Writtenwyrdd

Poetry as a teaching tool

"Theodore Roethke said that "Form is not regarded as a neat mould to be filled, but rather as a sieve to catch certain kinds of material", which seems to me one of the most profoundly true statements about art anyone's ever made, and why people who think that it's not poetry unless it rhymes and scans, and it is poetry if it does, are so wrong: they're mistaking the sieve for the meal. But traditional poetic forms are very clear, well-proportioned sieves."  Emma Darwin on her blog, This Itch Of Writing

It is my firm belief that, more than any other teaching tool, poetry can teach a writer how to use the language well.   

But one of the tendencies of those not too familiar with poetry and its myriad forms is to presume iambic pentameter or other unsubtle (and, in my opinion, rather sledge hammer-like) rhyming schemes are what defines that genre.  And if that's what you think makes poetry, I can see why you might scoff at my premise. 

Poetry, however, is a distillation of language.  It takes a lot of know-how and understanding of the underpinnings of word meaning and the interplay of sound and texture and even what the words look like on the page.  It's painting with words, but painting that lays the brush strokes in the reader's mind to evoke all the senses. 

As that's something we seek to do in great prose writing, it behooves we writers to learn something about this ancient form. 

Ask.com has a rather good definition:

One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy of language. [my emphasis]  Poets are miserly and unrelentingly critical in the way they dole out words to a page. Carefully selecting words for conciseness and clarity is standard, even for writers of prose, but poets go well beyond this, considering a word's emotive qualities, its musical value, its spacing, and yes, even its spacial relationship to the page. The poet, through innovation in both word choice and form, seemingly rends significance from thin air.

Economy of language... Yep, that's pretty much it in a nutshell, and you can see how learning to hone your writing ability in that regard can be an invaluable tool for the prose writer.

And, if nothing else, discovering poetry will open your eyes to a vast body of literature.  And training your poetic ear really is a great tool for your writerly toolbox.

Poetry links.

Sites about poetry:
Poets.org Lots of information and links here.
Dmoz' list of poetry organizations.  Rather comprehensive.

Information on poetry forms: 
51 Poetry forms
Wikipedia's poetry forms page, which has well over 200 links to varying poetry articles
Poetry Base/ Poetry Gnosis: A Resource for Learning & Teaching Poetry 

Miscellaney:
The Pose Poem defined.  Prose poetry is an interesting cross between prose and poetry in that it has the sensibility of poetry and the structural rules (more or less) of regular writing. 

Poets I particularly like:
Robert Frost
Mekeel McBride 
Billy Collins
Langston Hughes
Shakespeare
Brian Turner

I'll have a little mortar with my poetry, please

Angela Ackerman, the Bookshelf Muse, had an interesting discussion on writing with the senses and how to pull readers into your writing.  I wholly agree with mixing your description with much more than visual descriptions to draw your readers into your fictional world.  But I think that there's something else we writers should consider, too, and here's my comment to that effect.*

Writing with the senses is excellent advice and I totally agree with...that. 

But I think that, to evoke emotion, it's also needful to use a lot of the tricks that a poet uses.  Writers shouldn't forget the words themselves are your tool, not just what you say with them. 

By using the right words you can evoke emotion like good poetry does, with evocative metaphor/simile, word choice, pacing, sentence structure, voice. 

How you say it is just as important as the details you choose to promote.

Yes, I show my poetry writing roots in my opinion, don't I?  But consider this:  A novel is a building, a building made of words and meaning.  And words are bricks.  How you arrange the bricks defines the structure.  And the descriptive elements define the meaning/emphasis.  Descriptions are the flying buttresses, stained glass windows, and Gothic/ Art Deco/ frou frou/ gingerbread that give the whole building it's personality.  The two must work together to form a harmonious and functional whole. 

*Forgive me for not generating an entirely fresh post on the subject; I've got a lot going on and surgery in a week.  I'll engage more neurons in blogging when all of me is present and accounted for.  Hopefully that will be after surgery on April 1st.

Unique choices

"They had scared him then, and they scared him now.  And he didn't think it was just their reputations.  It was more the absolutely precise way in which they fitted inside their skins, as if each part had been machined with zero tolerance for error."  Cold in the Light, by Charles Gramlich

The writer in me likes to observe nice turns of phrase and unique choices of words.  This is one that caught my eye.  The pov character is looking at some military types who have come to town, and he recognizes them as Special Ops types.

Charles writes in a rather literary style, which is vastly different from the close-in view I've been getting in recent reads.  And I'm finding lots of nice phrases that make me say I wish I'd thought of that.