PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

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Start by not stating the reality negatively. Avoid no, not, ain't, cannot, will not, and absolutely shall not. Avoid archaic language, it does not make it MORE poetic. Sentiment simply sucks. Poetry is a discipline and hopefully, someday, the novice poet will embrace the study needed to attain the goal of becoming an actual poet. Poetry becomes a body part, like toes or hair. It becomes a vital motivation force for the personality; simply stated, you become poetry. It becomes a part of your way of working with words well. 

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Aim for at least one poetic device in each verse. (see Prosody on Google).  Do the work. Porn, mild or effusive, is not poetry either. Poetry is the attempt to equal in writing what emotion is to human existence. Period. A mouthful, yes, now go spend a lifetime trying to figure out what that means. If it does not talk about humans it is not a part of the humanities. Accept it now or after you have penned your thousandth poem and you can learn it then: Oh! I can relate all my writing to people? Oooooh.

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Learn it now. A box is never just a box or a sky air and water and vapor - you are the sky, kick open the box, add drama (action) meaning (say something profound) be topical (contemporary) or historical (old concepts) but be always inside the images you make. Implied human characteristics are fine. Haiku substitues nature, but  the initial posture is human IN or AS nature. Be the sidewalk, the dirt, I am glass. (damn that's pretty good for a first line, grabs the reader right off.) "I am glass, see through or reflective and unlying."

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The mixed metaphorical language found in novice poets is easily solved. Say it, say it differently, then say it again. One poem says the main theme that is condensed in the title and summarized in the last lines of the poem. Read my article on adjectives over and over until it sinks in. Read about adverbs and go a bit crazy until something clicks and you start using them in your writing. (See English For Poets file).

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In between title and a masterfully great ending is imagery that says the same thing. If you start talking about skin texture, that is the theme (pores, hairs, color, texture, wrinkles, moles etc.) or it is working to the theme, introducing it, delving inside it, and what I call milking the imagery. Somewhere in the first 2-3 lines the theme "skin" of the poem should be stated or implied. The poem is about some THING or PERSON or ANIMAL or state of being or state of matter (why be limited). Skin as covering, protective, breathing, alive, necessary skin, profound skin, contemplative skin. Go for all the seeming realities. Do not believe in the box. 

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Exercise: write a list of synonyms (words that mean the same thing) then use them one in each verse (or line)- to create a semblance of unity/glue/community) between each section of the poem. Look up each word's definitions and use that in the poem. Look up synonyms, find denotations (actual meaning) and connotations (ancillary or implied meaning) for words. Words are the tools of poetry. Example: sun star Sol equal heat sunshine light Earth. Earth's star, warm/hot, yellow/white or clouded obscured hidden shaded. The words to use in the poem are sifted from the definitions of the title words and ending lines words. Like goes with like. DO NOT MIX METAPHORS! If you are talking aobut the sun, stick to the subject and don't wander. - please. - ~(:D)-

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Study, learn all of its uses: PUNCTUATION. They are guides for how to read the poem and they separate to keep the work from becoming modern art. Jackson Pollock poetry is not the goal, new writer. You want Rembrant. Some think it clever - personal, mine only, fine, but for the reader - punctuation is absolutely necessary, it is mandated for clarity. It is how what you think is transmitted to the reader as precisely as possible. 

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Examine the uses of punctuation, pauses and stops, questions and exclamations in a novel. Learn to use them that way. BUT USE PUNCTUATION. period. Lazy does not equal success, it equals a lifetime of novice status. But other writer do it. Does meaning suffer in those writes or do they blend together into ambiguity? Well, that was my goal to confuse the reader. Okay. Novice. I've heard all that from the non-literary for years - novices all. Learn to use the semi colon and colon too.

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The line break substituting as a period works or where a comma should be - yes, but that takes skills beyond those of the new writer. Learn how it is done first before you deconstruct. And deconstruction of grammar is a poet's calling, but not to the point of sacrificing meaning and rhythm. Meaning and flow are paramount to writing better (I did not say well or writing exceptionally). Aim with each new poem to improve. I do. You might try it. Discovery of ways to say are potential waiting to come into your world. Write in the syntax that is already in your speech pattern. That IS your voice. Add vocabulary words and expand your voice and see the world more clearly. Words have that kind of power. Ask the questions: Can I see these images? Can I feel this phrase? If the answer is no, then locate words that accomplish seeability and feelability. Poetry is sharing human emotions from writer to reader. You are finished writing a poem when that is accomplished. Hard? You bet it is.

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Logic is another fatality or casualty in novice writing. First attempts are great and are encouraged. Do not stop writing, you will get there. I did, you will. (I threw away my first years of writings, saved the best and wrote thousands more). U can 2. Otherwise, you do not grow as a writer. Keep writing. But mixing building a house with walking in a garden full of tulips while flying past Jupiter attempts way too much for the emotional impact to sustain logic. Each of those ideas are too big for one poem and are the themes for three different poems. 3 DIFFERENT POEMS! Skilled poets (those who have done hundreds of hours of work, yes work, experimenting with making their lines unique and in their voice) might be able to pull off mixing metaphors, but the novice usually slaughters the flow, the rhythm, and the theme which ends in a maze of disfuntional unity and misunderstanding. Keep it simple and just state the original idea differently in each line as examples of the theme or extensions of the theme. Clarity is a goal to seek. Seek it.

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Nothing about writing is chipped in stone. But there are sign posts that can be absorbed and followed as a general way of cutting away the chaff to get to the grain inside your head where you emote and ideate. This is why writers in college writing classes are encouraged to keep a journal or write letters to themselves - after 10 thousand words, the boredom alone forces creativity. I wrote the first novel 40 times before I rid myself of simply saying and over time, 50 years, eventually discovered "my voice" my unique way of saying. I know, who plans to be a professinal published authority called a writer? I just want to express myself to my mom or boyfreind or granpa or everyone. That is fine, but eventually you will become frustrated when reading really "great" poetry. How did the writer do that becomes the question for the novice who then abandons writing or digs in and studies prosody. (see Google)

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Discipline comes from study. It is unavoidable. Put in the box, you fight your way out because poets resist norm and destroy norm to create that which is "newer" or "fresh expression" that  departs from everything you have ever read. No cliches please. No adages, sayings, nursery rhyme lines to start please. People speak in poetic language. Found poems: what you heard on the bus or in a meeting or in passing in the park - keep a small notebook in your pocket and jot them down. Taking a walk I passed two women talking, one was saying: "I ate it like a dog gnawing at a bone." Sometimes a great metaphor will walk right past you.

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Originality will eventually happen. Copying a form is not the same thing as adopting it as yours, that is theft (plagerism). Yours evolves from writing haiku, limericks, song lyrics (even rap unfortunately) using banter, humor, pathos, hellishness, evil, joy, ennui, commentary, chiaroscuro, and yes, rhymes (which I try to avoid because: a. already overdone, b. hard to take the time to do precisely - novices get close to what kinda rhymes and keep going). It is hard to hold true to the integrity of the write as artifice that attempts to enter the realm of humanism expressed as emotion when forced to make it rhyme and be a couplet or sonnet. For the attainment of true insanity, research the format for a sestina. I have written two in my lifetime. I have never been the same since.

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Rhyme is very difficult and requires time and a large vocabulary. (See my poem "Medical Lymerick"). It took me a week or more to write it and hone it and make it witty and inside the form, rhymed. The brain drains and strains and does the work and sweat happens and killing many lines that refused to work happens to find the theme attached perfectly to a rhyme--is what it took. Having read several thousand novels didn't hurt either and reading poetry by tonne weight helped a little. Mary had that little lamb, assuredly, but Shakespeare and Dickens and Baraka and Whitman, Sanchez, Plath, Ferlinghetti, and Chaucer helped expand the lyrical and emotional dialog into a literary vocabulary. I am not saying you have to read these people, find your own favorite authors and dig in. Expand your word lists. Copy a page, go through and highlight words YOU DO NOT KNOW. Look them up and use as a title for a poem. Ha - work!

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Once the poem is made logical (makes sense, if you do not have this ability it is going to be difficult to be understood) and the cliches are purged "Oh, My love, I want you to be mine forever and ever and ever and ever," then imagery can be introduced. What is caesura? What is onomatapea? How can texture and color enhance the imagery? What is a near rhyme? Example: cool/soul - the vowels (or dipthongs ea,ie,ey,ae,ee) may have to carry the rhyme. Images are pictures created with words - sometimes visually, sometimes metaphorically. i.e., The cat paused then pounced. Yarn unravelled. (visual) This animal nature fell upon life with claws extended and imagination unravelled. (metaphorical). Good luck with the metaphorical.

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Simile and metaphor. Learn them, then write them as exercises, create ten each and nail them to your brain matrices forever. At some point in a poem you are going to call a rose an airplane or compare truly like objects or concepts like: My hand is a sieve-- my desk became words. Unlike concepts compared stretch to locate familiar objects or ideas that push the poem into emotion and away from the simply stated. Metaphors and similes are poetic devises that compare dissimilar or ideas to familiar or simple concepts using the words as or like (simile):  The car was frozen like a popsicle right out of the icebox.

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Metaphor  are poetic devices that  call a simple idea a more complexed concept or idea using the word form "to be" ex. "is" (and I extend the definition to include are was were). Ex. The carpenter is a hammar. and A moon is a basketball.  Expanded: Orange and round running acoss the midnight floor, the center orb of the game in a deft hand aimed at the basket called moonset. Note: famillisr compsred to a larger concept personified. It comes in time after many attempts.

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Dress the poem's lines in words that force new ideation connections - Example: the poet writes on a computer becomes: (Similr) I used to be a keyboard, hard to play.. One definition of a simile. Compare a familiar concept with a more complexed idea.  She is a keyboard. Ex. She is like a keyboard (metaphor) Ex.  Each key is a paintbrush (simile). Metaphor definition - using as or like in a comparison between a familir idea and an unfamiliar or more complexed idea).

Ex, (simile) She is a dream that wants to paint her life on canvas. He dreamed of words speaking in pixels - NOTE: pixels do not speak but they can in a simile.  Ex. (metaphor) Art lost in a black and white period become words like a chiarascuro motif. A few examples - some okay, some pretty good, to explain two of the important tools of poetic expression. Similes and metaphors are tools that can differentiate poetry from prose.

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Practice writing verse,  then rewrite and rewrite until something "clicks" in your head that finds the counterpart on the page. Give yourself the freedom to do that and give yourself time to achieve a different plateau, your stage for saying something. (Find your voice, your uniuque way of saying.) There are millions of writers now because of the computer technology, and the novice can continue to simple say what they feel and share it. Usually, the ideas shared are not unique: or elevated to become unique or worthy of raising the reader's brow (the ultimate goal don't you know). Example. Our love is broken like Humpty Dumpty changed to: I am the shards, shatterred egg shells below a high wall, considering wholeness and the essense of loss.  Iit is a transformation, a location of the right imagery or comparitive items in interesting relationships to each other that create something original.

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Originality is a theme in art that has had billions of typed letters associated with attempting to explain it. Let it simply be absorbed that reading, writing, rewriting, exploring word forms and phraseologies lead you there eventually. The poet is always interested in a clever turn of phrase. A skilled writer, just writes, edits lightly, and liking the style, the emotion shared as exactly as possible, the execution, the outcome, the final product, then like Sandburg's fog moves on. A poem is never finished. Watch length, say in two verses what you have attempted in five to eight. Condense and do not repeat lines or words (for a while). Each word has value and is enough to say what it means. Once IS enough. Learn the value of repetition later. For now, each word no matter the size is unique and worthwhile in its usage. Every word is a heartbeat and keeps the body of the poem alive all by itself. That is why chosing vocabulary is important. Repeating the same lines in one poem is just lazy - unless it is a part of the moasic, the motif (song lyric perhaps or bridge of a song - the chorus). Novice, avoid repetition  and expand vocabulary usage instead. 

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I hope this helps. It is difficult to emerge from simple lines gleaned from all those songs and nursery rhymes and cliches and sayings. Rework them. Example: Cliche: I love you so much it hurts. To: Pain is not supposed to replace you when you leave the room. (the feeling described, reworked, a bit differently, from another angle) or Cliche: I yearn for your touch. To: It is the longing as wanting and desire in the wish to touch the sweat of your love. (gives you chills right?) Always aim to make the reder feel the emotion you are expressing. Note: love does not sweat, lovemaking does - you are into figurative language  territory here.

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Okay, not great poetry examples, but the direction is in there to twist it and torture the concepts into something newer, yours, and ENTERTAINING. The path is a multiple road forked with many directions: instruct, share, express, describe, educate, dream, float. I offer a few. My hope is that, as a new artist, you will chose one direction and travel it to the end that leads to your unique way of saying (writing down) human emotion.

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Now, that the entity called poem makes sense logically, has punctuation, and no negatives (Life and truth always reach for the positivity of existence and continuity) with all the cliches reworked or removed, you are ready to revise your poetry writing habits. Or start making those habits.

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A good ending nails the entire write: refers back to the title, summarizes the entire poem and makes a statement – the emotion lives inside the imagery and it is still a prose poem (without rhymes tacked on as an afterthought because you think it more poetic with rhymes). Ideas are to be transformed into pictures and lines that contain and ARE emotion. That is the goal of poetry. That is the ARTIFICE, the invitation that elevates the reader to join the experience. You can not just tell the reader the drama, you have to create it, enact it, and express it using selective vocabulary. i.e., passion is a good descriptive emotional word (over-used though like god and love and yearning and above). Excoriant is fabulous. "Excoriant" is not a word - but it estimates the emotion better. (excoriation - a harsh criticism). You learn to live inside language, inside the need for definitions, the need for a new grammar and, eventually, a new vocabulary. That's a lot to absorb, but that is the quest of the poet.

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Poets expand their vocabulary: I learn new words all the time and use them or turn them into emotional units of imagery. It is a smeltering down, a condensation, a merging of the senses with rhythm and logical “weaving” of symbols as comparisons close to the vibrations released from the initial idea. (Mouthful, it is how my brain works. Sorry for that one.) “I love you like this” which says it, but there is an avoidance of the music in the voice. Instead: “I want you to love me like this.” says more than all the love letters ever written. Yearning is added.  In the simple phrase/line, complexities exist. Rhythm and a beat is in there, a voice is making a plea in the second example. Human longing is inserted and implied. The rest of the poem explains "this".

Novice writers will not study prosody (the tools of poetry) but it is advised. I hope you will read my articles on English. They explore all of the above and tells you how to write all of the above. Studying poetry is needed here and a little prosody goes a long way (years). Then you can evolve. Poets never go dry, they get tired, exhausted, mentally limboed. Dry? The world is full of ideas and images and folks to write about. A new poet can not go dry. It is work, a function: wringing all the life giving water out of the brain's synapes. Brain sweat will do that. In the novice poet to not be able to write means it is time to study prosody (see Google).This got long. Hope it does not offend. If your response is: "I'm not doing any of that!" You are wrong. Once anything is put in your brain, unless you have deficiences and can't remember and recall, it is in there and will eventually come out in some form or other. That is the magic of studying poetry. That is the magic of words. Just the suggestion that you use punctuation will make you look at uses and artistic formats of commas and dashes, elipses, quote marks, and brackets, colons and semi-colons, and the phenominal period when you read something in the future. Your brain has been  altered forever. Ta da!

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VOICE: You have to discover your own voice. Your own set of unique imagery as spoken. You have to see it and react to it, not just say it dramatically (a novice tendency). Syntax (the way you uniquely form words in ideation clusters then speak them) is your voice.

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Centering all the lines is not going to improve the content. Triple spacing is silly. Spreading the poem all over the page loses the reader unless it is exquisite writing or artistically clever. Tone is best made consistent throughout a poem. Talking about death is slower, fun is fast, joy is full of fun words. Tone, the general flavor of the phrases that declare this is the way this should be read and felt. Tone. If you write using single and double syllable words only, try 3-5 syllable words - change it up to manipulate tone/rhythm/pacing and give it a series of irregular beats. When a line equals the beat in your head, you will have arrived at the cadence of preference. A good tone riding on good syntax and cadence simply makes the writing  more interesting. Your voice is the way you form words in your head before you speak them. It is the most unique way you have of expressing ideas, colors, shapes, smells, textures etc.  Easy. I doubt the word "thou" or "thence" or "thinketh" exist in the composition processes of your brain's manufactory. Avoid archaic language like the word "amongst". It is the mark of a gnovice contemporary poet - and a dead give away that vocabulary has not been explored. 

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Good luck novice writer. The veterans are sitting back reading this and laughing-gut critically thinking: Naw that ain't it., I was there ince. Time to evolve!  What I am offering the new piet adds and enhances a chance at avoiding pitfallss. This is one way to begin or proceed. It's all good.

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Lady A

03-28-19

1036a

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Revised 07-22-21

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