Poetry Possibilities: – Crafting Poetry: Toolboxes
Below is a toolbox of poetry writing strategies.
Choose a craft strategy from the toolbox and try it out on your drafts and revisions. How? Here is a model.
page 63 Georgia Heard:
"Poet comes from the word poiein, from the Greek to make or to do. Poets need to be masters of their craft, but only to serve the urgency of our hearts. A poet's job is to make experience, no matter how fragmented or unresolved, whole again in the act of writing a poem."
Ideas, images, sounds, feelings, form, rhythm, and repetition mesh a sense of the moment so the reader also moves through the imprint of the images wrought by the words of the poem. The heart of the experience appears from the pieces.
If poetry were a pie, what ingredients would it contain?
Craft Recipe for a Poem Pie
Basic Ingredients:
a generous cup of freewriting
a liter of lists of lasting images
tablespoons of sounds scooped out of memory
a quart of every sense heard, felt, touched, seen, smelled
volumes of vivid verbs, vibrant in action
a container of fresh feelings, sprinkled subtly
nouns kneaded in to clarify the content
a dollop of dandy descriptions, sweet enough to add a smile or tease a tear
Directions for Crust:
Gather the best and truest to heart of all the basic ingredients imagined so far. Whirl them through your heart and mind, and tenaciously tease them into phrases of foamy truths. Allow them to air out, forming a delicate dough, ready for spreading and shaping.
Spread the dough of feelings and experiences with images and observations in metaphor and simile. Smooth out with personification and line-breaks. Shape titles, beginnings, and endings to complete the crust of colorful impressions.
Directions for Filling:
Whip words around so the sound abounds with assonance and alliteration. Cut the clutter to utter rhymes and rhythm; rhymes and rhythm help the reader feel the meter, meander through the moment, and Bam! jump back with astonished understanding. Fold these in with consonance, line-breaks, and onomatopoeia layered in patterns and repetition until the full-bodied filling flows with the musical energy of the experience.
Directions for Digesting:
Pour a glass of musing, open up your heart and mind so your eyes absorb the effervescence, and disperse the awareness into a transformed experience of your own.
Poem Pie English Translation -- Your Turn
Ingredients
A poet starts with images, sounds, senses, feelings, descriptions, rendering them in specific and special words. Write them down. Write, write, write. Pick a memory, pick a topic, pick a feeling. Imagine it. Imagine it more. Break it down. Compare it. Really see it in your mind. Describe it. Find the image. As Virginia Heard says (page 66), "Poetry is about recognizing and paying attention to our inner lives --- our memories, hopes, doubts, questions, fears, joys -- and the image is the hook we find to hang the poem on." Find the image.
Crust
Use your freewriting, listing, notebook, to find the image. Describe with senses (sights, sounds, texture, smells, taste). Enhance the image by comparing it to something else in simile and metaphor. Give it life with personification. Use the meaning toolbox to give life to your image.
The Meaning Toolbox
Spread and shape feelings and experiences through visual and sensory tools: image, observation, metaphor, simile, personification, words, line-breaks, beginnings/endings, titles.
How?
Six Room Poem
Rooms
p. 69
Divide your paper into six sections, each section is a visual room for your topic. The sixth room is to choose a line that strikes you from your other rooms; write it three times in the sixth box.
Possible rooms:
image description
image sound
image feeling
image lightness or darkness
image questions; things you wonder about it
image comparisons to something different for similes and metaphors
image senses (sights, smells, tastes, texture, feelings)
how might it smell, taste?
how might it feel if you touched it?
a possible favorite line or phrase from another poem
image animation
what might it say or do?
Read over your "rooms" and write your poem, a discovery draft for later re-viewing.
Bland to Candid
Image Specification and Expansion
p. 71
Read the sentence below. Picture it in your mind. Now use words to create YOUR image.
Example:
It was a nice day. becomes
The bright sun dazzled my eyes as its radiance glared at me from the dimpled surface of Omak Lake just before I gathered enough nerve to nimbly cannonball next to my best friend.
Your turn:
It was a nice day.
We had a lot of fun.
The flowers were beautiful and colorful.
She was a good person.
The dog was mean.
The cat was cute.
Ordinary to Poetic
Think of your image. Create two columns on your paper, one called ordinary and the other poetic. Under ordinary, simply describe your image with every day words (who, what, when, where, why, how, looks like, sounds like, etc.) -- the first thing that comes to your mind. Under poetic, reread your ordinary words and ask questions; look more closely at your image. Compare your image to different things in simile and metaphor; describe exact details.
Example:
My friend laughing
ordinary poetic
lots of ha ha ha's ha ha ha, ha, ha, ha
her head looking up a little twittle like a wren
her brown hair touching her shoulders chortling to a cat
her eyes squinting squinted brown eyes closed now small like raisins
her hands holding her stomach holding in the hilarity, a keepsake of the moment
her blue sweater hangs loose while she catches her breath stolen like magic
she has to stand up and turn around by clutching her tummy as if it held the treasure;
tears fall down her cheeks her head tilts back in a sigh,
it was a good joke her hair tenderly graces her shoulders
up she stands to turn around
to calm down
to wipe the rain
of laughter
from my joke
Spinning Metaphors and Similes
p. 78
Compare two different things. Thinks of several similes and metaphors for the same things to shake up the brain and stretch the imagination. Be surprising; don't use cliches. It's ok to think off the wall; you don't have to use them in your poems or writing, but it will open your mind. If your idea is concrete, like a rock or cloud, compare it to something abstract and something concrete. If your idea is abstract (like laughter or peace), think of something concrete to compare.
When writing your poem, choose your best metaphor, and keep the metaphoric language throughout the poem; stretch it out for full imagery for the reader. Read the poem, The Compass, by Virginia Heard for an example (p.80).
Personification
p. 82
Personification gives life to inanimate objects. Pick an object. Think of five ways that object appears human or animal-like.
Example:
Lamp sits quietly on my desk
throws light on my work
ignores me when I'm frustrated
tricks me by blinking
agrees with me when I'm tired
That's fun!
Words: Poet's Paint
p. 82
Close Activities: Students fill in the blanks and compare to author's choices.
Verbs (Engines of Sentences): Verbs drive the image.
Example of revision for vivid verbs:
They went to the park.
They were riding their bikes to the park.
They rode their bikes to the park.
They pedaled their bikes to the park.
Which sentence cuts the clutter, "restoring the roar" in the sentence? (p. 83)
Action Verbs (Fast Cars) vs Dead Verbs (Slow Cars)
pedal ride
drove went
hunt go
sing was
Line Breaks
Poems are not natural speech; they are music and rhythm created by the pauses inferred by the line breaks. Use line breaks for:
showing natural speech
emphasizing a word or phrase
create tension by breaking other than naturally
speed up or slow down the pace
enjambment: breaking the line in a place that is not natural or that interrupts the meaning -- used to create tension, hide rhyme, vary rhythm.
Practice breaking sentences in different ways.
Rewrite poems as paragraphs for students to devise line breaks; then share original poem.
The Filling
Now fill in your poem with the musical sounds and rhythms through the use of alliteration, assonance, repeated words, line-breaks, rhyme, patterns, onomatopoeia. Cut clutter of excess words.
The Musical Toolbox
Tricks of Poets
Read out loud.
Rhythm The music of words in a line, for example:
bumpy word: hippopotamus (lots of consonants means the line is cacophonous)
smooth word: flowing (lots of vowels means the line is euphonious)
Consonance The repetition of consonant sounds any where in the words, like short and sweet.
Alliteration Repeated beginning consonant sounds, such as "feather fingers flapping"
Assonance Repeated vowel sounds, such as flies across the skies
Repeated words Repeat words for effect, like "hops, munches, hops, munches" to show the rabbit doesn't know the danger
Vivid verbs Action words like flies, spread, searching, hops, munches, drops, fold, dives, scopp, flaps, flows
Nifty nouns Specific nouns (persons, places, things, ideas); instead of dog, say German Shepard; instead of fast, say 100 miles an hour; instead animal, say rabbit or snake
Personification Giving life to something not living; such as saying the feathers are fingers
Onomatopoeia (ah no mah toe pee ah) Words that sound like the sound they make, such as Bam! Pop! Bang! slap gurgle Phzzzzt
Simile Comparing two things that are different and finding a similarity -- write it using like or as , such as comparing how high the eagle flies to how a skyscraper is. The eagle flies as high as a skyscraper .
Senses Write all sights, smells, tastes, texture, feelings about your topic
How might it smell, taste?
How might it feel if you touched it?
Ideas from the poem: piercing eyes; white head; crooked yellow talons; munching grass; flapping in the cold winter wind
Rhyme Repeated ending sounds, such as fold, cold; poems do NOT need to rhyme
Line breaks Whereever you want the reader to pause or look carefully at a phrase, put a line break there (hit return).
Coursework from now extinct Heinemann University based on:
Heard, Georgia. Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999. Print.