Guides to Writing Poetry

A friend of mine was recently doing some research on poetry and I remembered I'd written some guides for the now sadly defunct Wise Badger website. These are here. There are sections on rhythm, ballads, villanelles and cinquains.


1. A Guide To Poetic Rhythm

Poetry has much in common with music. It is soothing to the ear, if that is its intent. It can stir the passions. It can alter your mood instantly. Music is essentially a combination of pitch, rhythm, meaning and the shape of the sound. Poetry has all these elements but pitch.

Because of this, the rhythm and the shape of the sound need to be more interesting for a poem to be successful. The need for meaning depends on the style of the poem. People like Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Wendy Cope did without it on occasion.

I am not going to go into all the details of what differentiates a trochee from an iamb from an anapest. These are just technical terms for the type of rhythm a poem possesses, but anyone interested in a list of the jargon can find it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_%28prosody%29. What I am going to do is give you some ideas how to use them.

The basic unit of measurement in poetry is a 'foot'. The 'metre', the equivalent of the time signature in music, is made up of the type of foot and the number of them per line. The 'iambic pentameter' you might have heard from school just means there are five 'iambs' (an unstressed beat followed by a stressed one) per line.

So what are stressed and unstressed beats? These are the syllables that make up your words. Some are stressed and some aren't. Let's take the start of Shakespeare's most famous sonnet as an example:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

There is a recognisable rhythm to these words. All the way, it is an unstressed beat followed by a stressed one (the 'iamb') and there are five of them per line. If the stressed syllables are emboldened and the unstressed ones are not, we get the following:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Being a musician, I tend to think of this in terms of drum patterns, with a kick drum for the unstressed beats and a snare for the stressed ones. If it helps you to think of it in Morse code, dots can be unstressed syllables and dashes stressed ones. So this rhythm is :

. - . - . - . - . -

As a rule of thumb, the key for rhythm in poetry, as it is in music, is consistency. Once a rhythmic pattern has been established, the poem is often stronger for adhering to it. This is more important when writing lyrics than poems, to be honest. There are times when you would want to change metre for effect. For example, this limerick:

There once was a bard from Japan

Whose limericks never would scan.

When told it was so,

He replied, "Yes, I know,

But I always try to fit as many words into the last line as I possibly can.

But the basic rhythm is as follows:

.-. .-. .-

.-. .-. .-

.-. .-

.-. .-

.-. .-. .-

This is the standard limerick metre. It is not enough to get the number of syllables right. They also have to be the right type of syllables.

What I find helpful is to know, when I'm writing a poem, what the underlying rhythm is. Generally, once I've got the the first two lines, it tells me enough about the metre and rhyme scheme to continue.

Let's write a quick couplet as an example:

Feel the rhythm in your feet

This is as follows: -. -. -. -

So we need a similar rhythm for the second line. How about ''the poem's heart is the poem's beat'? This is .-. -.. -. -

There were a couple of extra unstressed beats in that, but that's fine. That often happens when a drummer is playing, and drummers don't know much but they do know rhythm! It's just a couple of extra beats and that makes the poem more interesting. The important thing is that the stressed beats (the snare drum equivalent) are in the right place.

This also works because the additional unstressed beats (the opening 'the' and the 'is the') were short syllables. Some take longer to say than others. 'Heart' for example, is a word to luxuriate over. It's always a good idea to read your poems over a beat – fingers snapping, hands clapping, the slapping of your thigh if you're getting into a country rhythm, etc. This ensures that everything is in the right place. Regional variations of pronunciation should be taken into account. I'm a Londoner, so 'bath' is pronounced 'barf'. Were I from somewhere more Northern, if might be 'baff'. This is the difference between a long syllable and a short one.

There are poems to be recited aloud, and poems to be read on the page. Bear in mind when writing that repetition of rhythm gives the reader more of a chance to understand what's going on. However, like progressive rock music, only complexity can satisfy a more discerning reader. Like so many things, the key is to know your audience.

2. How To Write a Poetic Ballad

There is probably no word that appeals to me as a poet while simultaneously repelling me as a musician as much as 'ballad' does. As a musician, it conjures up images of schmaltzy, sentimental, over-emoted slow tempo songs about love. Perhaps uniquely, putting the word 'power' in front of it doesn't make things better at all. As a poet, however, 'ballad' reminds me of some wonderful poems, a continuous tradition that goes back to the 13^th century and was itself influenced by earlier works such as Beowulf. To most people, a ballad is just a song you can slow dance to. But that definition has only been the musical one, and is only about a hundred years old. So what is a ballad in poetical terms?

As you might expect from something that has been going on for hundreds of years with only poetic fashion to regulate it, there are conventions rather than rules. Most ballads tend to be made of quatrains (four line stanzas), although the likes of Oscar Wilde subverted this with 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', which had six line stanzas. Most ballads in Europe follow a pattern of alternating lines of tetrameter (four beats to the line) and trimeter (three beats) but in places like Spain, the tradition was more for eight beats. The tetrameter / trimeter structure was so that ballads could be sung over any number of folk tunes.

One thing that seems to be consistent with ballads everywhere, though, is that they have a narrative. They tell a story. This story can be whatever you like: comic, tragic, religious, romantic. There aren't really any bounds. The alternating lines tend to rhyme, although even that is not a rule. Spain, breaking with tradition, used consonance (like alliteration, except the repeated consonant is not at the start of the word). Ballads also tend to be long and detailed. Some can have dozens of stanzas. They are more concerned with telling a story than the sort of images that could be savoured in a shorter poem. If, say, a haiku is a watercolour, and a limerick is a seaside postcard, a ballad may well be a movie.

I would love to tell you a story as an example of what I mean. To be honest, it was my wife's birthday last night, I'm still hungover and coming up with a new story is beyond my current powers! But I am someone who likes fairy tales in space, so I'm going to have a go at writing a ballad based on some scenes from the Star Wars movies.

I'm going to follow the more common European traditions and use four line stanzas. I will use the standard 'ballad metre' of iambic tetrameter followed by iambic trimeter ('te TUM te TUM te TUM te TUM' followed by 'te TUM te TUM te TUM').

First we should set the scene:

A long, long time ago,

In a galaxy far away,

A young heroic farmboy prince

Was bored of baling hay.

Welcome, Luke Skywalker! You are now the hero of this ballad. Many ballads tell the tale of a character, often a doomed one. And Luke did have his moments of peril.

His name was Luke, his hair was blond,

Tattooine was his world.

There wasn't much to do at night

With two suns and no girls.

Eagle-eyed readers will spot that I borrowed the last line from Blue Harvest, the Family Guy special on Star Wars. But this is actually in the ballad tradition. There is some heated debate by experts as to whether ballads were even written by one person or came from a whole community, like a football chant. But even those who believe they were written by one person agree that they were written for and often based on the community. Tiny Scottish villages have a whole heritage of traditional ballads just based on their history, which battles they fought, etc.

But back to our ballad. We know a little about Luke now. A typical role playing character, basically, a humble innocent unaware of his destiny but itching for more. What happens next? Well, the thing that really rocked his world was the arrival of the droids, R2D2 and C3PO. They were pivotal characters, the only ones to appear in all six movies, and responsible for much of the humour of the franchise. So how do we get them into the ballad?

The pedal bin and golden man,

As camp as Larry Grayson,

Ended up with Uncle Owen,

Luke's closest relation.

I don't like the last line, to be honest, but like rap, many traditional ballads took some terrible liberties with rhymes and there are many examples of words that are seemingly included just because they fit, so I think I'm consistent with the form.

I have introduced the droids by nicknames because I think they give you an affinity with a character. It makes you feel you know them better, especially if it's the sort of affectionate mocking you get among friends. And R2D2 does look like a pedal bin.

So poor Luke is still stuck, having to wait to go to space academy until after the harvest, not understanding it's probably for his own good and angry with those who protect him. To make this seem more immediate, to try and make the reader empathise more, I'm going to write this in the present tense. Also, 'wanted' would have been too many syllables:

He wants to join the rebels but

He's still stuck on the farm.

Uncle Owen keeps him there

To keep him out of harm.

And then the Merlin of the piece arrives, the almost immortal Obi Wan Kenobi. R2D2 had escaped and went looking for him in the desert. The force is strong with that one:

The pedal bin had slipped a cog

And flew across the sand.

Luke went to investigate

But ran into a band

Of sand people. Thankfully,

Obi Wan attacked.

He drove them off and rescued Luke

And took him to his shack.

This technique of spreading a sentence across stanzas is called 'enjambment' and can be effective in building tension during passages with action in them. It might not be something found in the more traditional ballads, but the ballad form is still evolving, still being used by a new generation of poets. This is my first ballad and I'm having a ball.

But back to Luke. He now discovers his father was a Jedi, gets given a light sabre and instantly believes everything a complete stranger tells him about a religion he's never heard of. But that makes him sound less heroic, so we'll leave it out.

Obi Wan dressed like a monk

And sounded like dementia.

But Luke had heard his destiny

And lusted for adventure.

These are not the sort of rhymes I use in any other poetry I write. But I think they fit with a ballad. There is something declamatory about them. Like the limerick, the ballad has its own rhythm that lends itself to immodest rhyming, at least in this metre and style.

It's probably time to give R2D2 his real name. At this point, he plays the hologram he had refused to show Luke. To continue with our ballad:

R2D2 (pedal bin)

Had played a DVD:

On holographic desert air

Was Princess Leia's plea.

I reversed the usual order of the last two lines to put it into the style of Yoda, another character in the Star Wars universe. The small green syntactically challenged Jedi, he is.

'Help me please, oh Obi Wan,

The hour of need is nigh.

Meet me here in Alderan

Before we all must die'.

'Die' is always a good word to end a line with. Everything about it screams finality.

The impassioned speech of the princess brings a bit of melodrama to the proceedings, which was another staple of the ballad tradition. At a time before radio, TV, videogames, etc, and where there was no facility for playing music without playing the instruments, ballads were the soap opera of their day. This is the reason so many traditional songs are quite grisly in their depiction of murders, executions and the like. One way or another, the dark side has always entertained us.

And so have ballads. And they still do. I've been having a great time writing this. You should try it. Pick a story you like and rewrite it in verse. Find inspiration in the newspapers. Writing just this bit has got me thinking about other poems I want to write. Maybe there is even a place for an epic ballad saga based on the lives of the Skywalkers, their droids and all the space folk they meet on their many adventures through the galaxies.

But it is not here. I realise now that there is no way I would be able to write the whole of Star Wars in ballad form for this article, so I'll stop right now. I don't know why I thought I'd be able to. I blame Old Speckled Hen.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas as to what a ballad is and how to write one. They're fun to do and like any creative act, writing a ballad opens up neural pathways that can keep the brain working, prolonging active life.

But for those of you who have somehow avoided seeing Star Wars and want to know what happens, this is the whole saga in abridged ballad form:

The Jedi only fight for good,

The Empire do not.

Things explode, the tale gets told,

The good guys end on top.

 

3  How To Write a Villanelle

The villanelle is arguably the poetic form that has the most 'rules'. The poem must be exactly 19 lines long, 5 tercets (3 line stanzas) followed by a quatrain (a 4 line stanza). Of these 19 lines, 8 of them are the same 2 lines repeated 4 times each. The first line of the first stanza becomes the last line of the second and fourth stanzas, and the third line of the sixth. The third line of the first stanza becomes the last line of the third and fifth stanzas and the fourth line of the sixth. Only 2 rhymes are allowed.

Villanelles tend to be about loss, but there are examples of villanelles on all sorts of subjects. 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' (below) by Dylan Thomas, written to his dying father, is probably the most famous one. But give it time - one day, somebody might be writing an article like this about your poem! You just have to write it...

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

What makes the villanelle so tricky to write is the need to have the repeated lines and the fact that only two rhymes are allowed (words that rhyme with 'night' and those that rhyme with 'day'). For this reason, at the planning stage (and you will need one), it is important to come up with lines that you don't mind hearing over and over again, and also to make sure that there are sufficient rhymes for them. Don't be shy about using a rhyming dictionary if necessary – there are lots of them available online. Also, be creative with other writing aids – I used a spreadsheet to write my villanelle. It seemed the best way to insist that rhymes got repeated in the right places. It also meant that changes to the repeated lines were instantly reflected in the rest of the poem. Bear in mind also that, as the first line of the first stanza becomes the last line of two others, it needs to be a line that stands on its own.

When I reread Thomas' poem, I wanted to write a villanelle of my own. I booted up Excel instead of Word and got the repeated lines in the right places. It is very easy to link one cell to another just by entering '=' and the reference for the cell you want to copy. That got the structure in place. I tried several repeated lines before deciding on 'This is it. This is the end' and 'And now I've lost a lover and a friend'. I had already decided I wanted to write about the end of a relationship, these lines would not be overly jarring if repeated frequently, 'end' has lots of rhyming words, and the repeated 'this is' was a deliberate echo of Thomas' repeated 'rage' in his villanelle.

So now I had the structure and the repeated lines in place, I just had to flesh it out. The first stanza was almost finished – as it contained both repeated lines, it was only the middle line that was needed, and at this stage it didn't need to rhyme with anything. I tried a few lines and ended up with 'For many years, I've tried to make you stay'. It fitted nicely between the two lines I already had and like 'end', 'stay' has many rhymes.

And that basically was it! I just tried new lines that fit, one stanza at a time. Because I already had the structure and repetitions formalised in Excel, it was impossible to get it wrong.

I was quite pleased with the final poem. This is as follows:

This is it. This is the end.

For many years, I've tried to make you stay

And now I've lost a lover and a friend.

I've made mistakes. I've tried to make amends

And in return, you tried to make me pay.

This is it. This is the end.

I've changed so much and no more can I bend:

I think my whole persona's gone astray

And now I've lost a lover and a friend.

My love for you was strong: it did ascend

To heaven, but now it's gone away.

This is it. This is the end.

I do not mean to anger or offend

But you and I are now as night and day

And now I've lost a lover and a friend.

For too long we've attempted to pretend

That everything could carry on OK.

This is it. This is the end

And now I've lost a lover and a friend.

The villanelle can be a lot of fun to write, and like anything difficult, you really feel like you've accomplished something when it does all work out. Happy writing!

4 - How To Write a Cinquain

The cinquain is an interesting poetic form. Like the haiku and tanka, on which it is based, it emphasises economy and adherence to syllabic rules. The cinquain was invented by American poet Adelaide Crapsey in a posthumous collection from 1915, It derives its name from the five line structure of the basic form.

There are many types of cinquain to choose from, but they all basically follow the same pattern – one line has (say) two syllables, the next four, the next six, etc, The number of syllables alters from line to line in accordance with the rules of the individual form.

A good example of Mrs Crapsey's cinquains is 'November Night':

Listen...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall

This basic cinquain follows a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. But we're not going to do a basic one. That would be boring. We're going to push the boat out and write a 'garland cinquain', which seems to be the hardest of all. A man's reach must exceed his grasp, to quote Robert Browning.

The garland cinquain is made up of six separate cinquains, the sixth one derived from the previous five. So the first line of the sixth one comes from the first line of the first, the second line of the sixth from the second line of the second and so forth.

Like the villanelle, a planning process is useful. It is better to write the sixth cinquain first and base the earlier ones around it.

How do we do that then? Well, a good place to start would be to come up with a theme. This is usually the hard part. I find it somewhat daunting to sit down with a blank page and every subject in the world as an option. I work better with parameters. Maybe you do too. So as I'm writing this for Wise Badger, I'm going to make this poem about the wisdom of badgers.

The first line of the last cinquain has to have two syllables. By a fortunate coincidence, 'badgers' has two syllables. So I'm going to make that my first line. We have established a cast of characters. What can we say about the badgers?

Well, we want to emphasise their wisdom, and we have to do it in four syllables. So how about 'wiser than owls'?

The next line needs to be six syllables long. The previous line was unexpected: owls are generally considered rather wise. So we need to justify this statement. What makes badgers wiser than owls? I needed some time with Wikipedia to work this out, but the badger has some advantages over the owl. For one thing, a badger can eat an owl but an owl cannot eat a badger. So I suggest: 'can pluck birds from the trees'.

The following line is eight syllables long. So far, we have: 'badgers / wiser than owls / can pluck birds from the trees'. What can the owl do instead? Not much, really. For such a wise bird, it lives mainly on a diet of vermin. So let's reflect that. 'But owls can only chew on rats' seems to sum this up. We need a two syllable line to finish the sixth cinquain, so let's just add 'and voles'. We now have the following:

Badgers,
Wiser than owls,

Can pluck birds from the trees

But owls can only chew on rats

And voles.

We're on our way. It may not seem like we've done much, but we're actually 33% complete. We have written five lines, all of which will be repeated, making ten in total, and the whole poem will be thirty lines long.

The first line of the first cinquain will be the first line of the sixth one we just wrote. So it starts with 'badgers'. A good place to start, given the subject matter. There are no rules that we need to adhere to for the remaining lines, except for the syllable count. So line two needs to have four syllables.

What else do we know about badgers? They're white, black and grey in colour. By another remarkable coincidence, 'white, black and grey' would fill the four syllables we need quite nicely. So let's add that.

Comparisons often work well in poetry. What else is white, black and grey? An elderly nun springs to mind. Also a well read newspaper. We need a six syllable line, followed by an eight and a two. So I suggest: 'like an elderly nun / or a newspaper, smeared by thumbs / and time'. That seems to work.

Cinquain number one is therefore:

Badgers,

White, black and grey,

Like an elderly nun

Or a newspaper, smeared by thumbs

And time

Cinquain number two needs to have 'wiser than owls' as its second line, but no-one says the punctuation has to stay the same. I'm going to rephrase it as a question and make the first line 'what are', so we have 'what are / wiser than owls?'. As it's a question, we should probably answer it. There are many things wiser than owls. At least some humans, I would imagine. I've never understood why the owl was considered wise when 'bird brained' is an insult. Who are some famously wise humans? I don't want to get into whether Socrates was wiser than Nietzsche, or Keats more wise than Shakespeare so I'll limit myself to job descriptions. The following six and eight syllable lines suggested themselves immediately but seemed to require a more defiant statement. Luckily the two syllable line was available.

Philosophers, poets,

And, believe it or not, badgers.

They are.

Cinquain two is now complete as follows:

What are

Wiser than owls?

Philosophers, poets,

And, believe it or not, badgers.

They are.

Getting into my stride now. Only another twelve lines to write and we've finished this. It's already 60% complete.

The previous line seems to require some explanation. We need to come up with a way to justify the grouping together of badgers with the loftiest ideals of the human psyche. Back to Wikipedia. One thing that impressed me about the badger was that, in North America it sometimes eats coyotes, sometimes is eaten by them but has been seen working co-operatively with the wolf-like creatures when they hunt. This intrigued me.

The only other constraint on this cinquain is that the third line must be 'can pluck birds from trees'. Hmmm.

How about 'badgers / can run with wolves / can pluck birds from the trees'. That showcases their occasionally co-operative natures and their tree-climbing skills. The next line, the eight syllable one, will probably need to start with 'and'. So how about 'and work with species not their own / to hunt'.

The third cinquain is now complete:

Badgers

Can run with wolves

Can pluck birds from the trees

And work with species not their own

To hunt

This may not seem like a big deal. Humans hunt with dogs and horses. The badger / coyote relationship seems a lot more democratiic though. Could this be a sign of wisdom?

By this time, I had got the rhythm stuck in my head and words were just coming out that fit without much conscious thought. I was pleased with this:

We hunt

With dog and horse

But we dominate them

The badgers just collaborate

Wisely

Then I remembered that the fourth line had to be 'but owls can only chew on rats'. I thought of the badger's omnivore status and came up with the following:

The gut

Of a badger

Can process many things

But owls can only chew on rats.

Real wise.

Another badger skill, especially if you're a honey badger, is to shrug off the venom from the snakes you eat. They have the resistance to toxins of a beat poet. The honey badger has been described as 'the most fearless animal in the world'. Its willingness to fight, and fight dirty, is a staple of YouTube links around the world.

'Honey / badgers are brave' fits the requirements of the first two lines of the fifth cinquain. They are natives of Africa and have eaten from animals as wild as lions. Their taste for exotic meat could be represented as 'fearless in their hunger / for more exotic fare than mice / and voles'. The 'and voles' was required by the form.

So now we have a finished Garland Cinquain. This is the final piece:

Badgers,

White, black and grey,

Like an elderly nun

Or a newspaper, smeared by thumbs

And time

What are

Wiser than owls?

Philosophers, poets,

And, believe it or not, badgers.

They are.

Badgers

Can run with wolves

Can pluck birds from the trees

And work with species not their own

To hunt

The gut

Of a badger

Can process many things

But owls can only chew on rats.

Real wise.

Honey

Badgers are brave,

Fearless in their hunger

For more exotic fare than mice

And voles.

Badgers,
Wiser than owls,

Can pluck birds from the trees

But owls can only chew on rats

And voles.

There are other types of cinquain than the 2-4-6-8-2 format shown here. A reverse cinquain goes 2-8-6-4-2. A mirror is a normal cinquain followed by a reverse one. A butterfly cinquain goes 2-4-6-8-2-8-6-4-2. And a crown cinquain is five cinquains combined to make a longer poem.

The cinquain is an interesting exercise in writing. If you are writing something in blank verse, where there are a specific number of syllables on each line, writing some cinquains can get you into the flow of counting beats. Like the haiku, it can be considered both an end in itself and a means to other writing.