Playing with Words
March 8, 2015
I was recently sent a copy of Acumen, and I've been dipping into it whenever I've had a free moment this week. It's a literary journal containing mostly poetry and fairly scholarly interviews and reviews. The poetic forms and the content match, following a loose, freer style that fits modern themes. Some of the poems are in a light vein and some cover eternal subjects, but in the issue I've seen there were no traditional forms or classical subjects. Nonetheless, the poems were written with discipline, displaying self-consciousness without straying into pretentiousness.
My poetry tends to come out the way it wants to, more or less. I agonise over the rhythms and tinker with the words to find the right ones, but generally I try to retain the shape in which the poem first occurred to me. That is, I rarely set out to write a sonnet or villanelle etc. The first time I attempted to write a sonnet (for a competition) I found it really difficult. While I was wrestling with making the words fit the form I felt the end result would be artificial and stilted. When I read it again after a few days, it didn't seem too bad, and the competition judges must have agreed, because it won second prize. That was 'Eternal Summer' in the Northampton Literature Group competition.
When I attempt to write traditional poetry, I might not produce great work, but exercising the writing muscles in this way extends my vocabulary and makes my prose leaner–two side benefits that make the effort worthwhile.
My poetry tends to come out the way it wants to, more or less. I agonise over the rhythms and tinker with the words to find the right ones, but generally I try to retain the shape in which the poem first occurred to me. That is, I rarely set out to write a sonnet or villanelle etc. The first time I attempted to write a sonnet (for a competition) I found it really difficult. While I was wrestling with making the words fit the form I felt the end result would be artificial and stilted. When I read it again after a few days, it didn't seem too bad, and the competition judges must have agreed, because it won second prize. That was 'Eternal Summer' in the Northampton Literature Group competition.
When I attempt to write traditional poetry, I might not produce great work, but exercising the writing muscles in this way extends my vocabulary and makes my prose leaner–two side benefits that make the effort worthwhile.
Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Competitions
