(For some reason, Wednesday’s post didn’t, well, post. So sorry for the delay. You get two today!)
I am not a poet
And I am not just saying that to be contrary. I’m really not. I fall pretty squarely on the prose side of things. Occasionally I’ll wade in as far as prose poetry, duck my head under and try some free verse, but I can pretty safely say that I am not a poet.
I’ve met a lot of prose writers like myself who are pretty confident in our non-poem writing identity. Sometimes, we put down poetry, joke about poets, and belittle the form. I’m guilty of throwing a few blows for my end of the prose vs. poetry war.
But when the dust settles, there is a lot we can learn from each other. In this post, I’ll talk about what us prose writers can learn from those on the poetic side of the trenches.
5) Sound – Poetry sometimes drops the pretext of trying to mean something pretty and goes for sounding pretty. Sometimes, a poem values meaning over sound, sometimes it values sound over meaning, but no poem doesn’t care about sound. I do know some prose writers who don’t care at all about sound, and that is one place poetry has us beat. Poets (at least the pre-modernist poets) know their work is one of sound as well as type. In some languages, the word for song and poem are one in the same because of this. From poetry, we learn that the individual sounds that make up words and phrases are not just cerebral building blocks, but parts of the reading and listening experience. The difference between “Slice” and “Chop” are in sound. As prose writers, we need to learn to hear the difference.
4) Emotion – Poems often set out to evoke specific emotions. They keep that emotion in mind in every aspect of the piece. It is one way that they have audience in mind that prose writers often forget. It is very useful to know what emotion you want to elicit out of your reader and to aim for it with every tool in your tool box. The strong association between poetry and emotion and the weaker emphasis on a logical progression of narrative allow poets to put more focus on directing their readers gut level feelings. But us prose writers should really still remember how important those emotion are. They dictate whether the reader keeps going, whether they like a character, or feel comfortable with a setting. Poetry can teach us the language of emotion.
3) Word Real Estate – Poems, with the expection of epic poetry, are shorter. They have inherently less space to do what they want to get done. As such, every word becomes something of value. When critics pick apart a poem, they look at each punctuation mark, each pronoun. No one looks that closely at a novel. This attention to detail, required by the poetic form, makes poetry a great platform for learning how to make every word count. You hear that advice a lot from professional writers, but it really starts to mean something when you try to write a Haiku, a Sonnet, or Blank Verse.
2) Rhythm – This specific component of sound is incredibly important. Even the rare reader who doesn’t sound out the text in their head at some level still pauses at commas, pays more attention at quotation marks, and is hyper aware of exclamation marks and question marks. Paragraph breaks and section breaks structure the prose piece like line breaks work in a poem. But what the prose writer forgets is that even the sentence has rhythm. Any student of the English Sonnet can tell you that English fits most naturally into Iambic Pentameter, but as prose writers, we often forget to read over our work out loud to hear where the language catches, where pauses need to be, where we need to chop things up for emphasis. Poetry teaches us how language naturally flows and how we can manipulate that flow for impact, a lesson that holds true even in the middle of a Space Opera.
1) The Power of the Word – Over all, the greatest gift of poetry is to teach the writer that no word is powerless. When used correctly, or with purpose, a single word can turn a poem. Because of the (good) poet must consider each words sound, emotional connotation, effect on rhythm, and thematic ties, he or she learns just how strong each word is. The poet is a student not of words or language, but of each word. A poet needs to know what each word evokes, what allusions it calls to mind, what phonetic qualities it has. Once you know a word that deeply, you (hopefully) never just throw it into a prose paragraph again.
Words: Ring, Appropriate, Symbol, Broken, Coat, Able, Ten, Windowpane
Writer's Manifest 