What is Genre Poetry?

Poetry. We all know what it is, and we either love it or hate it, read it or write it, and perhaps a little bit of all of them together. There are many types of poetry as well. There's rhyming, freestyle, prose, free verse, just to name a few. But what is Genre Poetry? Well, a simple Google search won't help, I've checked. I know I didn't coin the term, but let me tell you what it is. Genre poetry is a collection of poetry written about topics within any type of genre, from love and science fiction to horror and action. Basically, you write a poem about any topic that falls within a certain type of genre. Perhaps there is another word for it, but I like the term genre poetry because it's calling it what it is. Anyone who knows me knows I enjoy writing poetry. Not only that, but I enjoy writing and can write a poem about pretty much anything( that's appropriate and within reason, although if I feel bold or feel the need, I can go beyond expectation).

I am by no means tooting my own horn( toot, toot!) I am merely saying that I enjoy writing poetry by expanding it to more than just my feelings. I like giving poetry a purpose, a theme, and making something that isn't normally written as poetry. A science fiction poem, for example, doesn't mean write a poem about space or aliens; it means the same thing as if you were going to write a science fiction novel, take the elements of it, and create a poem from it. I have several poems in my book Like A Box of Chocolates that are Science Fiction based such as Starlight Express which is about the two cliches I mentioned to which Science Fiction isn't all about(I know I'm such a great exmaple to go by) and The Chemist which is my spin on the classic tale of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

The idea behind my book was simple: I knew I had a bunch of poems written within many different genres, so I wanted to put them all together to create a single book of poems. Genre poetry by my opinion is a group of poems and not necessarily one individual poem, although if you could write one poem and combine several different genres, that works too, and in fact, I'm sure I've done this at some point. Another key about genre poetry is that it's like poetry itself as a whole in the sense that the ideas are endless, and you can go out and express yourself. There are no limits in poetry, and with genre poetry, it's no different, but may be more experimental in some ways. We all know that when it comes to poetry, there are many tools, and these tools should not be abandoned when it comes to genre poetry; they should be used because it's just like writing any other poem.

It seems like I'm sugar coating it by giving genre poetry a name when in reality it's really just a regular poem within a theme and genre poetry is the category to which it happens to fall under. To give you more of an idea of some of the poetry I write, and within Like A Box of Chocolates, here are some titles and explanations of some of the work within it. The opening poem, Shattered Dreams, is hard to categorize as it doesn't fit a specific literary genre, but if anything falls under overcoming struggles. The poem talks about the ups and downs a person at times faces. Another poem is called Brutal Mentality, which again doesn't fall under any literary genres. This poem tells of how sometimes people treat us badly or assume the worst of us, but it is they who are in the wrong and we as victims.

In conclusion to this post, I would like people to know that there are no limits to what is and what isn't poetry. It doesn't have to be from the heart, about your feelings or about something sad that happened to you, like heartbreak, although those can make for some really good poems! Write what you see, what's on your mind, write what's around you, and what's within you. Take a less talked about topic and write a poem about it, or go way beyond the normal and write about something no one would ever think in a million years could be a poem. I once wrote a poem about dirty pennies called Dirty Penny Laundrerer's. Where did it come from? I haven't the faintest idea, but I sat down, started writing, and just went with it. It is these things and these self-made challenges, and simple ideas that make up genre poetry. If you have a collection of poetry that you want people to know about, but you're unsure of how to put it together, make it a mixed book of goodies, make it Genre Poetry. Make people not know what they're going to get.

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