Writing poetry does not
come easy for me, but that does not mean I don’t occasionally try my hand at
penning a few verses.
My poetry collection
numbers close to 100 books. It intrigues
me so some of those books are on the craft of writing poetry.
This week’s “how to write
a better poem” suggestion comes from Georgia Heard’s Awakening the Heart. It is a
technique she uses with students called the Six-Room-Poem that I found
amazingly helpful.
You take a sheet of paper
and fold it into six boxes and position the paper landscape, three boxes on top
and three boxes on the bottom.
In box 1: describe thoroughly
an image or a memory you want to use as the subject of your poem. You are not
writing a poem yet, so just fill this box with description. If you are stuck,
hold on, since you might get more ideas as you fill the other boxes.
In box 2: describe the
quality of light or shadow or colors about your topic.
In box 3: describe your
topic/image using the following senses: smell, taste, sound or lack of, and touch.
In box 4: what questions
does your image elicit, or what questions might it ask you? You could also use
this square to note quotes or verses from other sources that fit your
image/topic.
In box 5: what feelings/imagery
come from observing or describing your topic?
In box 6: go over the
five boxes and find an image, word, verse, sentence that stands out. Write it in this box three times.
Go back over the six
boxes and fill in more descriptions and images, build imagery using similes and
metaphors or other figures of speech.
If you have been
successful, you now have enough material to write your poem.
I have included a sample
of what my six-room-poem looks like.
Flamenco
The sun gathers her
skirts
pinks and purples.
Her song over
she steps off the stage.
Blinding brightness
shafts of light
cling to the end of her dance.
A magnificent spectacle
Her beauty on mute.
She
throws her arms into the air,
smiles,
And darkness follows.
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