Fill Your Mind With Poetry

Nothing is ever created in a vacuum, everything you see or hear or read or sense, helps build the poems within you. So fill you mind with poetry.

Go to the library and get out some poetry collections, it may take you awhile to find the poets you get on with and be prepared that whom you like reading maybe completely different from the sort of poems you like to write.

I personally find going to poetry readings much more enjoyable than reading the poems out of a book, the authors voices bring the poems to life for me. There are also lots of youtube videos of poetry performances both old and new, which are well worth the explore!

If you are anything like me, you will find that once you fill yourself up, poetry, new vivid, excited poetry, started to leak out of you.

Happy New Year and Reform the Poetic You

2014 has began and it is time to start a fresh with the writing, if you are anything like us here at WoPo you will find that during the year your poetic focus drifts. January is the perfect time to fix this!

Look at your daily commitments, and slot yourself in for a writing space – each and every day. It only has to be five minutes but it has to happen. This will help you get into a routine. You may not write much at first but as the days pass you will find it easier to slip into the writing zone.

Ideas will then likely start occurring when it is not your writing time, to deal with this text yourself the idea or carry a small pocket note book to jot things down in. If you are stuck for ideas, do not fret, there are always plenty of exercises on this blog to help you.

HAPPY NEW YEAR – now get writing 🙂

Is The Glass Full?

The water glass has long been a symbol of the pessimist and optimist, is the glass half full or half empty? As the pedant will inform you it is always full it just depends weather it is mostly full of air or water.

How do you view the world? Through rose tinted glasses or gloom specs? What prejudices do you hold when you observe the world?

Make a list of them and then cut them away – now look at the glass and discrib it.

How the Sound

The sounds of words are very important in poetry, oo, ah, sssssss and so on. Think about the sounds that actually make up our language, pretend you teaching a small child how to spell and give the letters their sound not their name.

Now pick some sounds and work with them, make them harsher than normal, alter how loud or soft they are, how long you draw the sound out for.

Now put several sounds together, how do they fit?

Can you get the sounds to express a mood?

Play around with this and you are verging on the world of Tonal Poems were the sound is the main facture.

Spanners

Look at this image – spend 5 minutes examining it in fine detail then do a response writing exercise for 10 minute. That means set a timer and just write do not worry about structure or form or even if the writing makes sense just write.

You may find a structure presents itself as you are writing but do not worry if it does not. Leave the writing for a few weeks and then go back to it – you will be surprised at what you find there to work with and craft into a poem.

Endangered

Think on the world and all of the life within it, scientists are currently debating weather to try and bring back extinct species – not just the wooly mammoths but the creatures we have wiped out in the last few years. We can bring them back but if there is no place for them to live – what then?

Read up on an animal or plant that is endangered or maybe already extinct. What did it look like? Was it something you’d have liked to see in your garden or a monster that could squish you easily? How did it become endangered or extinct? Where did it live and if the scientists bought it back what would happen? Where would it live.

What would it eat? Imagine what it would feel like to stroke and the smell of resins in its leaves. Maybe look at a whole ecosystem, marshes or deserts or the ocean floor. Fill your head with it and then go for a walk in you local town and park – how would your chosen subject fit in?

Once you have done all of this you should sit down quietly and begin writing do not worry initially about where it is going just write.

Cake Mix

Take a sheet of A4 paper and draw a large cake on it – just an outline and do not worry if it is only recognisable as a cake to you. Now write metaphors in the cake case or cake bit at the base of your cake, dill the area up. If you have drawn things like cherries or sweets put single words in these such as stars or seas. If you drew candles write verbs within, running, writing etc… The icing should be filled with concepts you would like to write poems about.

You now have a fantastic resource to use as a reference if you get stuck. If you wish you can extract the words and phrases and list them and see if any of them would go well together.

Crafting a Poem

Poems often need time to incubate within your head, one of the best ways of achieving this is to actually forget you are working on the poem. Immerse yourself in some sort of physical activity – crafting, painting, gardening or going for a run are the main ways people manage this.

Ideas seem to just pop into the poets mind or an existing idea gets mulled over – but it is a process you can not force if you sit there thinking about the poetry you will probably be as stuck as if you were sitting there with paper and pen. Let yourself be consumed by the activity and only when an idea or concept presents itself should you start thinking about where it is going as a poem.

Cats Sleep Anywhere

And it’s true they do as typified by the classic poem by Eleanor Farjeon (1881 – 1965). This can be endearing and cute or incredibly annoying especially if you are a dog lover!

Try constructing your own verse about where cats sleep.

Interviews

Interviews can be a bore, hassel or nerve racking experience depending on who you are – how do you react?

Are you the sort to have vivid nightmares in the weeks running up to the interview or do you sail through barely remembering to turn up to the thing?

But the really interesting thing is that often the person interviewing you will be stressed or nervous or bored depending on who they are!

Taking these things into consideration construct a five stanza poem showing how an interview is going.