Words: the super power we all have but can't control

#GogglesAreCool origins revealed

My Quicksilver (Evan Peters) cosplay

Quick exercise and talk on the power of words

7 seconds of me non-stop cursing blooper

Artistic Tips: Word Selection

Last week I talked about the basic structure of a poem (meter) and how it's not as important to follow those rules. This week I want to talk about the most obvious and important thing about poetry: words.  You can't have poetry without words, but you can have words without it being poetry. The structural difference is poetry consists of rhythm, meter, and rhyme while prose for the most part does not. The difference is in format, but they both require proper word selection. Prose is limited by the audience of what words are appropriate and recognizable. In an ethics paper, you probably wouldn't debate the economic benefits of distributing mass quantities of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to a single oxygen atom to the needy. In poetry you can. Well, maybe not exactly like in that example. Poetry uses considerably fewer words than prose which means every word should be carefully considered. This is where a thesaurus comes in handy.

You don't just want to find the right word, you want to find the best word. You want words that can have multiple meanings or certain connotations And then you want those words to be in synch with the words around them. You want them to either compliment each other (easily done with alliteration) or contrast each other to make them stand out or make people do a double take (like seemingly oxymoronic phrases). You want words that you can repeat and that can have a slightly or drastic different meaning depending on the words around it. Most importantly you want to be clever. You want to come up with a new or different take on how words are usually used, something that makes it uniquely yours. From there you can build your metaphors, and of course you should use puns and other poetic literally devices which I'll explore more in another poem, but if you want a head start on those, there's a link under Poetry Resources labeled Literary Devices.

So now I'm going to go through and highlight some of the word choices I made in this poem.

Coming Out as Bipolar

Bonus Art Tip: The Wright Way to Count Meter Like the Tone Deaf First Grader that I am

Artistic Tips: Meter and Other Basic Structures of Poetry

I picked this as my first poem to go through its PAST (Poetry, Art, Soul, and Therapy) because it is one of my poems that I spent the most time on the technical art aspect that also touches deeply to my soul and is a great segue into poetry as therapy. "Apathetic Artist" is written in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, but not really. Allow me to break that down. A sonnet is simply a 14 lined poem. Traditionally there are two main styles of sonnets: Shakespearean or English and Petrarchan or Italian. The Shakespearean sonnet is the more famous one, at least in English and American poetry. The main difference between the two is the rhyme scheme or the pattern of which lines rhyme with each other. That's the easy part. Anyone can do that. I did that here. It's made up of three quatrains of an ABAB rhyme scheme and ends with a couplet or a pair of rhyming lines. The tricky part is that, like with most of Shakespeare's work, it's written in iambic pentameter. Not everyone can do that. I didn't do that. I just wrote it, and it more closely fit a dactyl rhythm so I just went with that as best as I could and even threw in some curve ball anapests because why not.


Now you can skip down to the glossary section at the end of this post to read the definition of all those poetic terms that I italicized for you, but I'll just give you a quick crash course on feet and meter that I learned in my poetry classes for my Literate Minor. Let's step back so we can zoom in.

Bonus Monday Video! "About the Poet"

The Wright Way of Writing

This blog is dedicated to serve as a crash course tutorial on how anyone can use poetry as an artistic and therapeutic expression of the soul. Poetry has been my therapy in dealing with everything from bad breakups to dark depression to identity issues. You don't always want to talk about things with a therapist or sometimes even your closest friend, but it isn't healthy to let some things stay bottled up inside of you. When you take the time to sit down and write down your feelings, you force yourself to actually process your emotions and put concrete words to those elusive feelings. Something I did learn in therapy is mindfulness. There's so much power and control of stopping to say, "Hey, I am angry, and this is why, and it's ok," or "Hey, I am angry, but I don't really have a good reason to be angry. I should stop being angry." And then you can take those words and rearranging them and create something beautiful. You never have to share it with anyone if you don't want to. There are plenty of poems I may never publish. But you can still go back and read your art from years ago and reconnect with yourself and see how much has changed, for better or worse, or maybe nothing has really changed at all. It's like your own personal emotional time capsule.