Why I Wrote Sweet and Sour
I’m sarcastic and have a realistic perspective on things. I’m also not really the type to show emotions or prioritise my feelings. This begs the question: why write a collection of poems about love and relationships?
The answer is simple: I wanted to test myself. In early 2022, I decided to write some poems to do with love and relationships not with great zeal, but out of an interest to see what I could write. Me being me, I ended up tackling both the positives and the negative aspects of falling and being in love; starting, being in and ending relationships; and being single. That’s how Sweet and Sour came into being.
I never thought I’d write poems about love and relationships, but I did. I’m glad I’ve written them and as I started, I found I had things to say that I didn’t realise I had.
Sweet and Sour
The poems in Sweet and Sour are split into three sections that have very basic, direct names.
‘Single’
‘Taken’
‘Single Again’
It’s pretty self-explanatory. ‘Single’ looks at living life without a significant other and wanting to have a special someone in your life. ‘Taken’ is about being in a relationship and the ups and downs of being with someone. ‘Single Again’ focuses on life after a relationship and how you should move on.
A Cynical Author Writes Romance Poems
Even though I am a cynic, I’ve tried to show a softer, more emotional side to me (if there is one!) in some of the poems in Sweet and Sour. I didn’t want the collection to be one-sided; I wanted it to encapsulate the full range of emotions, feelings, wants and desires that people typically experience as they go through life.
Even though some of the poems are based on my own personal experiences, I’ve tried not to make them too specific; I want the pieces of writing in Sweet and Sour to be as universal as possible, and therefore as relatable as possible.
The way I see poetry, it’s about the words and their individual contributions to the sentence. Poetry is more about reading things closely and focusing on each particular word, one at a time. Novels and stories are more about the plot and what’s going on; the words are important, but they’re not under the spotlight as much. With poetry, the opposite is true, at least in my opinion. When writing and editing Sweet and Sour, I made sure everything reads well.
Poems tend to be written in such a way that lines are short and sentences spill out over multiple lines. I’ve stuck to this way of writing for Sweet and Sour and arranged sentences so that the word at the end of each line is always an important one that has meaning and significance.
Why Call It Sweet and Sour?
I decided on the title about halfway through the writing process. I’d written poems about both the ups and downs of love/relationships, so the title had to reflect this.
There are several occurrences of the word ‘sweet’ in Sweet and Sour. For example, I refer to sweet kisses, sweethearts and sickly sweet displays of love. I knew this word would make it into at least a few poems because it’s one of the main words that come to mind when I brainstorm the concepts of love/relationships. When thinking of a title, I thought ‘sweet’ should be in it somewhere and, naturally, the word ‘sour’ soon popped up as an antithesis to ‘sweet’. The title Sweet and Sour was inevitable, really.
Will There Be Another Instalment?
No. A big fat no. I’ve got no desire to write more poems about love and relationships. As I wrote Sweet and Sour, I eventually started enjoying writing the poems, but I’m not interested in putting together another instalment. As far as romance poetry is concerned, I’m done with it.
That being said, after Sweet and Sour I did write Love in Brief, a collection of 200 two-sentence romance stories. I haven’t completely abandoned the romance genre; I’m just done with love/relationship poems.
Read Sweet and Sour If You Haven’t Already
Download Sweet and Sour and read some poems about love and relationships this cynical author has written. You might enjoy some of them; you may even find some of them meaningful and relevant. Or not!
Here are the links:
Sweet and Sour - Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo
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