Last week when I posted “When You Are Old” in honor of William Butler Yeats’ birthday, I wrote that I sometimes use poetry to inspire my writing or help get the words moving when I’m stuck.
Writer Kevin Mackey and others who commented on the post said they do the same.
“I use poetry to remind myself of the beauty that can be wrung from language. It acts as a spur to my own efforts,” Kevin said.
Other comments and conversations I’ve had since then echo Kevin’s thoughts. But it’s confession time: I didn’t always like poetry. I often felt it was inaccessible and that made me feel left out, annoyed, and a little bit dumb.
I stayed away for a while, but I knew there was value in poetry and that I could learn from it. I wanted to find a way in. Over time with some effort I finally did. I’ve learned to appreciate poetry for its precision and imagery, and not strictly for its literal meaning. “The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide” by Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate was particularly helpful. It’s a tiny book that uses examples to explain how poetry uses the sounds of words to convey meaning in a rich, melodic, and concise way that keeps the reader entranced. As a writer, I aspire to that.
To use poetry to strengthen your writing, consider these elements that help make a poem a poem.
Sound: As Pinsky says in “The Sounds of Poetry,” poets use the sounds of words to make an impact. That can be done through repetition, alliteration, assonance, varied word lengths, onomatopoeia, and on and on (and on).
Try it in your own writing. Are you working on something that is light-hearted? High drama? Horror? Choose words to convey that feeling, not based simply on meaning, but based on sound. Do it in an over-exaggerated way. Let yourself have fun with it. You can fix it in revision, but you might find that what you’ve come up with is strong and vivid.
Precision: Don’t stop at using the right word or getting the scene right. Keep on writing (and rewriting) until it conveys the most information without overwhelming. Think about what other senses can be alerted to engage the reader. If your character is nervous, how can you show it through his senses. He feels his hands shaking. He hears his heart pounding.
Precision doesn’t stop there. Prose does not have the format limitations of poetry, but it’s equally important to avoid unnecessary words, whether in the form of clichés, useless adjectives, or pleonasms, a form of redundancy, such as past history and consensus of opinion.
Of course, there is far more to poetry than just sound and precision, but adding these two elements to your writing and revising will make a richer experience for you and your reader.
For information on “How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry),” this post from the Poetry Foundation is loaded with great insight. It’s a wonderful site, too!
Away with Words 