Share It On Social Media
This poem will be short, of course, maybe a quick observation, a moment preserved, as in this no-sentence poem by Ezra Pound:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Or maybe an apostrophe like H. D.'s "The Pool":
The Pool
Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?
It might as well be spring . . .
or maybe it is, so many love poems keep appearing in the blogs. Love poems are some of the hardest poems to write, or so claimed W. H. Auden. Here are a few classics that have inspired poets and lovers over the years:
- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe
- The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Ralegh
- somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by e. e. cummings
- To the March Wind by Chuck Guilford
- Let me not to the marriage of true minds by William Shakespeare
- The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell
- What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold
- A Birthday by Christina Rossetti
- How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Wild Nights — Wild Nights! by Emily Dickinson
- When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats
- Credo by Matthew Roher
A few suggestions: use concrete, specific images to show your feelings; avoid sing-song "roses are red" type rhyming; try to say something fresh and new that gives readers a new insight — or even a laugh.
And check out the following topics:
Poem #11: Begin, "When I . . .
This poem could grow out of a unique moment, like Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer." Or it could grow from a stage of your life, Like A. E. Houseman's "When I was One and Twenty." Or maybe you'd like to explore a repeated ritual, like "When I lift the trash can lid . . .."
Read more ...Revise Poems
-- the no praise/no blame method
Revision means re-seeing — looking again with fresh vision at what you've previously made. And since we're talking poetry, we might also consider "re-auditing" — re-hearing — the words.
Read more ...Stanza Breaks
In poetry, stanzas are visual groupings of lines. A group of two lines is called a couplet. A three line stanza is called a tercet. A four line stanza is a quatrain, and a five line stanza is a quintet. Two other common lengths are a sestet, six lines; and an octave, eight lines.
Read more ...