Artistic Tips - Repetition Repetition Repetition

Repetition is a really useful literary device. Repetition is a really fun literary device. Repetition can be a really annoying literary device. Repetition is useful in creating a specific rhythm, connecting lines or ideas, making a phrase stick out as memorable, and making it easier to memorize. Repetition is fun because it makes it catchy and it's easy to get into both as a writer and a reader. Repetition can be annoying if it's overused like probably by this sentence you're annoyed at the repetition of the word repetition.

Here's a quick glossary of different types of repetition.

Anaphora - repetition of the first part of a sentence
Epistrophe - repetition of the end of a sentence
Refrain - a phrase, line, or group of lines regularly repeated throughout a poem, usually at the end of a stanza

Alliteration, assonance, and consonance are repetition of sounds which I have defined in last week's Artistic Tips.

I use "I am" and "I'm" as anaphoras for the first and fifth stanza (also "I can"). Stanza 2 and 6 are the same stanza. This is loose definition of a refrain since it's only repeated twice and is an entire stanza in such a short poem. In a song it might be considered the chorus. But in the theme of the poem of relapsing, the same exact words carry a different meaning because of the change in context. "It" in stanza 3 is an example of an epistrophe. It's an excuse to rhyme a word with itself. But it also works well because of the assonance in "damn" and "had." "Good" and "golden" are an example of alliteration, and "better" and "embolden" are an example of consonance.

"Relapse"

I’m good. I’m golden.
I’m better. I’m embolden.
I can do this. I am steady.
I am driven. I am ready.

Day after day. Step by step.
I’m working hard to rebuild my rep.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
But I will do my best to not be vexed.

Damn it.
I had it.
All together again.
I had found my zen.

Now I’m back.
Exposed to attack.
It all happened so very, very fast.
I thought the last time was really the last.

I’m not okay. I’m broken.
I’m battered. I’m choking.
I can’t do this. I’m shaking.
I am trapped. I am breaking.

Day after day. Step by step.
I’m working hard to rebuild my rep.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
But I will do my best to not be vexed.

Artistic Tips - More internal poetic devices

Here's a quick glossary of poetic devices you can use within a line.
Internal Rhyme: words that have the same ending sound that's not part of the line-ending rhyme scheme
Alliteration: a group of words strung together with the same beginning sound (constant or vowel)
note: beginning with the same letters does not guarantee alliteration
Assonance: a group of words with the same vowel sound anywhere in the words
Consonance: a group of words with the same constant sounds anywhere in the words

(I'll make a video for this eventually although it might not be until after I graduate.)

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.

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.