Hey, today I wanted to touch on a little game I used to play to help me choose words for a poem. You know, being a writer, I love words. I like to find interesting words and see how I can use them. Sometimes it might be a phrase. You'd be surprised how one word can change your whole poem. Imagery is something you do need in a poem in order to put your reader into the moment. Getting the imagery from words and then forming a beautiful picture with words is a real art, and it takes practice.
Let me give you an example of an imagery poem that I wrote in 2009.
Walking Meditations
Lorelei Bell 2009
Softly falling rain,
blue cascading language
to sacred doorway of afterlife.
Windspeak ancient dreams
spirit-walk the veil of night
decrescendoed voices of stars
Yeah. There's a few words in there that I invented. "windspeak" was one, and I actually borrowed "decrescendoed" from another poem. Inventing words or word phrases that grab your reader is a bit hard, like this poem was. But for this, the words merely came to me one day. I will usually have some bit of paper in order to write lines down, and develop the poem later on.
Imagery here is
softly falling rain--you hear it, you might even see and smell it.
doorway-not just any doorway, but a sacred doorway
veil of night
voices of stars
I chose these as the imagery in this poem not for any specific reason than I had been playing my little word game. Take a magazine, a book, or newspaper. Find the most interesting words/phrases from these choices and write them on a separate sheet of paper.
I love finding wonderful phrases in novels. Here is an example of a list from one of my finds:
black pitch candles
witches riding on broomsticks
human hair, fingernail parings
bare-limbed trees
bubbling cauldron
peer from
black cat
dry leaves skitter
concoctions
witch from Toulous
dried up bat wings
haunted house
enchanted potions
skeletal wood
hinges moan
odors issue
pumpkin guts
candles ablaze
parts of dead human bodies
full moon
What I like to do is cut each word/phrase out (after I've written them large on a separate sheet of paper) and put them on another sheet of paper, and then move them around to see if a story/poem evolves.
Well, from this you can see this would make a really scary poem. And it did. I actually wrote a short story from it as well, later on.
Here is the poem I created from the above list:
Witch From Toulouse
Lorelei Bell 6/1/09
Bare-limbed trees
stand guard, creating
a tunnel of gnarled fingers
up to the front porch
Yellow eyes peer from
second-story windows
Black cat jumps
from behind a tree
You scream
I cry out
Dry leaves skitter
across sidewalk sounding
like dried up bat wings
Hand-in-hand we walk
up to the house
our steps clack
like castanets
along cracked sidewalk
Skeletal wood fence
silvered with time
leads drunkenly up
to the hold house
Door latch clicks
Hinges moan
as the door opens
all on its own
Roasted pumpkin guts
issue from within
Candles ablaze
glowing evilly from
sardonic grins.
Silently we stride forward
through a cobweb-draped doorway
Skeletons clatter in the
breeze hung from rafters
Human arms
and legs
litter the hallway
Turning, we open a door
Plunge into the near-darkness
Down a blood-splattered
staircase the hairs
on my neck prick
Black pitch candles
stationed
on each riser
A caustic laugh
Bubbling cauldron
Witch from Toulouse
has enchanted potions
lining her shelves
I think
I have just
enough money.
The bottom sentence in the poem above had been written in one line: I think/ I have just/ enough money. and I separated them to end it in a sort of funny way. The poem was a bit chilling, and I took the horrific cast off by making a little joke. If I had really wanted to, I would have made it more horrific, which is what I did with the short story I wrote from it.
This is what I like about poem building. You can do just about anything with it. Now, here's a couple of rules you can go by when writing a poem.
DO NOT CHOOSE THE FORM/STRUCTURE BEFORE WRITING THE POEM.
IT WILL DEVELOP TOWARD THE FORM AS YOU WRITE.
Use STRONG FRONT WORDS:
The way most poems work, the last word in each line gets the emphasis. Counting syllables and creating smooth line breaks enhances the end of each line. But don't neglect the front words in each line, either. Try to make sure you aren't over-using words such as "the" or "and", replace them with strong verbs and nouns and drop some of the modifiers.
Ask yourself: Do the lines feel best when they're short or long?
In free verse there is no pattern to the line breaks, but two rules of thumb are:
1-Break the line where you would typically take a breath.
2-Break it where it makes sense in terms of syntax and where it will help the reader.
And one last thought: End on a feeling or tone--but know beforehand what that is. Well, sometimes a poem can chose the way it wants to end--which is what happened to the poem above.
