Saturday, March 24, 2012

Pro Tips for Poets

A little metaphor goes a long way.

Start out by writing as many sonnets as possible. It doesn't matter if they're good or not; what's important is that you practice with a rigid poetic structure so you get the feel for stressed and unstressed syllables.  Mastering this makes your free-form poetry all the more powerful.

If you want to describe something as being deep or lush, use words such as "deep," or "lush." I'm not kidding on this one; it's amazing how much you can accomplish through imagery alone.

Assonance! Assonance with s is always good when not overused, with p is best used subtly so as not to halt the action with the hard consonant sound, and with f is somewhere in between s and p, so use as your own discretion.

Thesauri are your friends. Poetry is all about the nuance of phrase, and there is no such thing as true synonym, as each individual word in the English language conveys something slightly different. I've found it best to find the feeling you want to convey first, and structure the rest around those words.

Just because it rhymes doesn't make it true.



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