I’ll readily admit it — I suck at poetry. To be fair, I don’t really try to write poetry. I’d like to think that were I capable of capturing my thoughts in a condensed form that were capable of conveying a story, then I would be writing songs. I doubt that any of them would be all that great, certainly none of them would be hits, but they would be my songs just the same. Yet I don’t write songs either. The few attempts that I’ve made at doing so proved to be both embarrassing and frustrating. That’s not a recipe for a good time.
But were I to write either poetry or songs, I would be sure to do so via a typewriter. Things written on a typewriter just look better to me. Consider the act of creating written materials like a poem or a song using a computer. I’m sorry, but that’s just too sterile looking for my liking. Writing out poems or or songs by hand is always a nice touch, unless your handwriting happens to look like mine. (My handwriting leaves a lot to be desired after the paragraph or so, but I’m good for a haiku.) An honest assessment of my situation reveals that the typewriter really is the ideal writing too for me when it comes to creative assignments like these.
There have been a lot of people who have talked about how using a typewriter changes their creative writing process. I don’t doubt this. I’ve used a typewriter enough by the this point in time that I have come to understand what it is they are talking about. That’s all well and good, but I on the other hand am simply talking about keeping up appearances by way of using a typewriter. A page of text that was created using a typewriter just has an air of authenticity to it that many other formats can’t match. In the case of my writing, I need all of the help that I can get. This works out well given that I happen to dig typewriters and using them to write with is half the fun to begin with.
(Typed on a 1966 Olympia SM9.)
AFTERTHOUGHTS: I’ll admit that trying to write songs might not be as bad as I make it out to be. However, it’s definitely a lot harder than I imagined it would be. Coming up with the lyrics are one thing and hard enough on its own. But then toss in the act of coming up with the music to go with the lyrics (or vice versa) and the task gets exponentially harder all of a sudden. As I can’t sing, the thought of working to overcome the difficulty of songwriting itself just seems sort of pointless in my case. Still, in my case it’s probably preferable to trying to write a decent poem.