Poetry and Other Things

I'm in this poetry class this semester. I've never taken a poetry class before and it's pretty fun. My goal was to write one poem per day, so I'd have a wide variety to choose from when it came to submitting my pieces. I haven't been as disciplined with that one as I would like (I think I got to a month and a half before my first huge break from poems), but I'm only a couple days behind. When the semester began, I told myself that I was only going to write poetry this semester, and prose would have to wait until the summer. That didn't happen. The idea behind writing one poem per day, and only writing poetry, I guess, was to make myself better--if I couldn't be a great poet, I could at least not be a shitty poet. I know now that I'm not a shitty poet, but the question becomes, how good do I want to get?

I guess that same question could be applied to writing in general. How good do I want to get? After two years in school and a long time of knowing the basics before that, I'm fairly technically accomplished. I can get better, I know--anyone can, but I'm learning that writing isn't about technicality; it's about having something to say. If what I have to say doesn't matter, I should just write genre fiction and never worry about anything else. Except that won't satisfy me. I have an inherent need for purpose, and writing genre fiction might be fun, but it doesn't fulfill that. My writing from now on, I think, is going to have to start developing themes, and I'm going to have to start thinking deeply on subjects in a way I'm not used to.

Another question that begs to be answered is, what do I want to do with my writing? Jeez, if I knew that, I wouldn't still be in school.