How does one write ‘like a poet’? Maybe we should start by asking which poet we want to write like. After all, writing like Dr. Seuss will be different to writing like William Shakespeare. Penning a spoken word, different to a bouncing limerick. But there are some commonalities to poetic writing that could help us write better.

For one, poets write with their ears.

To write like a poet means listening out for the way your words sound, and how these sounds work together. Consider ‘one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish’. Say it out loud and notice how well it flows. Why? Maybe it’s the repeating ‘sh’ sound, or the constant monosyllables. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a list? 

Obviously it’s a combination of these factors, and that’s the big takeaway. Poetry knows how to make sounds work together to create rhythm; it knows how to make sounds build pacing and pulls its reader along for the ride. 

Consider a master of rhythm, Frank O’Hara. Here is his poem, Mayakovsky (1957):

I love you. I love you,

but I’m turning to my verses

and my heart is closing

like a fist.

More repetition! Splashed with some enjambment – ‘like a fist’ – and elevated by some jolting punctuation. Think of that first full stop: ‘I love you.’ How sure it is, how confident. Then notice how the repetition builds on the sentiment with a jolting, ‘but’. I love you….but. Ouch. No one has more power over punctuation than a poet, no one knows how it can change the mood of a sentence. What can we learn? Well, there’s that all-too-important use of punctuation. Think about how that changes the rhythm of this sentence. Then, there’s character. Think about what these jolting rhythms might mean about how this love-lorn person is feeling. There’s a mood, in other words, evoked by these clear and intentional punctuation marks and this mood tells us what our character is feeling more than anything ever could. It’s ‘show don’t tell’ on X-games mode.

Guy Webster