by Sherdyl (Charlie) Motz

In a past article, I wrote about rhyme and meter in poetry and showed some examples of how to do it. This month we'll look at more of the same, as well as some tools to improve your poetry.

More on Sonnets

In the past article, I told you that you should try rhymed, metered poetry and then move on to free verse. I also said that trying to force a rhyme can stilt your poem. Here's an example from my poetry class. Kim, my poetry teacher, made us do a sonnet every semester and this was one of mine.

"Homelessness"

The wretched and the poor lay on the street,
The multitudes whom life has passed on by.
Their hunger and their suffering eyes entreat,
And everywhere I go I hear their cries.

Walking daily through this Berkeley mire,
The anguished pleas for food and change resound.
Their situation daily grows more dire,
They cannot lift themselves up off the ground.

I often question how this came to be.
How can the kinder, gentler rich rejoice,
while many souls must live so squalidly?
Why does the Bushoisse ignore their voice?

Someday the homeless will arise and fight.
We'll hear the drums of armies of the night.

The sentiments are OK, for who could not feel their heart torn out at seeing the homeless all over the place. And I coined a cute word "Bushoisse", which is a pun on the bourgeoisie. BUT, in constantly reaching for the rhyme and altering the sentence structure to try and get true iambic pentameter, the whole poem ended up sounding stilted.

And just so my poem doesn't leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, here's another love sonnet from Pablo Neruda's "100 love sonnets".

"Love Sonnet No. 10"

This beauty is soft - as if music and wood,
agate, cloth, wheat, peaches the light shines through
had made an ephemeral statue.
And now she sends her freshness out, against the waves.

The sea dabbles at those tanned feet, repeating
their shape, just imprinted in the sand.
And now she is the womanly fire of a rose,
the only bubble the sun and sea contend against.

Oh, may nothing touch you but the chilly salt!
May not even love disturb that unbroken springtime!
Beautiful woman, echo of the endless foam.

May your statuesque hips in the water make
a new measure - a swan, a lily, -- as you float
your form through the eternal crystal.

And here's a sonnet by a classmate, friend and fellow pot, Barbara Minton, who found a way to bring humor to meter and rhyme. She also prefers free verse, but, like me and the rest of the class, had to do a sonnet for a class assignment.

"Tyranny Of The Lamb"

How does the loathsome iamb walk along
And let its heavy second step come down
With soft insistent pressure on my ear
Until I think my mind will take a hike?
I want to sing a song of love or loss,
But the iamb simply will not take a rest
Its beat keeps beating down upon my brain
And making me write words that must conform
To the thump and thud of hearts and feet and bands
No matter what the meanings they convey!
The hour is growing late. The copy shop
Will close before I finish up this poem.
How does the loathsome iamb stumble on?

I still recommend that you try your hand at some rhymed, metered verse. It's a good exercise in poetry writing. And if you are going to do a lot of rhymed verse, for goodness sake get a rhyming dictionary.

More on Form Poetry-The Sijo

Here's another kind of form poetry - the Sijo. It originated in medieval Korea. It consists of six lines arranged into 3 couplets-a beginning couplet, an amplification of the beginning and an ending couplet. There is no rhyme scheme or meter (but it can have, if you wish). I lost my book of Sijo's, so the only example I have is one of my own.

"Mt. Sijo"

Mt. Sijo is all aglow,
From poets who think they know,

How to blossom and enflame,
The cold stone of the mountain.

But only if their verse is Za-Zen,
Will the eruption's thunder sound.

This poetry form gives you the opportunity to be terse and to have every word count, yet you don't have to use rhyme and meter. The whole thing must be said in six short lines. Try a few Sijos. It's good discipline. Feel free to email your best ones to me.

http://www.spydersempire.com/forum/haiku/

Even More on Form Poetry

An even better discipline on brevity in poetry is the Haiku. It's really brief and has specific syllable requirements. The Haiku is a very popular form of poetry. Try running the word "Haiku" through as Internet search engine and see how many hits you get. I just ran a search through Yahoo, and got 116 hits of Haiku sites. A quality Haiku site is: The Empire of Haiku located within Spyder's Poetry Empire.

Free Verse

But then move on to unrhymed, un-metered verse. And therein lies a tale. Around the turn of this century, most poets did their verse in rhymes. Some had done unrhymed, un-metered before the turn of the century, like Walt Whitman. But there was the general thought that "If it doesn't rhyme, its not a poem." And this untrue thought persists to this day.

Then there arose a school that dedicated itself to free verse, led by Ezra Pound and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and others. They called themselves "The Imagists". Their idea was to write terse, un-metered, unrhymed verse and if a rhyme happened, that was cool, but why stilt your verse by trying for the rhyme. I coined a phrase to describe this free verse movement: "We will have no rhyme before its time." And poetry hasn't been the same since then. Here's an example of free verse from the incomparable H. D.

"Sea Rose"

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf.

More precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem-
you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose
drip with such acrid fragrance
hardened inn a leaf?

Note in this example that there is not an single intentional rhyme, nor is there any particular meter. BUT, the poem has great rhythm. See how smoothly it flows. The verse is terse and packed with meaning. Speaking of meaning, is this poem about a rose? Certainly not. The rose is simply a metaphor for something else. What do you think is the real subject of this poem? What does it say to you? Where does your mind wander in searching for the poem's real meaning? Another really great free verse poet is the recently departed Denise Levertov (1923-1997). She was a master of the free verse genre. Here's a poem from one of the early collections, "Jacob's Ladder." (1961)

"The Tulips"

Red tulips
Living into their death
Flushed with a wild blue

Tulips
Becoming wings
Ears of the wind
Jackrabbits rolling their eyes

West wind
Shaking the loose pine

Some petals fall
With that sound one
listens for.

We will get deeply into metaphor next month. Now lets get into another tool for better poetry writing.

The Simile

The Simile is a great comparison tool. The key words are "like" and "as". For instance, "You are as beautiful as a star". "You are really slow, like a turtle." And this great tool is also the most abused when used with clichés. How many times have you seen the same old tired cliché used over and over and over again, until you are totally sick of it. This is one of the keys for writing good poetry-namely to find fresh language. So here's an exercise for you to fill in the simile with fresh, original language. Click here for a text file (.txt) to print out of the exercise below.

She was as talkative as __________.

The bird sang like __________.

The car was as fast as __________.

While dancing, his body was as loose as __________.

The picture was as sad as __________.

She can really rap, like __________.

The cat purred, like __________.

Big Ben bonged, like __________.

It smelled familiar, like __________.

Everyone was as warm as __________.

It tasted as good as __________.

His desk was as messed up as __________.

The clowns frolicked, like __________.

He's as crazy as __________.

My depression is as dark as __________.

My anguish pours of me like a __________.

His leaving me hit me like a __________.

The tingle of her kiss was as good as __________.

You're good-bye was as hard as __________.

Your fingers in my hair are like __________.

I feel alone as a __________.

This exercise will help you to see how boring clichés are and help you on the eternal quest for fresh language. Notice how you immediately wanted to put in a cliché. Stop and consider again and look for fresh language for your simile. The simile, like the metaphor, is a tool that adds depth and deeper meaning to your poetry.

For instance, say you were writing about your cat, and wrote:

My cat purred contentedly.

The lines OK, but let's spice it up a bit by adding a simile:

My cat purred contentedly, like Buddha meditating.

Now we have added a whole new flavor and meaning to the cat purring. We've added spiritual content to the cat and equated purring with meditation. With a little 3 line simile, we've changed a mundane line to something with several other meanings. Lets try another example:

The drunk stumbled on the stairs.

Yawn! Now lets add a simile:

The drunk stumbled on the stairs, like a dying bird, falling and getting up, over and over again.

This simile has added the picture of a dying bird being equated with the drunk. Here's a few examples of similes from my poetry class:

In her pregnancy, she was as big as a camel's hump.
Our love affair was as dead as dried buffalo dung.
The neighbors, sounding like muffled morons.
Cold as a fundamentalist preacher's stare.
Quiet, like the desert in the shimmering noonday heat.
Smooth as a slicing samurai sword.

As an exercise, write a new poem or take an old poem and use some original similes to spice them up.

Other Poetic Tools-The Five Senses

Bring the five senses into your poetry and it will become much stronger. They are: sight, taste, smell, touch and sound. As an exercise, take out five sheets of paper and put one of each of these senses at the top and write down as many words that show each of these senses as you can. Now incorporate the senses with these words into your poetry and see your imagery become much stronger. We'll treat the five senses in more depth next month.

Spotlight Poet

This month's Spotlight Poet is William Witherup. He's a West Coast poet. In a review by William Everson, "Skeptical of civilization, disgusted with its discontents, in him the reformist vein in West Coast writing finds outlet through an occasional tirade against polluters of every stripe…." Here is one of his poems from a collection "Black Ash, Orange Fire, Collected Poems, 1959-1985."

"Marian as Tassajara Springs"

1
I remember your hair,
spread out like black moss against the rock,

your skin tasting faintly sulfurous
from the mineral baths,

your laughter like a spring
swelling up

from the lime and chalk of your pelvis
and flowing out the white stones of your teeth.

I caught the small trout of your tongue
in my mouth.

2
It was October.
The Monarchs were dying,

falling through the air
like oak leaves

and landing on rocks and stones
where they would rest,

slowly moving their faded
orange and black wings

as if they were trying to fan themselves
back into flame.

We talked of the certain end of our season

as the crumpled ghosts of old lovers
floated past us on the water,

and of something waiting
in cities and in each of us

that is hostile to love
and to rocks in clear streams.

I will think of that day
and the wings of your shoulders

when the firestorm comes
and the wind

whips my shirt
to black ash and orange flames.

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