How my passion for poetry was reignited during the COVID pandemic.

Annie Lennox famously said in 2014, that she stopped writing songs because she was happy. Something that resonated with me during the recent pandemic. After years of not writing any poetry, I found myself with an overwhelming compulsion to write again.

In two weeks I had written over thirty poems. Clearly, my creative output is very much akin to Annie’s, albeit her’s has afforded her a tonne of awards and accolades. Sadness, stress, uncertaintity were all emotions quite commonly felt by most during the lockdown stages of the COVID19 period, and for me those emotions encouraged creativity in a cathartic way.

With no formal training in poetry and following no rules, apart from what I had learned from William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe in my English A level classes, I found myself compelled to express a whole range of emotions and thoughts in both rhyming and free prose style.

I am aiming for a book when I reach fifty poems and I may have to squeeze some humorous ones in too, just to get one up on Annie’s brooding style. Watch this space!