The Everything Writing Poetry Book (7 page)
How do you appeal to a reader's sense of sight in a poem?
Don't simply write “He is tall.” Use size, shape, color, and any other visual cues. Instead, write, “He ducked his head, covered with a blue ball-cap, and twisted his shoulders to the left, just barely fitting through the dwarfed doorframe.”
Likewise, your sense of sight also determines the way you decorate your home. The art you choose, the carpet you select, and the colors you paint your walls are all efforts to make yourself feel more comfortable in your living space. Additionally, you may be trying to attract and impress guests with the decorations you choose. Think of the poems you write in a similar way. You are trying to create an environment for your reader. By describing visible details, such as the color of a coffee cup or the stillness of a lake, your reader will be prompted to use his own sense of sight as he imagines the scene of your poem in his mind.
Sound
Though visual description is very important when creating a poem, sound details can further heighten a reader's experience. Not only do sounds help a reader experience the scene of a poem in her mind, but they are also important when a poem is being read or recited aloud. In addition to the vision of a red car going by, the reader should also hear the
whizzing
or
roaring
sound it makes as it passes. Just as size, color, and shape create vision, so do pitch, tone, and volume create sound, giving the reader the information she needs to learn about a poem's environment. For example, you may mention a woman's voice, but is the sound high-pitched and harsh or deep and delicate?
To create convincing sounds in your poetry, you need to be aware of the sounds that fill the air around you. Does your keyboard
clack-clack
or
tick-tick
when you type on it? Does the water leaking from a pipe in your house
trickle
down the wall or
splatter
on the floor? Does the wind
whoosh
through the oak tree in your front yard or does it gently
hiss?
These seemingly small distinctions will help your reader imagine the scene you're constructing.
Smell
Your sense of smell directly connects the outer world to the most primitive portions of your brain. As a result, your strongest memories are often associated with smells, and frequently triggered by them. By using strong scent description, you can make a poem an even more personal experience for your reader.
To practice identifying and describing smells, do some cooking. As you stir cookie dough or sauté potatoes, choose three words to describe the aromas of the food you're preparing. You can do a similar exercise anywhere. If you're walking through a park in autumn, try to describe the smell of fallen leaves or the smoke rising from a chimney. Keep a list of these words, and refer to them as you write your poetry.
If you walk into a friend's home and smell pumpkin pie, you might remember with perfect clarity a bright November morning in your mother's kitchen as she prepared a Thanksgiving feast. If you pass a construction site and smell sawdust, it could trigger a memory of your father's workshop. You'll immediately envision the floor covered in wood shavings and an oak rocking chair in midcreation. If you identify these essential details of the moments you are trying to re-create, then your poems will be that much more believable.
Touch
Unlike sight, sound, and smell, the sense of touch requires your body to be in physical contact with the things you perceive. Your sense of touch perceives temperature, pressure, and pain, but it also alerts you to more intimate feelings, like love. A pat on the back from a parent, a kiss from a spouseâthese are physical acts that reveal a level of contact between two people. Describing these sensations can make a poem more real to your reader. For example, show your reader the warm, smooth stroke of a parent's palm on your back or the cushioned softness of a pair of lips reaching out for a kiss.
Be careful not to force all five senses into every poem you write. Poetry does not have to follow a recipe or a mathematical formula. Only include details that will help your reader experience the subject matter. Too many details can negate one another. The imagery you select must be natural to the poem's purpose.
One way to come up with touch descriptions is to use your fingertips. Your fingertips are very sensitive and will give you the most acute sensations when touching objects. So, if you're trying to describe the skin of a peach, touch it with your fingertips instead of the palm of your hand. The descriptions you choose through this method will probably be more intense and realistic than those you would use otherwise.
Taste
The sense of taste is highly connected to the sense of smell. When you smell a pie baking in the oven, your taste buds and salivary glands are aroused. These reactions set in motion an entire chain of reactions in the digestive tractâupon smelling food, your body is already preparing itself to digest it. Once you actually taste the food, you experience one of the most intense sensations possible. Eating delicious foods is pleasurable, and you want to provide your readers with the same pleasure when reading your poem.
Because the sense of taste works inside the mouth, it has to be used thoughtfully. In other words, don't go out of your way to include taste sensations within a poem simply to broaden the reach of your sensory details. However, certain emotional and physical states, like fear or sickness, can bring a taste to the mouth. Describing these states might be a more effective way of capturing them than simply writing “She felt sick.” Instead, write something like “The taste of sickness filled her mouth, like a thousand dirty pennies, as she watched the giant worm moving inside the sink.”
Abstract Versus Concrete
Imagine you are walking through a fine-art gallery. Perhaps you will see a painting comprised of distorted shapes and colors and it will remind you of the anger you recently felt during an argument with a friend. Or a painting of a woman in a boat may resonate with you because you enjoy boating in your spare time. Neither painting is better than the other, but each stimulates a different part of your psyche; one is abstract and the other concrete. You can use these two concepts in your poetry, depending on what kind of emotion you want to express or what response you want to generate in your reader.
Renowned Chinese-American poet Stephen S. N. Liu says that in China, poets have a guaranteed way to test if a poem is too abstract. The poem is given to a child. If the child can't read the poem, then the poem isn't quite right. When the child can read it, it's then considered poetry.
For example, consider Christine Boyka Kluge's poem “Dancing on Ice.” Throughout the poem, Kluge uses concrete language to bring her reader to the place she describes. In stanzas two and three of the poem, which follow, the speaker is entranced by the sounds of the winter night:
This is music beyond hearing
,
a sweet tickle in my ear
.
This is the whistle of warming wind
lifting snowy branchesâ
branches lined with buds
that pulse like thawing hearts
.
The sound makes me dance
on the lake in my nightgown
,
makes me pound my white heels
on the booming, cracking ice
.
I press my palms flat
on the cold smooth glass of it
,
willing upward the sleeping fish
.
From
Teaching Bones to Fly,
Bitter Oleander Press, 2003. Reprinted with the permission of the author
.
Even if you've never danced on a pond of ice beneath a winter sky, you can certainly get a sense of the moment through the poet's use of concrete language. You hear the “whistle” of the “warming wind”; you feel the “cold smooth glass” of the ice. While most of the imagery is concrete, the poem still concludes with an abstract thought: In “willing upward the sleeping fish” the speaker reveals a longing for the spring.
Using Concrete Nouns and Verbs
Nouns and verbs are the most important parts of speech because you must use them to create complete sentences. If you use nouns and verbs that do not work as hard as they should, you will have listless images in your poems. For example, the words
double-axle personnel transport vehicle
can mean almost anything with two axles: a car, a truck, a tank, a plane, a bicycle, or a skateboard.
The word
car
is more concrete but still may lead to confusion. Mention the word
car
to twenty adults, and one will think of a Corvette, one will think of an SUV, one will think of a Toyota Camry. If you want your readers to envision one car specifically, then you must include much more detail, starting with a concrete noun: “Frank drove a blue Lexus ES with gold rally stripes, gold rims, a white leather interior, a ten-speaker Bose 200-watt tuner, tinted windows, and a six-speed manual V-8 engine.” Now each reader can visualize the car the same way. An important effect to note is that once the car has been described, the readers can begin to form ideas about Frank. One can tentatively speculate what Frank does for a living, how much money he earns, where he might live, and so on, all from this simple description of the car.
Another example highlights the need for strong verbs. In the sentence “She made her way across the room,” the reader gains a sense that the character is moving through a crowd of people, but the verb is too vague to really show her movement. If a more concrete verb were used, the sentence would be more engaging. For example: “She slithered through a sea of people to the other side of the room.”
Active and Passive Voice Verbs
Verbs can be used in active or passive voice, and the voice of the verb tells you the relationship between the verb and its subject. The subject of an active voice verb performs the action of the verb. The subject of a passive voice verb receives the action of the verb.
