As you’ve probably gathered from the last few posts, I tend to write pretty casually while I draft and do a lot of refining of language during line editing.
While I don’t mind line editing, my goal is always to become a better drafter. The less clean-up I have to do later, the faster I can produce a book, which means the more ideas I can explore without spending years perfecting one book. To that end, I am always looking for ways to improve my facility with language.
One the best ways I’ve found for doing this over the years is to read and write poetry.
I should clarify here that I am not by any means a poet. In fact, I will further admit that I don’t even like most poetry very much *dodges rotten fruit thrown in her direction by poet friends*
So why would I spend time reading and writing something isn’t my absolute passion? For the same reason that someone training for a marathon does core exercises or warm-up stretches every day–to stretch my writing muscles.
There is nothing better than exploring poetry to bump your prose performance up to the next level. Here are a few things poetry does that translates into clear benefits for your prose:
Imagery: Prose consists of several elements, including description, action, dialog and exposition. Poetry rarely uses dialog, and doesn’t allow for much use of exposition. The core of poetry is image, specifically the conjuring of images to elicit an emotion. Both reading and writing poetry can strengthen your use of imagery in prose.
Sparsity: Not a single word is wasted in a good poem. A study of poetry is a true study in word economy. Consider the famous “Red Wheelbarrow” poem by William Carlos Williams. Four tiny stanzas (verses), sixteen total words, and an entire life conveyed.
Emotional impact: A prose story, whether it is a long novel, a novella, or a short story, tends to build to an emotional finish, with a series of emotional impacts punctuated by breathing space where the emotional tension ebbs and the characters reflect or plan. But in a poem, the emotional impact is often high from word one. While trying to maintain a poem’s level of emotionality through the life of a novel would be exhausting for your readers, it can still be a great study for those emotional moments. How do you make the reader feel emotion just by describing geese flying home? “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, does just that.
Ideas: For those of us who struggle with theme, either having it be too heavy in the writing or too subtle, poems are a great study in how to convey ideas embedded in metaphor and parable. Take for example Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night.” Every line in it is an image or metaphor for the ideas he is conveying about the aloneness of existence and the meaninglessness of time, the dark side to reality. And yet, no where does he directly state “we are all alone,” or “I have experienced severe depression.” Yet, as a reader, all of those ideas are not just thought, but experienced on a visceral level. Imagine if you could, like a poet, cause your reader to viscerally experience the themes in your books!
Freshness: In prose, especially genre, it can be really easy to get lazy and fall back on cliche. He sighed, she smiled, he leaned back and crossed his arms. But the act of writing poetry tends to direct us away from cliche. There’s something about the form that begs for unique phrases, fresh images, authentic metaphors.
Poetry is a lot like music in that tastes can differ dramatically between readers. If you start exploring poetry, you’ll probably find a lot of poets that simply don’t speak to you. That’s ok–move on to the next. Peruse many poets, and eventually you will find something you love. If you can broaden your tastes, all the better, but if a single poet speaks to you, go with that.
Here are a couple of ways to search for poets that will help you improve your prose:
- Do a Google search for poetry by the particular theme you are working. Skim the works of several poets until you come across one or two that make you feel the theme most viscerally. Look up that poet’s work and see if they have other poems that reach and inspire you.
- Invest in an anthology of poems, from a used bookstore, yard sale or free book pile. This can be a good way of looking at poets over the ages. Skim the works, looking for poems that speak to you and also ones that match the voice you are cultivating in your own writing.
- Ask your fellow writers and especially poet friends who their favorite poets are! Of course, you may not love them all, but you’ll probably find some surprising gems. To get you started, here are a few of mine: Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost, Omar Khayyam, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Rupert Brooke, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allen Poe.
That’s a short list, there are many more. As you can see there’s a bit of a pattern to my poets; most are moody, dark and somewhat philosophical. You may start to see a pattern in the poems you enjoy; perhaps you are drawn to whimsical poems, or love poems, or dramatic ballads. The poetry you choose may reveal something to you about the general tone of your own writing.
I’m of the belief that it’s not enough to merely read poetry, you also have to challenge yourself to write your own. The great thing is that you don’t have to worry about it being great poetry–no one will ever see this writing. If you were a visual artist, you would compose serious paintings, but you would also spend time doodling and playing with different color combinations. Think of writing poetry as simply playing with language.
Who are your favorite poets? Have you drawn technique from poetry that has translated into your own prose? Tell us about it in the comments! This concludes the posts on line editing. Up next: Nope, you’re not done editing yet; it’s on to the copy edit. In post #68 of TIWIK: What exactly is encompassed in a standard copy edit?
