Category:

SO FAR SO GOOD....

1/19/2013

Canadian poetry legend Frank Davey

The first four months of London Open Mic Poetry Night's first season have been a success, with the last event, on Jan. 3rd, featuring John Tyndall, drawing a crowd of fifty to the terrace at the Mykonos Restaurant, even more than attended the series' launch. We're optimistic that the remaining five months of the season will be just as upbeat.

We've made good use of the first four events to test out and then toss out ideas that sounded much better in an excited discussion than they actually worked on the floor. In the process we ended up with a leaner, simpler event, composed

0 Comments

Advice for new poets on what NOT to do

12/1/2012

0 Comments

By Kathryn Mockler (UWO poetry prof.)

Below is a list that I compiled with students in my poetry class.

Obviously there are great poems that include elements on this list; however, these are words, phrases, rhyme-patterns, metaphors, etc that I've found are overused by writers new to poetry, and the use of these elements or words can and, most often do, result in one-dimensional, cliché poetry.

centre justification
capping first letter of every line
overly dramatic or overused words such as tears, soul, quivering, being, yearning, pain, existence
hearts/heartbroken/hearts beating/bleeding hearts
love poems (I love my parents, my boyfriend, my grandparents)
poems about homeless people (unless you’ve been homeless)
excessive use of abstract words like hope, joy, love, alienation, loneliness
predictable hard end-rhymes, sing-songy rhymes
referring to the sky as inky
using the description blue-black
using different font sizes or types
cliché phrases or dead metaphors as in “cherry red lips” or “out like a light” or her "sea blue eyes"
references to stars in the sky
excessive use of adjectives
excessive use of “ing” words – climbing, falling, pumping, yearning, glinting
using sound effects: crunch, crunch, crunch
antiquated language – thou or shall or wanton
avoid vast generalizations or general language
pat poems - poems that are closed because the poet directly explains the theme of the poem to reader or the metaphor is so obvious that the poem becomes one-dimensional
trick poems - poems that trick the reader to thinking that he or she is reading a poem about a person and then we find out that the subject of the poem is really a dog or bird

One of the most effective ways to learn how to write contemporary, publishable literary poetry is to read poetry that was published, in say, that last ten or twenty years.

This is the hard part because there's a lot of stuff out there that you won't like.

But go to your local bookstore or library and start pulling books off the shelves. Read a few lines from each poet and ask yourself--what draws you in, what makes you stop reading?

Buy the books of the poets you like and read them over and over. Underline favourite passages and try to figure out what these writers are doing that has had such an impact on you.

Then go back and look at your own poems from the point of view of a reader.

How-to books are okay for learning the elements of poetry, but your teachers should be other poets.

Ed. Kathryn Mockler was the featured reader at the November 2012 London Open Mic Poetry Night. She has an MFA in creative writing from UBC, has been published in many journals, has two collections in print, has had her work screened several times on television and screened at a number of festivals. Currently she teaches creative writing at UWO and co-edits the UWO online journal ‘The Rusty Toque” at www.therustytoque.com.

0 Comments

SO FAR SO GOOD....

Advice for new poets on what NOT to do

Archives

Categories