Poetry: Painting Life with Words

    According to Merriam Webster dictionary,  Poetry is a “writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.”¹  Poetry is not just writing words in lines and stanzas, it is painting life with words. Like a song, it starts from a low tempo and gradually builds into a high tempo taking the mind of the reader into a progressive creative journey of seeing each words as real as tangible things.

Tips on how to write Poems

1. Use figure of Speech

Figures of speech are ways to encode plain words in order to lure the readers mind into an imaginative realm. There are different figures of speech namely: Simile, Metaphor, Alliteration, Hyperbole, Personification, Oxymoron, Pun, Paradox, etc. An example of a poem written with figures of speech is seen below

“Love is like a wind
It embraces us with passion
leaving the scent of fresh flowers
tingling our mind“²

The above poem contains two figures of speech, Simile and Personification.

The use of figures of speech helps to beautify the story you are telling, keeping the mind of the reader engaged from start till finish. To learn more about figures of speech, click here

2. Connect with your words

Never write a poem that doesn’t come from the depth of your soul. Never write a piece that is not real to you. Write words that you have encountered. It’s not necessary that you must have had physical encounters on the topic, but you must have spent time reading and understanding what you are writing about so as to pass across a message to the target audience.

3. Clarity

Simple is creative. Never fall for the myth that a complicated piece is a creative piece. A creative piece is one that both the learned and unlearned can understand without stressing his mental faculty. The main aim of creativity is that the message is passed a crossed to the target audience.

Writer’s Block

Creative writing is not complete without looking into writers block. “Writer’s block is a phenomenon experienced by writers that is best described as an overwhelming feeling of being stuck in the writing process without the ability to move forward and write anything new.”³

Writer’s Block can be dealt with in the following ways

• Resting: Taking breaks in between writing helps to ease Writer’s block.
• Creating a writing plan: Having a writing plan helps to ease the tension on your mind. The mind is able to focus on one thing at a time.
• Give yourself incentives: Rewarding yourself for jobs done also helps to ease the tension of your mind. It enhances the creativity of the mind and also boosts the esteem of the writer.

Conclusion

    Poetry is an amazing journey that one can experience. It helps bring people to see the world in an entirely different way through your eyes.


To access websites that can help boost your skills, click here.

References

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poetry
2. http://jokosuper.blogspot.com/2013/01/poetry-figures-of-speech.html?m=1
3. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-writers-block-how-to-overcome-writers-block-with-step-by-step-guide-and-writing-exercises#how-to-overcome-writers-block-in-8-easy-steps