Fundamentals in Poetry

by The Tasteless

To know how to write a poem, you must first know what makes up of it. Poetry isn’t all about feelings and meanings, and most often that not, writers gain that void of incompleteness whenever finishing a poem. For us to counter check our works, I have devised and summarized the main components that build up a poem: content, music, imagery, sound and tone.

1. Content: The goal of the author is to always involve the reader. When the poem is being read, it’s the responsibility of the author to build a relationship between the both of them. Now content can always be anything, but we must make sure we avoid the "don'ts" of any good literature.

The "don'ts"
1. cliche – we all know what this is
2. melodramatic – putting too much drama or emotion on the poem that the reader only feeds on it. You know those poems that has a part where the persona was left by his lover, and then there was a storm, and the rain flowed with his tears, etc. That's what I'm talking about.
3. Deus ex machine – meaning "god from the machine". As if the hands of god are there. You know when you reach the middle of a poem and suddenly you know what's going to happen next, even worse, the ending? This somehow applies to that, but remember that its different from foreshadowing.

Now I know there’s more and it’s up to you to add them up. Be unique, if one of your "don'ts" is writing about politics or whatever, then it's your thing.

Also to add about content I shall quote something from Archibald’s Ars Poetica "a poem should not mean but be" – We must not always try and force our poem to have meaning, cause that’s not the overall role of poetry (if it is, then its better off reading philosophical contexts, wouldn’t it?). Its more about experiencing, its more about life, and in life isn't a mystery to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

2. Music – now this is a tough one to explain in text. Disregard formed poetry for a while and imagine a poem as a song. There are certain parts in a song that has pauses in it which does well with the beat or flow of the song, there are also parts where the refrain becomes slower or the bridge of the song becomes faster, right? That’s how poetry is as well, it creates music by the form the author draws. Here’s a (random) example:

(excerpts from Dorianne Laux' Antilamentation)

1 You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
2 ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
3 after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
4 window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
5 of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
6 any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
7 on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Now observe the 3rd and 4th line, some would ask why she didn’t end the 3rd with “window” instead of putting that word in the introduction of the 4th line. The reason under that is to keep the reader reading, as if it’s the last word of page 13 of Coer’s novel the reader is immediately forced to turn the page. And since poetry aren’t plastered in pages (its just in one) the author uses the lines. Do you get what I mean? Imagine it this way… let me “revise the 5th line…

Emptied of expectation.Relax.
Don’t bother remembering any of it.

- if you read this, you’d probably create a pause at the periods. Which is just write, but then the tension that the author created is delayed. As if it’s a movie where our hero is about slice up the dragon but then the scene is skipped on a villager getting water from a well. Now try reading the real formatted one. (read line 4; start with “emptied”). As soon as you say that word you are immediately drawn to the next line, and so on and so forth, without the tension being lowered. I hope you understood what I was trying to say. : )

3. Imagery – Now everybody knows this. “What the author has draws inside the reader’s eyes… blah blah blah.” But its not all about what the reader should “see”. Imagery should involve all senses by the reader. The author has the responsibility for the reader to see, feel, smell, taste and hears what he hides inside the poem. It may sound hard but that’s the beauty of it, it challenges the writer’s imagination and creativity. If you want your poem to have a slight of disgusting smell to match up its content, then draw from with your words… let the reader smell its stench, feel its texture, see its filth (all these without using excessive adjectives) that’s our goal.

4. Sound – this one isn’t so hard. It involves more on the word choice of the author and the syllable count of his/her words. I’m not specifically noting on iambic pentameter, even just on normal lines we tend to have ignored. It’s the use of words that complements each other. For example, if you’ve noticed that your poem has drawn up the imagery of spring, still matching up with the content of your poem, its more preferable not to use words that wouldn’t match with what you already have, words such as “knife”, etc. Or when you use adjectives to describe something… “his treacherous death” SOUNDS scarier or more believable than “his wicked death”. Sorry for the lame example, but to summarize it, the sound of a word should complement its use. If you want to describe soft skin, use “supple” for example instead of “ductile”. Supple sounds definitely “softer” than the latter.

5. Tone – Finally, this is the voice of the persona (not the author). It carries the heavy loads of everything about the persona. You know through the tone of the poem the persona’s emotion/mood, is he mad or sad or in between? You know the persona’s age as well, through the word choice. – that’s important since I notice a lot in this site that uses heavy metaphor yet the persona is just a 15 year old teenager contemplating suicide because her boyfriend left her. Now first of all, yeah the content is messed up, but the point is, if the persona “sounds” so sophisticated with her use of words, then it doesn’t match up the content. The tone is very important because the reader finds with it the whole purpose of the poem. A poem may appear like a love poem yet the tone is a bit angst, then if you look deeper in the poem you realize its not a love poem about this person, but a love poem about someone new- thus you realize the persona wrote the poem to his cheating wife, and thus the love poem is about an affair with another woman to get back on his wife… but the reader felt strong a metaphysical connection with the love poem, proving how strong the author has placed the reader.

I can go on and on with this but I believe I can leave it here. Now I noticed I used the word “responsibility” more frequent, than “opportunity” and its true. The author may have the poetic license to ignore all these components and deal with writing a poem their own “unique” way, but it doesn’t seem like a good exercise is it? Be proud if you have written a complete poem because such of those are rare. Poetry, to me, is above the literature pyramid. If you aspire to be a writer some day, you must take care of your poem as if it were a child. Breathe in your poem. If you fail, learn from those mistakes, don’t apologize to the reader, apologize to your poem.

Good luck everyone and thank you for reading this far. : )



p.s to whoever moderator reading this. I'm sorry if there's a lot of funny characters. I'm sure there's a bunch, I did this in word, If you'd want me to re-edit them, just send the piece with the funny characters back to me and I'd edit them out myself. haha Peace and good day!

Submission date : 2009-02-14
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