Abstract:
Creating Poetry
By John Drury
Abstract: By Rex S. email:
[email protected] I like look at contents and appendices of How To books and by looking at the last page first. This one passed my inspection with flying colors. The last page is ?Special Interest Writing Books.? For example: ?How you can make $25,000 a year by writing? by Nancy Edmonds Hansom (paper) $12.95. Writers Digest Books, 1507 Dana Ave, Cincinnati, Ohio 45207 with credit card orders call 1-800-289-0963. Prices subject to change without notice. Also they advertise their magazine by the same name and another one called ?Story.? They advertise their book club, school and their ?criticism service.?
Another thing near the books end is its? Index to Exercises to which I referenced ?in tone, 143-44. John Drury?s description of tone in poem writing is the best that I?ve seen. ?A poems tone is its manner of speaking, its mood. It can be neutral, of course, but often it will be colored and shaded to suggest emotions ? instead of baldly stating them.?
?Robert Frost said ?a good sentence does double duty: it coveys meaning by word and syntax and another by the tone of voice it indicates.?
Wallace Stevens calls the spin and irony of tone ?the beauty of innuendos? without the
ugliness of sarcasm.
There are six exercises listed for practicing tone and several other exercises: 1) Eavesdrop in a public place and try to place shadings in different voices some pleading some pressuring, some dismissive, some adoring and a few other particulars 2) Sometimes a poem needs to be ?toned down.? Replace ?Buzzwords ?(like ?heartache?) with images and unexpected phrases. Make it more neutral and objective and a few other particulars 3) See red, feel blue, be green with envy, or yellow with cowardice. Be funny, serious. Be quiet, be loud. Be polite, be obscene. Talk like cop, or a shrink, or a barfly. Do these as you choose a scene or person or object to describe and describe this in short bursts (only three or four lines each), talk about your subject in as many different tones of voice as you can come up with 4) Read a variety poems in an Anthology. Sum each one up in a word in a phrase: ?hardboiled,? ?soppy,? ?inquisitive,? ?professional,? ?wisecracking,? ?,?legalistic,? and a few others 5) fill in the blank ?It?s ironic that___________________.? Then Write a poem about the irony an 6) Start with an audience instead of a subject addressing you?re: boss, your significant other, or a politician.
