In all honesty you are just the wind

whispering over paper-thin corpses of summer

these apotheoses of decomposition,

burgundy ghosts,

and I am happy just to listen to them crackle under my feet,

satisfied and waiting for the snow to fall

because it will and not because I want it to.

we are all waiting for springtime.

This one’s mine: “Transition”

Last week, I wrote about my process for reading poetry. Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about the components involved in writing it. I started writing poetry when I was ten or eleven. I was in middle school and thought sonnets were the peak of literature, and everything I wrote was god-awful and rhymed. I like to think that at some point in the last ten years or so, I’ve developed my writing skills just a little and that my poetry in particular has improved.

Though not the only part of writing, content, as always, is important. It can be difficult to nail down what the subject of any piece of art should look like. I don’t think it’s critical that poetry always be exceedingly personal or that it expose levels of deeper meaning or political leaning, but I do think that the best poetry is good because of a certain obviously honest quality that makes it appeal to readers. This honesty can manifest in different ways; many poets use their poetry to tell their own stories. Poetry like this is often heavy and draws the reader in on an emotional level. Sympathy and empathy are powerful things to hit on in a reader, but effective use of this requires the writer’s full commitment to their story. I’ve spent the last few months working on a book of poetry that I hope to publish one day, which focuses on one single event in my life, and the many ways it changed my life. It’s a story I want to tell and I want to tell well. Finding the balance between my own experience and the political implications and connotations surrounding it has been difficult (and will continue to be), but think it’s this same honesty that will tie it all together in the end. Often, what lends congruity to a work of poetry is the author’s passion and voice, rather than the different sides of a subject or its leanings. This doesn’t mean that theme should be ignored, but I think a writer with the right (write? Get it?) ideas to follow can express exactly what their work means to them from multiple sides.

There are a lot of technical mechanics of writing poetry which should be considered as well. When I was young, I wrote a lot of rhyming poetry, and that’s not always bad (though mine often was), but a more nuanced view on poetry realizes that there are many different types of rhyme and rhyming schemes. The word assonance refers to the repetition of vowel sounds in a segment of speech. Assonance includes end rhyme as well as a host of ways to repeat sounds internally. A lot of free-verse poetry actually just relies on more subtle kinds of rhyme, particularly spoken word poetry (as we have previously discussed). Exploring different ways to use this to make your words look and sound better together is a great step to take to improve your poetry. Another technique poets use is called enjambment and it describes the way that poetic lines relate to each other. Poetry uses line breaks to communicate different things and often creative enjambment can play off of double meanings, control pacing, and divide ideas in a poem. Whenever I write, I mess around with line breaks all over the place, trying to find the best way to organize my writing to express what I want to express.

There are so many, many ways to improve your writing by finding your perfect muse, or by learning about different writing techniques, or by reading your favorite writers and studying the methods they use, but none of them will ever begin to compare to writing, and writing often. In almost any discipline you will practice in your life, it is the practice that will help you the most. So, write. Write every day.