Apr 11
Considering my love of all things related to writing, it makes sense that I like poems about writing. A friend recently sent me the poem “Workshop” by Billy Collins–a poem about a poem becoming a poem.
You’ll have to read the poem to understand what I mean.
Collins’s poem sparked my own idea for a poem. Double bonus.
Exercise: Pick a favorite poem about writing and use it to inspire your own.
Happy National Poetry Month!
In honor of National Poetry Month, I’m posting one of my poems below. Ideas for poems are everywhere. Most of my ideas come from daily life–like this poem below, “A rice farmer from California.”
Please visit us again this month for more posts about poetry.
In need of some creative fuel to finish off the week? Power up with this trio of blog posts about writing craft.
Marla Madison reviews Don’t Murder Your Mystery by Chris Roerden and reveals 11 tips to create compelling sample chapters that will entice readers to buy the whole book. As it turns out, these tips are just plain good writing advice.
Darcy Pattison at Fiction notes writes about her search for a scene to avoid a “sagging middle.” Learn more about her exploratory techniques and find other great links to scene writing tips.
Poets and writers of any genre will find a burst of creative energy from Keith Jennings’s guest post at The Write Practice about collecting and connecting images and words. At the end of the post, you’ll find a writing exercise to practice connecting the images you’ve collected.
I’ve always loved poetry. But it wasn’t until I studied for my MFA that I really began to delve into the craft of writing it after one of my advisors gave me the assignment to annotate poetry. By directing me to study poetry, she knew I would understand the power of words in a new way.
While poetry wasn’t my main focus, that taste of learning about it at a deeper level spurred me to continue studying on my own. Besides writing and reading poetry, I’ve found several books in which poets discuss their approach to writing. Read more
In my last post, I wrote about a writing practice that I was using to try to generate material for poems, essays, and even memoir. If you joined me in my quest to write from the subconscious, you may be accumulating some wild pages of words by now. So I’m going to give you the next step in the practice.
When you have about 10 or 12 pages, pull them out of the drawer and read them. Highlight, underline, or circle anything that looks interesting, tugs at your chest, pings your brain, or just seems downright weird. You’ll find some material that is boring, odd, and exciting. You’ll likely not even remember writing it. Read more
Writing is a lot like life. Some days, it flows like the Rio Grande—the words rush and tumble from our pen and we feel as if we can hardly keep up. Other days, we wonder where the ten-foot beavers came from that overnight built the dam that not only blocks our proficiency but our very ability to form syllables, put words in the right order.
I had one of these days recently. I felt as if my synapses were asleep, as if I just couldn’t find the words. Any words. They were gone. But I really needed to write the last poem for my poetry manuscript. And I had a deadline. So, what did I do? Three things.
1. Mind-map. First, I drew a mind-map. With a mind-map, you only need to come up with one word at a time. It’s a great tool to use after you’ve had a visit from the ten-foot beavers. First, you draw a circle in the center of your paper and then lines or branches out from that in all directions.
I wrote the word “Sorrento” in the circle because I knew the poem was going to be about my trip there a few years ago. I knew the poem had something to do with language so I wrote that word on one of my branches. I drew three branches from the main branch of “language” and named them English, Spanish, and Italian. Then, I drew a branch and called it “sightseeing.” I drew a line off that branch for every statue, piazza, or shop that made an impression on me (meaning ones that I still remember five years later). Read more
One of the questions most asked of writers is, “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a question that stumps us sometimes because the answer seems so obvious. As creative types, we’ve trained ourselves to find ideas everywhere we look.
Recently, I was at a poetry reading where I tried an experiment. As I listened to the three poets read, I jotted down any words or phrases that struck me or grabbed my interest. Here are a few from my list: an old vocabulary, etymology, smuggling the universe, the safety of seduction, mouths pucker, cornucopia.
I’d been having difficulty with the ending of a poem but at the reading, I had an inspiration of how to fix it. Now, I think the poem is one of my best. Read more
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