Creative Writing that Empowers You, as Poet, and Engages Others

Over 17 Issues, Please See Me has accepted poetry of many different types and styles, by poets from a wide variety of lived experience and varying levels of writing training. We welcome work from everyone with a health-related story. Over time we have had opportunities to help patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals expand their audience by developing their writing. Those who write for a living know that getting published requires hard work and multiple drafts. The reward can be a greater sense of fulfillment, the knowledge that you have accomplished something for yourself, and the hope that your words have touched others. The poems selected for Issue 17 – “Free” and for the Mental Health Awareness writing contest offer many examples of effective poetic techniques. It’s a pleasure to use two of these poems to say a few words about craft, specifically metaphor and rhythm.

In “Stage Makeup,” Meg Taylor uses vivid metaphors running throughout her poem, side by side, to compare quietly living with chronic pain to an actor preparing to play a role, and to a soldier girding for battle. “The truth is my body is an understudy, always rehearsing for collapse. And still I pull on slacks like armor. Tap my keyboard like I’m not unraveling cell by cell. . . . [I] Build a life that doesn’t make room for being sick because no one ever gave me the script for slowing down.”  Over the years, it has been humbling, to listen to writers express their physical or psychic pain. Though we can’t experience another’s pain directly, in Taylor’s poem, we can recognize the value of courage and determination as she seeks to endure what chance has sent her. I admire her for that and because I can also sense her gaining personal strength developing imaginative figurative imagery, shaping her poem draft after draft, then stepping back from it like a painter beholding her creation, eventually placing it in a public place for others to experience.

Even if you write free verse rather than set forms that use a metrical pattern, like  iambic pentameter, recognizing the rhythm of your words and phrases can help you make important decisions. All language inherently has rhythm because of the relative or varying stress of words and syllables. Some take little breath to say and others take more force. If you can recognize the stress patterns of your phrasing, know which syllables carry heavy stress, and which take less, you can begin to pay more attention to the beat of a given line and make adjustments to support and enhance the content you are developing. Many heavily stressed syllables in a line will slow it down somewhat, and the opposite effect is created if there are more lightly stressed syllables in a line where the line will read somewhat faster. If you add punctuation to a line, that slows it down even more; conversely, using less or no punctuation will speed a line up. Making informed decisions about rhythm can subtly impact readers without their even noticing it—though being able to recognize it may enhance their experience and appreciation of your skill as a poet.

To illustrate, I want to refer to Michael Sanders’ poem “Wissahickon Creek.” First though, many of us are familiar with Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the lines that conclude this modern classic:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

We might agree with the common interpretation of Frost’s poem that the speaker, in a rural setting, watching the snow quietly falling in the darkened woods, is experiencing a feeling of loss, maybe even contemplating his own death, but then, realizing his responsibilities to others, he moves on with his life. Regardless of interpretation, however, each of the four lines repeats a pattern of a lightly stressed syllable or word, followed by a more heavily stressed one (da—dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum). It is the standard iambic “foot,”  or unit of measure, marked this way when you are scanning the beats of a line: –/–/–/–/.

Frost’s repeating the pattern four times in a line makes it iambic tetrameter. You don’t need to know that to appreciate the poem. What we can be sure of is that Frost, a consummate American poet of the Twentieth Century, consciously intended keeping things simple, or “regular,” here, without much variation or punctuation in his lines. Perhaps because he meant to recreate the peaceful, almost hypnotic mood of the scene and his speaker. Aside from pondering the meaning of the words, you may literally feel at peace reading them. (If you’re wearing a device on your wrist to measure your pulse right now, your heart rate may be lower and “regular” as well.)

In “Wissahickon Creek,” Michael Sanders presents his father’s death within the context of a complex universe in which change and variation form a constant pattern. Matter comes into existence  and then alters—in the universe on an unimaginably grand scale and on a more personal and painful one, when a loved one dies. Sanders’ poem is a more complicated “scene” than Frost’s, and perhaps because of that  it is also more rhythmically  complex. Adding to the speaker’s affirmation of order and variation, many lines include iambic feet, but there is variation with other syllabic patterns introduced—or variant “feet.” You can see it notably in the climactic stanza that ends the poem. Sanders is a poet who understands how to create distinct rhythms to support meaning. The poem culminates in the act of releasing his father’s ashes into Wissahickon Creek:

My father’s flesh and bones,
Now fire-refined, are greyish powder.
We strew his ashes in the stream,
His dust between our fingers.
Around how many boulders
Will this water flow,
divide, rejoin, divide, rejoin.
before it undivided bears
my father’s body
to the sea?

Can you see or hear the prominent line of iambic tetrameter in this passage? It is this one that describes the movement of the ashes in the water as they flow with it around the boulders to,

divide, rejoin, divide, rejoin.

The distinctive rhythmic flow of the line gives more weight and feeling to the portrayal of his father’s remains as now part of the larger world of nature. Both the words and the rhythm mirror the reality of our lives. His father’s conscious life is over, but his ashes in the water are a reminder that his life—all life–gains greater significance as even a small part of the physical universe. For me, it is the climactic moment of the poem, for it suggests both the speaker’s affirmation of the beauty and mystery of existence, and a son’s acceptance of his father’s passage from his life.

Life is the gift we are given; writing without fear, but with skill and confidence, can be the gift we give to ourselves and others.

*For more extensive discussion of the techniques of poetry writing, I recommend The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the pleasures of Writing Poetry, by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, a good place to start; and A Poet’s Guide to Poetry by Mary Kinzie, a more comprehensive study.

Stephen Granzyk is the Poetry editor of Please See Me.