Questions tagged [poetry]
Short form writing, often focused on the aesthetics of words as much as the meaning. This tag should be used for any questions relating to poems, including poetry formatting and technique, poetry critiques, and the publishing of poetry.
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How do you use a heavily poetic style while also using a formatting that's similar to that of modern novel?
How do you use a heavily poetic style while also using a formatting that's similar to that of modern novel? Is there a way to add a poetic spin to the modern formatting seen in novels that was ...
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Can we treat a word as a different thing, and then use preposition that don't naturally cooccur with it?
Can we treat a word as a different thing, and then use preposition that don't naturally cooccur with it? I don't know if this is considered a metaphor, but this is rarely done.
For example, I was ...
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Resources on All Kinds of Poetry/Verse
For a previous question, in which I inquired about writing prose with rhythm, I received an answer saying this: that learning to write poetry should help, from strict-verse poetry to abstract free-...
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How do you format a poem inside of a novel?
How do you format a poem inside of a novel? I am not sure how to go about it. What are some popular ways of introducing a poem inside a novel.
Let's say that the character reads a poem from a small ...
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Does a sonnet have to follow a standard rhyme scheme?
I wrote a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter consisting of two rhyming couplets followed by ten lines of blank verse. Would it be accurate to call this a sonnet?
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Which sentence is correct? How is variety created in these sections (of a song)? or How is variety created between these sections (of a song)?
When describing the variety or contrast evident in a song we can compare the song sections. Variety adds interest to the song. We ask how is one section different to the next?
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Is there a term describing two poems that start simultaneously or in succession?
I am studying a poem called Unbearable Weight of Staying by Warsan Shire. It includes regular type and then indented, italicised type e.g
I don't know when love became elusive.
My mother's laughter ...
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Can I reference italics in academic writing?
I am analysing a poetry collection for college and one poem is 'Unbearable Weight of Staying' by Warsan Shire. She includes both regular and italicised type in the text, e.g:
I don't know when love ...
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Is it considered to be a bad thing to use idioms in poems?
There are words that are considered to be weak like: spirit, heart, love, sublime, because they tell and don't show, so I am wondering what about idioms such as "dead in the water", because ...
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Use of unconventional punctuation
https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/ellipses.html
I thought it was an ellipses, but ellipses only typically have three dots. Are there good use cases or is there a good justification to using four ...
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Is there a situation where you shouldn't omit the article (a, the) in lyrics?
Is there a situation where you shouldn't omit the article (a, the) in lyrics? Sometimes, you have 1 syllable you want to remove on a line, so you remove a or the, but sometimes doing so modifies the ...
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Would using poetry to represent a character's dreams be viable?
In a couple of my writing projects I have used poetry to represent the dreams of the POV character. That way some of the content of the dreams and hopefully some of the emotion/feeling of the dreams ...
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Expressing the intensity of an emotion by showing and not telling
I get how you can "show" for example the story of a woman who is sad by merely describing the stars in the sky, but how do you describe the intensity of her emotion in a poem? I think you ...
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Can specific metaphors be interpreted or meant to be interpreted in a vaguer and more general way?
A boat of heaven shed roses.
A boat of heaven is a symbol of the female genitalia. Shedding roses means she bled and lost her virginity, but can we still use the phrase to simply mean "loss of ...
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Do poets care about the meter when writing for the first time?
I wonder if poets write their verses in the correct meter at first or if they review it later after writing it just to express their thought. I'm not sure if it's possible for someone to be as ...
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Does show and don't tell mean something different in allegorical poems as opposed to novels, movie script, etc?
Can you write a love poem by showing and not telling and only describing the landscape? I am thinking you need to make it allegorical, but without mentioning animals and humans and clothes, etc, just ...
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Does punctuation within lines necessarily indicate a pause or a caesura?
I am not an expert on poetry but I was wondering whether punctuation necessarily indicates a caesura. For instance, when reading some poems, I instinctively ignore commas within lines due to the fast-...
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Can you help me understand what a "lyrical short story" is?
What are the minimum requirements for a lyrical short story to be a story? If it is plotless what separates the lyrical short story from random chatter?
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What is the minimum requirement for a song to be considered a story?
I can't figure out if my songs are stories since they don't contain a climax, multiple characters, or a resolution.
For example is this song a story? It lacks conflict and climax and resolution but it ...
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Is Hyotan Rozu or Calabash Rose a bad publishing name? [duplicate]
Opening question got too long so I shortened it drastically, I like the name calabash rose as a publishing name but it struck me as gimmicky so I played around on google translate a bit and settled on ...
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Is it a bad habit to omit conjunctions in poetry?
When writing a verse for a song a lot of times I find it easier to sing if I leave out function words (demonstratives/conjunctions). Is this a bad habit? It seems to cause lack of clarity but I see ...
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Why do I lose focus and direction in my songwriting?
Today while writing my song, every line seemed to fight me. It seemed to wander without direction. I don't always have this problem but would like to figure how to avoid writing songs that wind up ...
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Trouble finding two-syllable and three-syllable rhymes (or near-rhymes) for "eld" as in "field"
I am using The Complete Rhyming Dictionary, edited by Clement Wood, as a reference as I work through a poem.
I can't tell if my search is not thorough enough or if there is a shortage of this ...
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How to write metered poetry, when you can only read 'phonetically'?
I have dyslexia, and when I pronounce words in my head the syllable count and stress doesn't reflect the way the words are pronounced in everyday speech. I think you might describe it as phonetic ...
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Paragraph break in poetry
I am translating an essay on translation of poetry. In this bit: Allegria di naufragi (Joy of Shipwrecks, 1919), established what remains for many people the quintessential Ungaretti poem: short lines,...
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Are there any strict requirements for classifying a rhyming word?
I'm trying to write a yadu:
Nude, tall and blue,
Yellow's new love,
...
Here, I'm trying to create a rhyme for the word blue with the word new but I'm wondering if the lack of the L sound in new ...
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Is a reference to the seasons required when writing a yadu?
I’m learning about different rhyming schemes and forms of poetry from around the world, and one that intrigues me a lot right now is the yadu:
The yadu is a Burmese climbing-rhyme verse. Each of the ...
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A word for a free-form poetic sentence
I'm looking for a word or poetry genre to describe a short free-form lyrical and poetic sentence, verse, or paragraph.
Something like "free form Haiku", but without any rules like number of ...
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How long does a poetry book have to be?
I'm currently working on a poetry book which is meant to be short in length.
To help be gauge how much material is required, what is the norm for the length of a medium-format (A5 page size) book of ...
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How do you preserve emotions in a poem?
I am just another person who writes poems to vent out emotions. I discovered that the amount of emotions that I feel my poem has during the time of writing, slowly evaporates away. When I re-read it ...
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Are real English words trivial to poetic language? [closed]
I have been writing poetry for a short time now, and many times I had the urge to use a word that isn't in the English language, but expresses my feelings in the clearest way.
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How do you write a poem where plain descriptions later are proven to be plainly wrong?
The land was unsullied
Green grass to the horizon
Teeming with life
...
The land was sullied
Green grass no more
There is only death
Sorry for this extremely simple example, but I am wondering how ...
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What are the 15 possible rhyme schemes for a Quatrain?
Wikipedia says that for a Quatrain there are fifteen possible rhyme schemes.
What are these? I cannot find a full list anywhere.
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What to focus on while writing haiku?
I started writing haiku as a hobby. What techniques can help with writing this particular form? What should I focus on?
A few examples of my haiku:
"Mountain"
Mountains under snow
Cold air ...
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Can you use the landscape and personification to imply what a person is thinking?
Can you use the landscape and personification to imply what a person is thinking?
Example:
The forest thought that these branches could be good for hanging myself (suicide).
Is this a valid figure ...
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What type of rhetorical figure is this?
What type of figure of speech/rhetorical figure are the following:
“You are dearer to me than myself, as you yourself can see.” (Bob Dylan)
“Them I will forget, but you I’ll remember always.” (Bob ...
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Is it bad practice to start a line with 'of'?
I have written a poem in which several lines begin with the word "of":
The men and women
Of the United States
Who sang and danced along
The music that echoed in the night
Were drunk with ...
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How do you use interjections effectively in poetry?
How do you use interjections effectively in poetry? I am wondering when and where you can use the interjection O.
One thing I noticed is that O is often optional, and is used when we refer to a person ...
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Term to describe where the first word of a sentence rhymes with the last word of the same sentence?
Is there an official term to describe a rhyming technique where the first word of a sentence rhymes with the last word of the same sentence?
For example, lines such as
Brian almost got eaten by a ...
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How do you say that a land is desolate without telling it literally in a poem?
Show don't tell is what people say poet advise you to do, but how can you say that a land is desolate without using the word desolate, lonely or any synonym? Is there a way to do this?
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Using an em dash in a sentence spanning over multiple lines
When using em dash in a sentence that runs to multiple lines, especially in poetry, can it be the last word of the continuous sentence? For example, let us consider the following Wordsworth poetry. (I ...
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Using em dash in a sentence spanning over multiple lines [duplicate]
When using em dash in a sentence which runs to multiple lines, especially in poetry, can it be the last word of the continuous sentence? For example, let us consider the following Wordsworth poetry.
...
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Knot Theory and Creative Writing
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Creative Writing and an M.S. Student in Mathematics. I'm writing my master's thesis on knot theory and trying to tie in applications to creative writing. Has anyone come ...
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How do you integrate numerology in poetry?
How do you integrate numerology in poetry? I was thinking of using numbers in the first four verses. For example, write a poem about war and make sure that the first four numbers matches the year ...
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How do we count syllable at the end of a line when there's a comma?
I am an able-bodied person and she is a horse, 15
A big blue horse, a really big horse, 12
Like the one we see in movies. 8
I am wondering if it should be 14, 11 and 8, because we usually pause at ...
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Is there a name for a poem with rhyme scheme ABABCB?
I have just started writing a new poem, and I am thinking about rhyme schemes. The one that jumps out to me looking at the few lines I have already written is: ABABCB CDCDED... (in dactylic dimeter, ...
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How do you suggest in a poem that the narrator has dementia or a mental illness? [closed]
How do you suggest in a poem that the narrator has dementia or a mental illness? I am thinking of using metaphors such as broken mirror and distorted reflections, but more specifically is there ...
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Quoting another poem in your own
I wanted to intentionally reference a famous Dylan Thomas poem in a poem of my own.
I wondered whether there is a convention for how to do this or if it is 'allowed' at all.
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Is there any word or phrases that can replace greed and greedy? [closed]
Apparently, greed and greedy are weak words in poetry, so you can't use them, but what other words would you use?
The pirate greed for their gold.
And the adventurers are greedy
In their quests for ...
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Software for Typing Scanscion [duplicate]
Is there software specially designed for typing scanscion symbols synced with the words below them?
In Word for example, inserting a 2 x 1 matrix , and increasing the column incrementally for each ...
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