Writing Poetry: How To Write A Poem That Will Engage Your Reader

Writing poetry can be as simple as a few well-placed rhyming words, or it can be a complex arrangement of lines, stanzas, and rhyming patterns.

Poetry opens up a limitless world of creative possibilities, and once you have a good understanding of the wide range of techniques and styles available, you can create your own unique expression of life – a poem that will captivate your reader.

An overview of poetry.

The history of poetry is as complex as the art form itself, and there have been many debates over the centuries about what constitutes a poem. The origins of poetry go back to the oral tradition, where a poem was used primarily for educational and entertainment purposes in the form of a ballad. Shakespeare made famous the Sonnet, a poetic form that fuses a delicate balance of narrative and lyrical qualities. With the advent of the printing press and the book, poetry became a highly respected literary style.

So what constitutes a poem?

Is a poem just a static literary form that must adhere to a particular rhyme pattern, specific use of language, and rigid structural format? The traditionalist would argue that a poem must adhere to a strict rhyming pattern and its appearance on the page must not deviate from the four-line stanzas that run the length of the page. The rebellious modernist would argue that rules are meant to be broken and that writing a poem is a free and unrestricted craft that is subject solely to the artistic whim of the poet.

I believe the answer to what constitutes a poem lies in this statement: a poem is the perfect form of creative expression. What is your point of view? Does a poem allow a writer to express his feelings, thoughts and experiences of the world better than a short story?

The nineteenth-century classical poet and critic Mathew Arnold defined a poem as “the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective way of saying things, and hence its importance…” (Knickerbocker 1925, p. 446). But as great as this quote sounds, the art of writing a poem is much more.

A poem allows the poet to reveal his thoughts or life experiences to the reader through greater use of language that appeals to the emotions. It is an invitation from the poet to the reader to embark on a journey of exploring ideas. In general, the poet designs his perfect form of creative expression to engage his reader and elicit a response.

Here are seven techniques or tools that can help you write a poem that will engage your reader:

You have access to a toolbox that is full of different poetic techniques or devices that will allow you to adequately convey your thoughts, feelings and experiences of the world such as:

one. A sound arrangement (a clever combination of alliteration and assonance – the repetition of consonant and vowel sounds), which creates an internal rhyme and evokes music in our minds when we read the poem aloud. For example: assonance can create an internal rhyme like this line of poetry by Theodore Roethke “I wake up to sleep and wake up calmly…”

2. Overlapping (strategic line breaks that determine meter and rhythm, which can highlight a certain phrase).

3. Imagery: Building on the vivid description of an image to create a verbal image. You can use concrete images, which are images that we can see or feel like cat, house, sun, rain. Abstract images denote concepts that we understand but cannot see or feel, such as knowledge, freedom, or justice. An abstract image can be both conceptual and emotional.

4. Metaphor/Simile: Figures of speech that reveal hidden similarities and compare two ideas for poetic effect.

5. Rhyme: words that rhyme or lines that end in identical sounds. “I think I know whose woods these are. Although his house is in town…” Robert Frost.

6. Tone: a particular use of the voice such as melancholic, happy, thoughtful, which is determined by the choice of specific words. This is an excerpt from Departure by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I wish I could walk until my blood flowed

And leave me, not to move again,

On a shore that is wide, because the tide is out,

And the overgrown rocks are bare for rain.

But dump or dock, where the road I take

Mention, it’s little enough that I care,

And it is little that I would care about the fuss they will make,

Huddled dead in a ditch somewhere.

7. A poem is a vibrant and versatile art form. There are many styles of composition available: free verse (not following traditional rhyming stanzas or regular meter or rhythm), or elegy (a poem used as a lament or as a poignant memory of a person or an event).

Of course, these techniques are just some of the tools that a poet can use, and some of these techniques can be used to write stories, but they specifically belong to the world of poetry.

Poetry teaches us about the beauty and power of language and the richness of the written word. By using a combination of the available poetic techniques, a writer can find complete freedom in the expression of thoughts, ideas, and feelings.

John Redmond defines a poem not so much as a structure of words, which has to conform to a particular set of rules and form, but as an experiment with being, which has a personality and value of its own; and “…any good poem should make us feel like explorers of a new planet, embarking on a momentous adventure… [a] A good poem will try to maintain the openness, the sense of possibility, that every reader feels when opening a book for the first time” (2006, p. 2).

To maintain openness and a sense of possibility, the poet needs to keep the reader in mind when writing a poem, using language and imagery that the reader can engage with and therefore feel that they can join the poet in the process. exploration trip.

Ultimately, the role of a poem not only serves the purpose of self-expression, but it can also teach us something new and also capture our imagination and emotions.

References:

Knickerbocker, William S 1925. ‘Matthew Arnold’s Theory of Poetry’. The Sewanee Review 33(4). Johns Hopkins University Press: 440-50, via Jstor.

Redmond, John 2006, How to Write a Poem, Blackwell Publishing, USA p. 2.