Welcome to
Part Four of our month-long celebration of
National Poetry Month!
If you've missed our earlier posts, please follow these links:
Part One,
Part Two,
Part Three
In this final part, we're going to
turn you into a poet!
Well, at least we're going to try!
Perhaps you've written some poetry in the past, or had a vague sense you could but never acted on it.
The truth is
EVERYONE can be a poet. Yes, everyone! With a little knowledge, effort, persistence, and belief in yourself, you can do it! You can write poetry!
All of our thoughts are valid. All of us have experiences, histories, dreams, preferences, realizations, ideas, emotions, people we met/know/knew, things we learned and lost, situations that changed our lives, unique perspectives no one else precisely shares.
As individuals, these rich ingredients and aspects enable us to speak on a wide range of topics in ways only we can know and say.
These particular and powerful thoughts and expressions help make poetry such an endlessly fascinating and insightful enterprise: everyone potentially has a variety of things to say, ranges of styles and preferred words to phrase those ideas, and points of view that can express things in new light and from fresh angles.
Beyond being individuals, we are also members of communities, which in turn are part of towns/villiages/cities and states and countries and the larger world.
We exist in various times and conditions in the larger timeline of human history. We go different places, interact with diverse arrays of persons, organizations, and conditions.
This gives even further personal context to who we are, what we've seen, what we know and imagine, and all that informs us dynamically throughout our lives and everyone we encounter. Our influences can influence others as well.
With all that in mind, each of us already has "what it takes" to be a poet - inspirational memories, knowledge, occurrences, creative impulses, and aspirations to draw upon once we attune ourselves to that spectrum with inclinations to write and express as we could, given enough patience and perseverance.
Once you realize this, the only thing you need next is some basic awareness of how poems work. We have three free publications that can help you get started:
There's not much technical stuff to memorize when you're just starting out. It does help to be familiar with a few basic concepts, such as
stanza (what you could consider a "paragraph" in a poem),
rhythm (patterns of accented/unaccented syllables in words as you read a poem aloud), and
rhyme scheme (how words in some poems can sound alike, or not, at the end of each line in a poem).
Instead of studying glossaries of such "literary terms" and "poetic devices," perhaps the best way to "know how poems work" is simply to read good poems by known poets.
In
Part Three of this series of posts, we highlight
Poets.org
and
The Poetry Foundation: these are two of the best websites
to begin reading poems and, if you like, learn more about poetry itself.
Many readers new to poetry are surprised - when they really look at a famous poem close up - how simple yet effective it can be.
Sometimes people with say, "I could have written that!"
And, there would be truth in that: you could have written something like that,
but, in all likelihood, you might have chosen other words and ways to voice those thoughts.
One stellar example of simple, honest, direct poems, is this one by
Emily Dickinson, a certified master of wit and brevity:
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They 'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
(source:
Project Gutenberg)
What a great poem! It's conversational - as if the "speaker of the poem" (the narrator, like in a story) is talking directly to us. It's at once personal, engaging, real, and enjoyable.
There are many other fine examples out there in both classic and contemporary poetry. Since poetry today can take a wild variety of forms, it can be easier and less daunting to start out with classic poems.
Classic poems also offer us some appreciable understanding of what it is to be "timeless poetry": what makes a poem so wonderful, so universal in what it says, and how it says it, that it can still be enjoyed decades or hundreds of years after it was written.
When you're ready to begin writing, don't pressure yourself to produce a poem. You'll see that will come naturally in time.
Just grab a notebook, some paper, a pen or pencil - or you can start up your word processor (such as the free
LibreOffice or
OpenOffice, or something simpler like WordPad or Notepad on Windows) and start putting your thoughts down into words.
Having a
dictionary and a thesaurus around can be very helpful. Sometimes we'd like to use a word but are not quite sure as to its meaning, or spelling, or usage. A good dictionary solves that fast!
Good dictionaries also give us some history of the word - its "
etymology" - and that can help us understand those words, how they were formed, and even what they may have first meant when they first came into existence.
Other times, we might have a sense of what we want to say, and we'll write something down, but the words don't quite seem right.
There are almost always "better" ways to express ideas. You will know best, in time.
For now, a
thesaurus can work wonders, reminding you - or revealing to you - comparable words (synonyms).
If you don't have a dictionary or a thesaurus, no problem! We have a directory of, as Shakespeare's Hamlet once said...
There you can easily find dictionaries and thesauri online (such as
Dictionary.com
and
Thesaurus.com) and some other things you might find helpful,
such as
rhyming dictionaries.
Eventually, as someone new to playing the piano develops more familiarity and confidence and begins to be able to play a song all the way through, so it will be with you and your poetry: eventually, through persistence and belief in yourself and your ideas and expressions, you will be able to put words on a page in such a way that it will become a poem.
Do this every day, or every week, or any chance inspiration strikes (and it will, once you allow it), and you can have enough poems to fill up a notebook!
But, now what? You reach this point, having poems you're pretty proud of, poems that sound and feel great when you read them aloud, but what do you do next?
Perhaps you have no interest in publishing them. Maybe they're too personal or you aren't ready for the world to read them. No problem!
You might consider sharing them first with one or several of your closest friends. If you feel more comfortable and encouraged in doing that, perhaps you will reconsider the prospect of publication.
How do you publish poetry? There are several routes you can go:
Self-publishing used to be a bit of a controversy years ago, since, before the Internet, the only way poets could ever achieve wide recognition was to get published multiple times in notable literary journals. For many readers and critics, this is still a preferred path for aspiring poets, since it maintains a sense of competition (your book of poems versus dozens to hundreds by other poets) and evaluation (a publisher decides your work meets a publication's standards).
One thing to be aware of are "vanity presses" and any publications inviting you to be published as long as you agree to buy their books. These offers may have the potential to be mostly for-profit operations where quality is not necessarily a prime consideration or even a requirement. They make money, your poem gets published. Everyone feels good, for a while, and for some people that is enough, to see their name in print (hence the "vanity" of this form of publication).
Wherever you submit, be sure to read their guidelines very carefully, be alert as to any restrictions, possible submission or reading fees, response times, whether or not they allow you to submit your poem elsewhere simultaneously, whether or not they will consider poems which have been published elsewhere (e.g. online).
Be especially intent to determine whether "all rights" remain yours after any publisher published a poem of yours - that your poem has the potential of being publishable elsewhere someday.
The
Writing section of our Ready Referece Center includes
websites featuring calls for manuscripts with various content preferences, requirements, along with any other special considerations or directives.
Ultimately, you will have to decide which route is best for you, when the time comes for that.
For now, just write! Express! Luxuriate in the
power and beauty of words!
Permit yourself to be
inspired and inspiring!
Let your poetic mind and heart and soul
soar!
Believe in your voice, its
relevance and
validity, that it
deserves to be read and heard!
Become the poet
you always had the potential to be!
Set the poetry already inside you free!
