Writing Interesting Poetry
Five Handy Tips to Keep in Mind when Writing Words in Lines
Become Poet Laureate of the Solar System with these five simple ideas to help your poetry stay interesting, exciting and fresh.
Your poem is worth nothing if it is not interesting. Keep it interesting. A writer needs five things to survive in modern poetry:
1.) Sounds
Poetry in the 21st century rings with sounds. End-of-line rhymes are minimized, but taking their place are the wonders of assonance and consonance, repetitions of vowels and consonants to ease rhythm and grease the music and the meaning. Sticking a number of like-sounding letters in a line, as long as it’s not overdone, gives a poem a nice verbal flow. Mixing multiple sounds into one sentence can also aid your quest for quality.
Just be wary of overusing the S: it's an easy trap to stumble into, and your sonnet ends up sounding subtly snaky. See?
2.) Enjambment
Enjambment, a term that Microsoft Works won’t always recognize, means breaking a sentence in the middle of a line. The lined poem, when opposed to the prose poem, is all about sounds and lines, after all. When lines end on convenient periods (or any caesura), readers stop. If they haven’t been utterly impressed by your loquacious finesse, this is a good point to almost subconsciously slide their eyes on to something more interesting, like a page number, or the ceiling. Keeping the ends of lines free of debilitating punctuation keeps a poem kinetic. If you have to end a sentence, end it with a baited hook, break-neck and risqué.
3.) Cunning Line Breaks
Riffing on the same topic, keeping lines ending in suspenseful or humorous ways yanks a reader along. Invoking the appropriate emotions is up to a writer, but the spirit will remain the same: make your reader keep reading. For instance, ending a line with “smacked him in the” will never lose a reader’s attention, and the writer can think of him or herself as clever.
If this turn-of-phrase doesn’t come out naturally, try seeking it out. Look at what you’ve written, see what makes you smirk, then hit the Enter key.
4.) Layers
In art, a cigar is never just a cigar. A tornado is a metaphor, a mustache is a parody, a sneer is a picture worth a thousand words. Such meaning may not always be obvious or intentional, but your poetry is certainly less interesting if your writing does not evoke an empathetic, sympathetic, or intellectual response.
If you’re writing about watering your ferns, make sure there’s an interesting reason for that. Are your ferns hungry green beasts, or are you an overprotective nurturer? Did you just fail, determined not to fail again? If so, are you going to fail, ironically, by trying so hard that you drown the poor things?
Clever language only takes you so far, and then your poem’s second layer is a sad critique on the inadequacy of clever language.
5.) Style
Without the layers, you’re all style and no substance. But you ought not shortchange your readers for style, either. The ubiquitous “They” say that all the stories are written, that originality has ceased to exist. Believe it, and you may get somewhere special.
Upon completing his done-before film Jersey Girl, writer-director Kevin Smith told a critical Newsweek, “But you haven’t seen my version.” All a writer can do in this harsh environment is do it differently. Inject your poetry with your words, your senses and metaphors, your idiomatic thoughts. The details you choose are essential to your poetry. Hand-pick nouns and adjectives for sound and meaning.
Your personal touch will preserve (or at the very least dignify) your rehashing of something Li Bai waxed about 1,300 years ago.
