Write Like a Poet!

FYI "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"
is my all-time favorite love poem.

It's the end of National Poetry Month, and I think it's worth reading what some of the great poets have said in order to help get inspired for our own writing. Because, really,  Baudelaire nailed it. All writing should aspire to be poetry. Tight. Aware of the way consonants and vowels roll off the tongue. A composed rhythm of sentences. A picture of life that makes us see the eternal truths in life. So here we go... :)

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Robert Frost

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

John Keats

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

T. S. Eliot

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

Carl Sandburg

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

W.B. Yeats

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

National Poetry Month!!!

As a way to celebrate National Poetry Month, I've been posting quick poetry lectures online for my students (flipping my classroom a bit), and I'm finding that the more I read poetry out loud, the more lyrical my prose writing becomes (still not as lyrical as I'd like, of course, but better). Anyway...I encourage you all to celebrate in your own way, but I highly recommend that it is out loud and often. You just might be surprised at the euphonious results that trickle down into your own writing.

Here is a link to one of my ridiculous video lectures on Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (an interpretation for high school students where I am sure to add a side note they rightfully mocked about not taking heroin) in case anyone has that much time on his hands. :).


XOXO
--Lauren
aka Miss M.