Poetry and fiction are very different, but the elements that go into making a good poem can help authors of all types improve their writing.
There are few similarities between poetry and longer-form writing like short stories, novels, or non-fiction books. However, they all use language. Poetry is probably the most language-conscious form of writing, in part because of its concision, but also because poetry is more attentive to the sound and rhythm of language.
Poetry is also often more suggestive than prose, which generally recounts narrative stories. Poetry often uses using images and metaphors, and frequently focuses on emotion, mood, or isolated moments.
All these characteristics of poetry can be valuable tools for writers of other types of works. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, short stories or memoirs, learning about how to write poetry can help you hone your language skills and improve your writing.
A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver
If you want to learn about the way poetry works – the elements that make up a poem – this is a great place to start. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winner Mary Oliver distills the basics of poems in this 130-page book with little fluff, but with loads of insight. She discusses rhythm, meter, different poetic forms, imagery, and more in a no-nonsense style. The goal of this book is not so much to make you a poet, but to show how poems are made. Oliver teaches the craft of poetry, not the art – which is harder to teach – and she says, “it is craft […] that carries an individual’s ideas to the edge of familiar territory.”
The sounds of words are important in poetry, and Oliver spends some time discussing the different vowels and consonants of English and how they work together to build the atmosphere of a poem. While writers of fiction and non-fiction may not care about rhythm and meter – but more on that below – mastering the sounds of words can help improve the flow of every author’s writing.
Rules of the Dance, by Mary Oliver
While A Poetry Handbook is about all the basic elements of poetry, Rules of the Dance focuses on metrical verse and expands on some chapters in the earlier book. Much contemporary poetry is written in free verse – lines that don’t have consistent rhythm and that don’t rhyme – but there are valid reasons for learning about meter and scansion. Understanding these elements can be very helpful to writers of fiction and non-fiction.
You will learn how a line of metrical poetry roughly corresponds to the number of words one can speak in a single breath. And you will learn about scansion, the way word stress and rhythm combine to form lines of poetry. These two elements can help you write dialogue that sounds more realistic and compose sentences that flow more smoothly.
After teaching about these poetic elements, the second half of the book is An Anthology of Metrical Poems, which lets you see these features in action.
I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like: A Comprehensive Compilation of History’s Greatest Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes by Dr. Mardy Grothe
Poetry involves using words in unique ways, offten through metaphor, simile, and analogy. In A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver has a brief chapter on Imagery, which discusses the basics of these linguistic elements, but not in any depth. While I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like is not a book about writing poetry, as a compilation of these imagistic forms of language, it can help writers understand how they function.
There is always the risk of going overboard, laying it on thick, or beating a dead horse when using this sort of phrase and veering into the realm of cliché. Carefully chosen metaphors, similes, and analogies are like tidbits of a tasting menu of creative writing. Reading the examples in this book can help prime your mind toward this way of thinking and inspire you to judiciously use these elements in your writing.
A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry, by Robert Hass
Form poems are poems with constraints. Most people are familiar with the sonnet and the haiku, but other forms include the ode, the elegy, and the georgic. While metrical poetry has its own constraints, these forms add other types of constraints, such as rhythmic patterns (like AABA) or limitations in the number of syllables (as with haiku). As Hass says, “the essential expressive gestures inside those forms, forms that have held traditional shapes of grief, rage, longing, spite, adoration, have persisted, and it seemed that there could be ways of understanding the persistence of those shapes of thought and feeling.”
While prose has different constraints than poetry, limitations can free authors to write more creatively. Understanding how these forms work and how form is related to certain types of thought can bring insight into any type of writing.
Poetry anthologies
The best way to learn how to write poetry is to read poems, poetry anthologies can help you discover poems written over time by authors you may not be familiar with. Some examples:
The Library of America anthologies American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century offer exhaustive selections of a diverse range of American authors. The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1950 claims to include “The best of English poetry in one volume.”
There are many contemporary poetry anthologies and annual selections to choose from, and there are plenty of anthologies of poetry from different cultures and languages as well. You can discover different ways of thinking and images from other cultures and other times, and understand how poets over time have been influenced by these works from languages different than their own.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.