The Art of Poetry Writing

People who write poetry for the first time usually write from the top of their heads. This means, once inspiration hits them, they write down whatever they felt during that inspired moment in the simplest possible words that they could use.

Poetry can be described in so many ways, but one general concept people have about poetry is, it stems from an emotion, an inspiration, or from a particular event in the poets life. Poetry is an art form that uses metaphors to express a certain thought or story.

While telling the tale as it is can be easier understood, poetry is not into expressing one definite meaning, but rather into making the reader think and determine for themselves what the writer may be trying to put forth. The artistic use of words to represent something is else is common in a lot of poetry writing styles and is viewed as the norm by most poetry writers. Poetry, however, is basically indefinable and this may be due to the multiple writing styles available to the art.

People who write poetry for the first time usually write from the top of their heads. This means, once inspiration hits them, they write down whatever they felt during that inspired moment in the simplest possible words that they could use. While this does not make for good poetry writing, this could be very well the base for a good poem.

Like all books and other reading material, poetry can only improve with rereading and some rewriting. Some of your emotions from that inspired moment may have been expressed accurately enough for you, however, to help it transcend into art, some careful scrutiny and deliberation may be needed to further complete your work of art.

While certain words may be accurate enough for the writer in terms of expressing the emotion they are trying to convey, this, however, does not ensure that the poem is good.

Here is where metaphors come into play. You can use certain comparisons to how you feel by pairing them off with things and happenings around you. For example, if you are feeling sad, you do not just write in your poem that you are feeling sad or there is sadness in you.

Try to find a phrase that can encompass what you feel without being too direct so as to leave the rest of the thinking to the imagination of your reader. A good comparison to the word sad would be dark or darkness. Another possible word you can use would be deep or depth.

These two word choices may not be totally negative or describe the word sad if taken all by itself, but combined with a few other words, you can artistically portray the feeling of sadness in your poem.

Not all poems are expressions of sadness and negativity, however, despite there being quite a number of them being created and having been created. This is not surprising since sorrow is a very strong emotion and writing can be quite an outlet for this feeling. Anger, as well, has found an outlet in putting pen to paper, along with confusion and even hate. More positive feelings are also common fodder for the poet, with the astounding number of love poetry that is available making this apparent. Other stronger emotions often used for poetry include happiness, and, well, the other predecessors and by-products of happiness.

Whatever the inspiration a person has for writing a poem or poems, poetry is indeed a literary art form that is, as indefinable as it is, something that a lot of us can do well, with a lot of feeling and some practice.

One of the rather useful tools to better yourself at poetry writing is your basic thesaurus. It offers you quite a few choices in terms of word selection to further express what you feel in your writing. 

by Chris Kennelly - 24th July 2007

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