Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Poetry’ Category

Jul 8

1 Comment

Queen of the list: how I transformed compulsive list making into art

I am queen of the list. Hear me roar. I make lists for everything. Maybe it’s my feeble attempt to make some kind of order out of my chaotic mind.

Lists are important—without my work lists, I’d never get anything done: shipping, phone calls, emails, appointments, ordering.

I also make lists for writing projects. Since I’m one of those neurotic artists who needs a variety of stimulation, I list action items under certain categories: Fantasy Novel, Memoir, Poetry, Blog Posts, and Continuing Education. I’ve even made a weekly writing log to check off action items as completed.

There’s something magical about checking off a completed task. I feel satisfied, successful, slightly euphoric. My friends threaten an intervention, but I tell them there are worse addictions. One success begets another and before long, I’m on an upward spiral.

But lists don’t have to be just for organization and keeping your goals on track.

List making can be an art form. Read more

Jul 6

3 Comments

Six guidelines for turning rejection into success

Rejection hurts. No matter who it’s coming from, or what part of your life it’s directed at, it hurts. As writers, we have to risk rejection if we want to see our work in print. 

What’s the best way to handle rejection? Can we turn it into something positive?

When I began submitting my poetry to literary magazines, my mentor told me I’d need to develop a thick skin and to look at those rejection slips as stepping stones: with each rejection I received, I was one step closer to getting published. Though I accumulated a bonfire-size pile of rejections, I kept writing and kept submitting. When I received my first acceptance letter, I jumped up and down in a little victory dance. All that work paid off. My second acceptance letter came the following week. Read more

Jun 22

It’s raining concrete: the #1 rule of writing, Part 1 of 2

I didn’t discover I was a writer until college when I fell in love with poetry. Fortunately for me, my first poetry professor was big on concrete. No, he didn’t have a weekend job laying sidewalks or foundations. But he did pound it into us that our effusive abstractions needed to be transformed into concrete images.

Some of my first poems were pure mush and raw emotion. When I blathered on about feeling lonely in a foreign country, he asked, “What color is lonely? What does lonely smell like? Was there a specific place or location or city where you felt the most lonely?” He explained that through the right details I could evoke those feelings in my reader.

I can still remember the rush of satisfaction when I finally captured the essence of that poem into specifics. Read more

Jun 13

2 Comments

Four ways to stimulate creativity & cure the writing blahs, part 3 of 4

Poetry is juicy. It gets things moving. Like music, it’s verbal and nonverbal at the same time. It resonates within and without. No matter what kind of writer you are, you can benefit from poetry’s ability to inspire creativity.  And not just by reading it…

Write a poem. If you’re stuck on your current project or just can’t get your creative mojo going, write a poem.  (If you’re a poet, try another form of writing—maybe a piece of flash fiction, an essay, or some haiku).  The idea is to write something different than what you’re used to. Writing poetry is like working a puzzle.  It jump-starts our brain’s synapses. Read more

Jun 9

Four ways to stimulate creativity & cure the writing blahs, part 2 of 4

Writing feeds my soul. I do it because it makes me happy. But too often my writing time gets whittled away by other things. I have my excuses—it’s because I do so many things: run a business, keep my clients happy, take care of the house, act as servant and maid to our three cats. It’s easy to get scattered and before I know it, the day’s over and I’m asking, “What did I do to feed my soul today?”

My intent is to write first thing in the morning but that doesn’t always happen—often I end up squeezing a bit of writing in between work-related projects. So, how do I switch gears and jump-start my creative process if I only have a few minutes? Read more

May 13

2 Comments

An experiment in form: Channeling a beat poet

I brought a new poem to my writing group last week. They loved it. Said it was the best poem I’d written.  I was almost embarrassed at the accolades (notice I said “almost”).

The poem was different than the kind of poem I usually write. For one, it was longer—39 lines.  And, the lines themselves were longer than what I normally write.  Plus, it was a sestina (a poetic form of 39 lines with 6 stanzas of six lines each and a tercet of three lines at the end.  In a sestina, the end words of the first stanza are repeated in a certain order through the rest of the poem). Intriguing?  Yes. Easy to do well? Not so much.

Read more

May 6

4 Comments

Two exercises to help you write poetically

Poetry is a great primer for beginning a writing session. If you read yesterday’s post, Write lyrically by reading poetry, you know why author Cristina Garcia reads poetry before she writes. Now you can learn how to use poetry as part of your writing practice. Try these exercises.

Exercise 1
Capture something from your subconscious. Pick several poems to read. Read to yourself and aloud. As you hear a poem, write down anything that catches your ear — A sentence, phrase, word. Any snippet that resonates. This helps you raid your unconscious. You are discovering something you didn’t even realize you were thinking about. Take this piece of writing and examine it for meaning. You may find this meaning takes you on a path in your work that you didn’t see coming. This will inform your writing and propel you forward.

As Grace Paley said, “Write about what you don’t know you know.” Read more

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »