Monday, March 18, 2013

Let Poetry Energize Your Prose







In order to grow as a writer you have to be willing to journey to strange places, unfamiliar territory.  For many fiction writers, the world of poetry feels like a distant realm, often unreachable.  Many of us have been trained to believe that there is towering wall that separates poetry and prose.  You’re on one side or the other.  Scaling that wall is harder than climbing Everest.  In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

That wall is roughly as tall as a french fry.  Even I could climb over a french fry, as long as I wasn’t trying to eat it at the same time.  When you climb the wall and enter the realm of poetry, you will soon realize that the fruit on the trees will feed your voice as a fiction writer.  The papaya made out of poetry is extremely tasty when served in the middle of a landscape description or during a particularly poignant moment in your book.  Squeezing a poetry lime on a novel will bring out the flavor of any dish you might be preparing in the kitchen of prose. 

One need not write poetry to feast on its fruits.  You can simply read poems in order to strengthen your voice, learning invaluable lessons about compression and clarity and color and verve.  Keats, Yeats, Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop are waiting for you at the library.  They’re eager to help you on your journey.  So what are you waiting for?  Go for it!

10 comments:

  1. FANTASTIC post! I do this periodically, strangely, especially with E.E. Cummings (sorry about the capital letters, E.E. I couldn't help myself) and Emily Dickinson. Also Robert Frost.
    There is poetry in all my stories, whether I actually write the poem or not. The poems are hidden in the characters.

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  2. All writing is poetry, even if it isn't verse. Just my humble opinion.

    Otherwise, great post, James! Love your metaphors.

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    1. Great point, Matthew. Maybe that's what I was trying to get at but you expressed it more succinctly!

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    2. I should have said all "creative" writing. I'm not sure I would call some of the technical manuals I have to slog through at the ole day job poetry.

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  3. Love this, especially as an author to stumbled into writing verse novels. For a long time I didn't acknowledge I was writing poetry because I didn't feel smart or skilled enough. The mantle felt too heavy. Just as I started getting comfortable with things, I heard from a number of people verse novels aren't poetry anyway.

    I've decided whether they are or aren't poetry doesn't matter to me anymore, but let me tell you this: the distillation of language and imagery have been immensely helpful in my writing, of course, but also in how I process the things I read and how I see the world.

    Poetry is meant to be seen and heard, I tell young readers, and living it these past few years has deeply grown me as a writer and human being.

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    1. There are two ways to distinguish what poetry is and isn't. Nobody knows what they are!

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  4. I have a post on this coming later this week, except I go a bit farther.

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  5. Great post! Love your food similes and metaphors, except now I'm craving lime juice...

    I wrote poetry long before I ever attempted a short story, a picture book or a novel. Periodically, when I'm stuck on my current novel, I take a break and write poetry, often haiku, just for myself.

    I grew up on Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, and Carl Sandburg, and the latter said, "Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

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  6. "That wall is roughly as tall as a french fry."--great line, and so true! I love poetry. A lot of people say they don't "get" poetry, but I don't try to understand it, I just let the images wash over me and revel in the juxtaposition of the words.

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Thanks for adding to the mayhem!