Poetry Tips From a Heavy Consumer Thereof
I shared a few poetry-writing thoughts via Twitter, and wanted to spread them around a bit more broadly.
These come from the perspective of someone who reads many poems every day on PoetsUnlimited. It’s a daily publication sharing poems from writers across the planet, from every continent (except Antarctica, sadly). With a few years of steady growth already, we have several hundred contributors and many thousands of readers.
Rather than try to be too broad, I came up with just four straight-forward things you can do that *might* make your poetry stronger.
I’ll preface this to say that you can do the opposite of every one of these and still produce something spectacularly good.
- Tip#1: Instead of employing exclamation marks (or multiples) try to make your words deliver the power, so that the punctuation becomes unnecessary.
- Tip#2: Instead of “I” did this and “I” feel that, see if you can put the reader into your shoes w descriptive, comparative words. Or explore your feelings as stuck into someone else’s perspective. Can you paint the scene without referring to yourself? Make it intensely personal without the personal pronoun.
- Tip#3: Pretend each word costs you hard cash out of your pocket. The adage “less-is-more” often applies to words (within limits, of course). Explore how the removing of words (restructure phrases as necessary) adds more power to a phrase. And where does that effect stop?
- Tip#4: It can be more powerful to describe everything in the scene except the ‘big thing’ that your entire piece is about. See if you can work through all the other stuff until “it” screams out at us.
Break these ‘rules’ at will. But if you do get a chance to employ some of them, compare the before and after results. You might just be pleased with the outcome.
I should note that I’m not thinking of anyone’s writing in particular, nor intending to be critical of any particular poem. Rather these are intended to help differentiate anyone’s work among the vast body of stuff out there. Maybe if you stretch yourself a little you’ll like it.
Growth and challenging oneself in one’s writing often seems to produce good rewards.
Just a few thoughts, something to try from someone who sees a lot of words from a wide range of poets …for whatever that’s worth.
-Ross.
