One Weird Trick to Improve Your Poetry!
Modernist Poets HATE this EASY way to write GREAT VERSE!!!
Disclaimer: I do not hate all modernist poets, all modern poets, all blank verse, or all free verse. In fact, I’m not much of a hater at all.
Anyway, let’s get on with it.
I’ve heard these idiotic modernist critics (think Ezra Pound and his ilk) say formal poetry is bad because a poet has to degrade their writing to meet the demands of meter and rhyme. You have this beautiful, meaningful turn of phrase, they say, but then you go and ruin it by choosing something inferior, whomp whomp, because it doesn’t happen to rhyme.
Well, I have good news! There’s an easy way to make sure shaping your poem into formal verse always makes it better.
It’s simple. You have a blob of text you barfed onto the page in a fit of emotion. You need to make it art. Find the places where the meter is already there. Start to look for rhymes. Cut superfluous verbiage and add more interesting details. Rearrange things. Go to merriam-webster.com and look up synonyms. Go to rhymezone.com and look up rhymes. Don’t do this to use a fifty-cent word you aren’t familiar with. Do this to find all the great words you know and love but which aren’t currently coming to mind. And as you make each change, ask yourself: does this change make the writing better or worse? If it makes it better, keep it. If it makes it worse, don’t.
For example, in “The Cancer” (which is a triolet) I describe an anthropomorphized cancer entering a room “[r]obed in flowers and cards from the sympathy bin.” “Bin” is not the first word I would have chosen: “section” or “shelf” make more sense, but they don’t rhyme. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen greeting cards of any sort in a bin, though I’ve seen toys and DVDs and room-temperature freezies in one, so I can imagine cards there too.
And the word “bin” has this subtle association with carelessness: the cards aren’t organized; they’re probably cheap; the images and the sentiments are mass-produced. Hell, “recycling bin” is where you find the word the most. Consequently, the poem gains another small sadness: the people sending the cards probably aren’t thinking about you and your cancer very much at all.
So I made the change because I had to find a rhyme, and the poem became better for it. If the poem had become worse, I would have tried something else, unraveling as much of my progress as needed to find a change which would be an improvement, or maybe just chucking the whole thing. Formal verse doesn’t confine you: it challenges you, expands your reach, and hones your language.
It’s so simple it’s tautological, and tautologies are simple things indeed.