Part 1: Poetry · 1:36am Sep 3rd, 2015
“But I hate poetry” well that’s because you’re doing it wrong. A poem of the type that we were told to write in this class is just a short, condensed piece of work that shows who you are and what you do as a writer.
What is a poem? Poems are generally short and dense. They near universally have some kind of rhyrhm. They make creative use of line breaks. They usually, not always, convey some kind of deeper meaning--writing in between the lines, as it were.
Notice that counting syllables, choosing rhymes, and forming verses are not found in that list--more on that later. Basically, we were told to just get an idea, put words into a doc, make it look and feel like a poem, and then bring it in and see what everyone else came up with.
Here are the rules that we were given for poetry:
No rhyming
The way the instructor put it is that even famous and historic poets ended up missing rhymes, using forced rhymes, or writing weak lines in order to make them rhyme, so if we try doing rhyme then we’ll definitely mess it up. Dealing with the extreme difficulty of making your poetry work in rhyme kind of ruins the point of learning how to write condensed, eloquent poetry.
We were also not allowed to write sonnets, limericks, or haiku, for obvious reasons. Working an idea into a rigid form like that is more like a fun game than an exercise in eloquent creative writing. Besides, a haiku isn’t even a real haiku if it’s not written in Japanese.
As for syllable-counting, that was evaluated on a case by case, line by line basis. Much like sentence flow in any piece of writing, sometimes a line just feels like it needs one less syllable or one more. Rhythm often comes out naturally just in the course of trying to write a nice sentence flow that’s divided into lines of poetry.
No feelings
Did you write any emo teen poetry when you were an emo teen going through emo teen issues? Don’t lie--yes you did.
This rule wasn’t strictly enforced, but the goal was to write using nothing but sense imagery. A message can be conveyed as a metaphor; an emotion can be evoked with word choice; an opinion can be expressed via allegory. Aside from cheesy goth-ish imagery, one of the distinctive aspects of a shitty teen poem is that it either gets personal or breaks “show don’t tell.”
Still no fragments
Primarily, sticking to this rule prevented the class from writing poems that were just lists. The notion of a poem that’s basically just a “list” got a few chuckles out of the class, because we can all envision it and how awful it is. Again, shitty emo teen poetry was to be avoided at all costs.
For our purposes right now, however, writing poetry made entirely out of actual sentences can serve as a lesson in flow. Complete sentences should be your default for being clear and readable, so using complete sentences to create a laser-sharp, don’t-waste-a-single-word poem can and should be highly effective. In this way, poetry really is something that’s worth a try for anyone who wants to be a writer.
We were given very little guidance with this or any other assignment; it was kind of weird to be given writing homework that basically respected the fact that we were adults who were ready to just write without being told exactly what to write.
Fimfiction has a perfect example of how poetry can be fun, easy, expressive, and unrestricted. Yes, they break these rules all over the place, but they weren’t written for this class. Along with showing how free-form poetry can flow and punch, they’re funny and clever and sometimes they’re even deep.
Give poetry a try. Seriously. I worked some poetry into one of my fics, and it actually felt really good--not to mention how good it felt to write poems for this class and see them turn into things that really felt like finished pieces of writing, despite being less than 100-odd words long.
