http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/<\/a>. But Warning #1 applies; some of the poems won\u2019t be appropriate for all ages.<\/p>\nA confession: I tend to read poems at the same breakneck speed I read prose, which is better than not reading them at all though not ideal. But if a poem grabs me, I reread and reread and remember. My favorite poems lodge in my brain. And by taking up residence there, they make me more of a poet. Same as with fiction.<\/p>\n
If you like a poem, reread it. Read it out loud. Observe the tools of poetry at work! Notice the sounds. Pay attention to the sentence structure. Does the poet vary her\u00a0sentence length? Or not? (No way is better than any other.) Do most of the lines end in punctuation? Or not? Is the poem punctuated at all (it\u2019s up to the poet)? Is the punctuation regular? Are the lines long or short or varied in length? Does the poem tell a story? Or not? Does it even make sense? Do you understand it? You don\u2019t have to, and it doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re stupid. (I am susceptible to feeling stupid if I don\u2019t understand, and I\u2019m not fond of poems that leave me feeling that way, but some poets are more interested in sound than meaning, and some readers enjoy that. You may discover that you\u2019re one of them.)<\/p>\n
Does it rhyme? Does it rhyme sometimes? Are the rhymes unexpected? Does the tense change surprisingly? Does the person (first, second, third) stay the same or shift? Are there metaphors and similes (not all poems have them)? Is there a surprise near the end? Or anywhere else?<\/p>\n
And pay attention to what you feel as you read. Some poems are intellectual, but many go straight to the gut or the heart. I love the emotional wallop a poem can pack.<\/p>\n
So reading poems is the absolutely essential, sine qua non step to becoming a poet. A lovely collection to get you started is Step Lightly: Poems for the Journey<\/em>, anthologized by Nancy Willard. Though I haven\u2019t read it in a long time, \u00a0I think this one is fine for middle school and up, but check with an adult to be sure. Nancy Willard is a wonderful poet with exquisite taste. Years ago, I took a workshop led by her.<\/p>\nAs you read, notice how vast the world of poetry is. Some poems are short and as light as air. The poet isn\u2019t making a STATEMENT. Some are deeply emotional. Some are intellectual. Some advocate causes.<\/p>\n
When you write poems, experiment! Poems are generally short enough that we can play around and try many approaches and many kinds of poems. Write serious and silly. Rhyme and don\u2019t rhyme. Learn about meter and try a metrical poem. Go for feeling, and go for intellect. Write long poems and short. Try some of the short forms, like haiku, cinquain, tritina. Try other forms, like sonnets, pantoums, sonnets. If you\u2019re feeling like a challenge, try a sestina. You\u2019ll find descriptions of all these forms online. And my go-to\u00a0reference book on forms is The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms<\/em>, edited by Ron Padgett (high school and up).<\/p>\nSuppose you write ten poems today… Don\u2019t judge them! Put them aside for, say, ten days. Read poems by other poets in the meanwhile. Look at your poems again. Still don\u2019t judge them, but revise without judgment. See if you can push the sounds by switching to synonyms with more alliteration and more assonance. Try breaking the lines in different places. Put them aside again and write new poems. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.<\/p>\n
Most, maybe all, learning is subconscious. In reading, we writers give our brains poems and stories, which they churn while we\u2019re unaware, and learning happens.<\/p>\n
Aside from improving as a poet and becoming friends with great \u00a0poets decades younger than I am, what has poetry school done for me and for my fiction? Most of all, I\u2019ve become more aware of sounds in my prose. I notice especially when I use alliteration, which I push sometimes and take out others. I\u2019ve gotten better at noticing words and clauses I don\u2019t need, because poetry is often compressed, so my prose has become leaner, which I like in my work and in everybody else\u2019s. Sometimes I\u2019ve used poems to try out in this short form ideas that I might use in a novel. For example, I\u2019m thinking that I might like my next book to be a strange fairy tale variation on \u201cBeauty and the Beast,\u201d and I explored the idea in a poem.<\/p>\n
Back to Bug\u2019s question. Improvement in poetry and fiction comes with practice, more than with identifying what\u2019s wrong and fixing it, although that helps, too. If we can figure out what doesn\u2019t work, of course we should look for ways to address the problem, but we should avoid that negative voice. What we identify should be concrete, like too many adjectives and adverbs, not enough thoughts and feelings, taking too long to get to the conflict. Not: Today I\u2019m going to transform my writing from lousy to good.<\/p>\n
There are lots of prompts above, and here are three more:<\/p>\n
\u2219 Write an unsentimental poem about a pet. An example of this is a disturbing and funny poem by Billy Collins. A dog dies and its soul reveals that it never liked its owner.<\/p>\n
\u2219 In a poem, argue a position you feel strongly about, but also bring yourself into it. Show in the poem why you care, why you have something at stake.<\/p>\n
\u2219 Pick a last line from one of the many poems you\u2019ve been reading and make it the last line of your own new poem. This isn\u2019t stealing, because you\u2019re going to acknowledge your debt. Under the title of your poem, write After Name of Poem by Name of Poet.<\/p>\n
Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Happy holidays! Happy New Year! Next post in 2016! First off, this is an appeal: I need title help again. I wanted to call the Two Princesses prequel just plain Bamarre. But my editor nixed that, alas, so I\u2019m back in title misery. This no more than what is revealed in the first chapter, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":692,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions\/692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}