyming Dictionary

Need to find a rhyme, here it is! This site also features lexical freenet which can be very useful for poets as well.

Glossary of Poetic Terms

Quite a large glossary for anyone studying poetry.

You can only learn to write poetry if you are taught well. Since I am more like an autodidact myself, I just study the poetry of the masters by reading them. For some nice listing of poets and archives, I can recommend the following:

The Emule Archive

Bartleby

Luminarium

Some extensive archives of poetry

Yahoo

And go to the literature/poetry section for lots of links.

Here is a small selection of the poetry I created so far. Note that all poems are copyrighted, but you are free to read them here. If you wish to use them for any purpose, please contact me first.

• Mozzies
• Spearmint
• Winter