Poetry Problems

Hey gang,

The Fiction Tribune's office is starting a new series of guides to writing, called the Writer's Workshops. The Writer's Workshops will talk about the art of writing, rather than the mechanical tips often focused on in Shadow Academy courses: how to write more effective descriptions, how to write interesting fight scenes, writing in specific genres, and other style points of writing.

One of the Writer's Workshops will be a guide to help people get started in poetry, and overcome the most common problems that poetry writers have. This is where you come in: what would you like to see in a guide like that? Leave your answers here, and we'll try to incorporate as many suggestions as possible into the WWs when they're written.

Thanks for sharing!

That sounds like a great idea! Maybe there could even be seperate guides for different genres, styles or maybe even forms of writing like poetry, stories, memoirs, instead of putting it all in one guide?

Poetry is a huge field of study -- doctoral programs are dedicated to this stuff -- with many, many styles, including quatrain, palindrome, haiku, limerick, free verse and epitaph, to name a few. But I'd just as well have all that complicated technical stuff left out. Instead, I'd focus on teaching poetry that's evocative and filled with imagery and emotion. Lessons on vocabulary, theme, metaphor, and symbolism, with discussion, examples and exercises included in the guide. One exercise I know of is where a sentence or paragraph provided is completely rewritten with different vocabulary, imagery, tone, etc., while still preserving the original meaning.

Definitely work on the imagery. The majority of DB-inspried/churned poetry tends to be too literal. It tells you the image, rather than evoking it. Which takes a lot away from the poem. In addition, people tend to focus more on following the structure and getting words that rhyme rather than working on the picture - forgetting that poets sometimes play with words to get their meaning across (Langston Hughes' "prose poet" or Shakespeare's "grow'st" would be prime examples). Hell, your poetry isn't limited to "real words"...you can take a "real word" and make it into something that rhymes: so long as you stay away from constantly doing that.

There's also too much focus on writing sonnets or epics or set quatraines. Not needed, too cumbersome and too unwieldly, especially for beginning writers. Sticking to a more free form example that does have a simple rhyme scheme would be better (See Frost's "Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening").

Just as an FYI, I am holding a writing course for Tar/CNS starting 9/10, if you'd like to check it out, e-mail me, Erinyes, and I can cc you on my lesson plans.