Before
I start this post, I want to just say that I’m not a poet. Prose is my thing,
but I’ve had the good fortune of taking a poetry class with a rather amazing
poet recently and learnt a few things that I’d like to pass on to any first
time poetry writers out there.
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| Don't get saddled by your childhood. Rhymes aren't essential for your poems. |
1. Jack & Jill Went Up the Hill…
It’s
tempting to write with rhymes,
And certainly that’s not a crime,
But
your work can start sounding forced
With unwilling words that seem coerced.
We grow up with nursery rhymes and certainly some of the
greatest poetry in literature has rhymes, but rhymes aren’t a prerequisite for
poetry. My teacher stressed that what made a good poem was the power of its metaphors,
and often enough similes. Judge for yourself:
“He acted rather bad,
And that made me sad.”
As opposed to:
“He hasn’t returned.
I feel as hopeless as a broken promise.”
[please don’t knock the above lines, I wrote them for my
class]
Okay,
I used an exaggeratedly bad example for rhyming lines, but it’s to illustrate
that the metaphor not the rhyme makes the poem.
2. Metaphors Over Similes
“He’s as powerful as the wind as he rushes into my life.”
“He’s the wind that rushes into my life, uprooting my
thoughts
There
is nothing wrong with a simile, but if you have a simile that can be converted
into a metaphor, convert away. Metaphors are stronger forms of speech as
suggested in the above example. Remember, however, that these suggestions are
general. You might find that only a simile works in your poem and that’s fine
too.
3. Sentiment vs Sentimentality
So, what’s the difference? To put it rather simply in
terms of the effect, if your poem has sentiment, the reader feels it. If your
poem has merely sentimentality only you feel it. My last assignment was to
write an unsentimental love poem. That’s a contradiction in terms, you may
think, but it’s not.
Read Shakespeare’s My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like The
Sun. My teacher told us two methods to write a similar poem. The first was to
pick one characteristic of your lover and describe it in extreme and beautiful
detail while another was to describe the person’s flaws and yet justify your
love (Shakespeare’s technique). I chose the first style and wrote in extensive
detail about a man’s golden hair. I described what it looked like when he was
getting a haircut, when it was freshly washed, what it looked like in the
moonlight. Then, just in the last stanza I wrote, “When the world is drenched
in darkness, I see sunshine in his hair.” It was considered a good
unsentimental love poem because my class had no idea who I was talking about,
but in that stanza they understood what he meant to me.
You can of course write, “He is the best looking person
in the world. No man can look better.” But your audience won’t be convinced,
their idea of the hottest person is that vegan vampire. Your job is to make
them feel what you feel.
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Tom Hardy serves no actual
purpose in this post, but since
we are talking about good lips...!
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On a side note, this approach works in prose as well.
Recently, I had to describe my character’s beautiful mouth and no matter how
many accolades I put to it- color, shape, lushness- it wasn’t all that.
Miserable, I stared at my work, then realized the missing ingredient. I put in
a line about his coarse skin, his cruel eyes, his wide forehead, and his
gorgeous younger brother. Then, against this backdrop I wrote that despite all his
shortcomings, he could rival any man because of his mouth (Shakespeare’s
style). See what I’m getting at?
4. Leave Out Descriptions
What?
No descriptions?
Yes and no. It depends on the type of description you
have. Of course, you want to go on about your lover’s eyes but never list their
color and shape.
“Her eyes are blue” or “her blue eyes are breathtaking.”
“She carried the ocean in her eyes.”
They both describe the same thing, but the first one
belongs in a work of prose while the second one takes its place in poetry.
Metaphors, metaphors, metaphors all the way!
5. Brevity Is A Virtue
A poem is visibly smaller than prose and there’s good
reason for it. Poems don’t have unnecessary words in them. If your job is
getting done with “she’s looking good,” don’t bother adding, “she’s looking
very good.”
To achieve this, you’ll have to choose appropriate and
powerful words. Consider:
“The salty spray from the ocean’s waves hit my face.”
Firstly, I know that the ocean has salty water, so omit
“salty.” Secondly, can you make this more concise?
“The spindrift hit my face.”
Trust me, few but powerful words can say a lot more than
a million less effective ones.
6. Don’t Do Something Just Because…
In poetry, don’t do something just because it sounds nice.
If you’re using improper word order, alliteration, or a rhyme make sure it’s
there for a reason. Otherwise it’ll take away the reader’s attention from the
theme of the poem. Writing a poem the other day, I kept most of it free verse,
then let just two lines at the end rhyme. The point was that the last two lines
were related and the echoing sound made it easier to draw the connection between
them while isolating them from the rest of the poem. So make sure whatever you’re
doing has a better reason than “it just sounded pretty.”
7. Poetic Language
Sure, poetry does something rather special with language
that we don’t achieve in our daily conversations. But this doesn’t mean that
you have to use flowery language when a simple word is doing the trick.
I stuck to pretty words in my poems and went the
conventional way, but a rather gifted classmate of mine managed in lines like,
“We each hoped the other would speak,
And then, whatever…”
Out of context, it sounds a bit odd, but believe me, it
got a lot more praise than my poem. So use language that you’re comfortable
with. Similar to the very first point, good poetry isn’t defined by the kind of
language you use but how you use it to express your thoughts. If “f*** off” is
getting the job done, don’t get hampered with, “You offend me, sir.”
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