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I’m so pleased to announce that a poem I wrote about roller skating was published today in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review’s Spring 2023 issue! The theme is “Growth.” It’s also a great joy to appear in the same issue as my dear friend, Charles. Follow the linky-link to check out the issue, filled with poetry and photography by many talented artists.
A splendid way to start National Poetry Month! To all of the poems we’ll read, write, and celebrate this April!
Recently, I had the great joy to share my thoughts with multitalented author and editor Roz Morris about writing, publishing, books, persistence, a fulfilling artistic life, and so much more: clicky here to dive into the fun.
Be sure to check out Roz’s excellent books, from her riveting, prize-winning novel, Ever Rest, and the many stellar reviews it has gleaned to her wonderful craft books sure to encourage novelists on this writing path.
Also, Roz has a meaningful newsletter, insightful interviews with fellow creatives, and more at her site to motivate and to bring out the very best in your writing.
Fabulous cover by Jessica Bell at Jessica Bell Design.
So honored to be a part of the conversation today at talented Kate Bradley-Ferrall’s marvelous blog. along with inspired author and writing instructor Sue Bradford Edwards. Check out how “writing in unfamiliar genres can reboot your writing and challenge you in interesting and inspiring ways.” 🎉📝
3 Techniques to Write More Vibrant Poetry
By: Melanie Faith
Whether we want to write free-verse or a sonnet, a haiku, or a prose poem, some key elements are universal in poetry: vivid imagery and precision of diction choices are two widely agreed-upon qualities of successful poems. The following are three less talked-about techniques that are every bit as vital that could take your verse to an exciting new level.
Everyday is A-Okay: Sometimes, we get the impression poems have to be about monumental subjects or events. Not always so. While there certainly are classic poems to commemorate the big-day events in life, such as high-school graduation or joining the military or marriage or the birth of a child, there are myriad more poems about small observations and tiny moments that, without art, a person could easily move past without reflection.
In fact, the reflections and observations that occur about ordinary topics can, indeed, be extraordinary for readers. I’m reading a collection of poems this week where dates are the titles of each work. In some of the poems, the poet describes people and events of the day literally. In others, the speaker of the poem is obviously someone different than the author or the author combines time periods.
Something authentic and tangible that we observe from our day might spark a poem and then the poem could veer in an imaginative way that surprises and combines fact with fiction—also totally acceptable and, in many casing, inspiring ground for creating poems.
Open your poem with an image grounded in real-life, but stay open to associative leaps that serve the poem, too.
Empty Some Space: Poetry is a compressed art. When I first started to write poetry, as a fiction writer, my tendency was to write long lines (almost margin to margin) crammed with details. I also rarely included stanza breaks.
One day, in graduate school, a favorite professor took one of my poems and, in his critique, marked several places where empty space (sometimes called “white space”) would improve the poem. Mind blown! When I retyped my poem, incorporating the blank spaces, I immediately saw how the focus was stronger on each image and indeed each line and stanza break as well.
Then, I did another round of emptying space: I looked for unnecessary prepositional phrases, words that were vague or place-fillers, and other ways to focus my language even more. The more I refined by taking away from the page as I edited, the more the theme cohered and strengthened.
Both ways of compressing poetry—including more stanzas or new stanza or line breaks to highlight certain key images or words as well as editing out cluttering or vague phrases—can go a long way to bringing resonance to your poems.
Dialogue it up! One literary technique I don’t see often enough in poems is dialogue. While prose frequently incorporates conversations, quotations, or the inner thoughts of characters or speakers, poetry infrequently does.
There are many styles of poetry that even just a line of dialogue could help to set place/setting, time period/era, tone, characterization of the speaker or character, as well as the theme. Narrative and prose poems particularly work well for integrating dialogue, but no need to stop with these formats.
Sonnets could include dialogue or a quoted phrase or inner thoughts of the speaker, for example. Or, a line of spoken or internal thought could become the title of a haiku, tanka, or other style of poem that sets up the body of the poem’s theme or conflict. Or a famous quote could be used as an epigraph to launch into your topic’s theme.
Many types of poems could benefit from dialogue, from lyric poetry and ekphrastic work (such as a line from a song or quote from an online show or another art form) to formal styles, like villanelles (where a repeated question or thought could work wondrously). The sky’s the limit!
Try this prompt: For 3 days, write down three things that happen in your daily life or 3 things you observe about your day, such as an image or an overheard piece of conversation in passing. At the end of the 3 days, pick one of the observations from your list and write a first draft of a poem from this real-life impetus. If the poem veers off of “what actually happened” or if a new image arrives, wonderful and go with it!
Super excited to have poetry in the awesome collaborative "Ekphrastic Magic" photo-poetry project curated by the fabulous @amyjasek @filmshooterscollective in the international Revela'T Analog Photography Festival, currently running in Barcelona! Check out the festival website for excerpts of the excellent work in the "Ekphrastic Magic" exhibit as well as a listing of other fine photographers/photographic exhibits now on view in Spain and on their Instagram @revelatfestival .
More details about the exhibit: “The Film Shooters Collective is proud to present ‘Ekphrastic Magic’: an interdisciplinary project bringing together thirty FSC members and thirty writers. In it / Ekphrastic Magic, the private world of the photographer becomes the solitary walk of a poet, and together they create a new, unique universe, welcoming in the viewer to bring their own experiences to their personal interpretation of the work. The photographs range from 35mm and 120 film to instant film and even tintype; the images and words are as diverse as the artists who made them.”
To celebrate, I thought I'd post this film photo I took this summer on #kodak #kodakfilm with my #35mmfilm Canon camera. Can't resist glasses, violets, and reflections.
“Return to Beck” excerpt:
I look down this very long set of rectangular tables pushed together and there is Beck, dressed like the ’90s, singing along to Beck. And I walk past him, also singing Beck, thinking: “Keep it cool. Pretend this is just a normal thing, Beck sitting here, singing his own song”…
Beck never made eye contact (cool customer); he just went about his business, giving off 100% Beckness. The Beckness was just real-life rolling off of him, down the tables, and people milling around but nobody saying this was any big thing, this was just the same old Beckitude, any day of the week. And I was trying to keep my stuff together. Sure, I could mill around, I could keep it cool…
I took down some fizzled balloons, some soggy streamers wound around my bare arms, outside the party, outside the door, but didn’t see the trash can, didn’t see anybody, so I turned back to Beck, walked back in. There he still was, being all 100% Beck, Beckalicious, Becktastic. He hadn’t moved….
I was trying to keep it together, “just keep it together,” and walking around him at the terribly long tables and him not making eye contact, and the ’90s were back but we had nowhere to take them. So Beck kept singing Beck, Beckifically, and the Beckness was all around, 100% authentic, the ’90s were oozing…
For the entire, much longer prose poem, check out Issue 2.
