Know it from a Poet

So you’re sitting down in an endless field reading a book on gravity—maybe the classic Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. And you see a pure, soft apple—once snug under the nurture of a tree—fall and collide with the cruel Earth, its insides dissolving and becoming one with the soil.

 

You may gasp, “Woah, that’s poetic”.

 

But what exactly makes something “poetic”? And how can we use that knowledge to write better poetry? This is Know it from a Poet, where you can get the earliest, most latest poetry tips.

 

Many people might have chosen a different word to describe the above scene: ironic. Seeing an apple fall while reading a book on gravity is quite the heavy callback to Newton. But irony isn’t the right word here, as irony refers to something happening against a reasonable expectation. You shouldn’t expect all apples in the universe to seize their tumble because you’ve opened a book on gravity. If they did, that would be ironic.

 

People commonly misuse the word irony in these scenarios where situations resonate with a context. For example, say the head of a clay statue of Marie Antoinette falls off after a long day of rain. Some would call that ironic, but I’d argue this isn’t proper: nothing in the scenario is against what you’d expect. But there must be a word that captures the humour and satisfaction of that event happening—something that describes a simple event having a deeper cultural or metaphorical significance. That word is poetic.

 

Poems are all about bringing (or sometimes, losing) meaning to simple things. A river flowing becomes a metaphor for the fluidity of life, and a beetle peacefully dying becomes a metaphor for the rigidity of fluids. Something is poetic when there seems to be a greater meaning than what initially meets the eye.

 

Poetry isn’t its own thing—it’s a relation between two things. Poetry isn’t written, but made into. I’m at the verge of becoming sciolistic, so I’ll elaborate.

 

When we write fiction, we’re creating a series of events. But in poetry, we’re trying to connect physical or immaterial concepts to a series of events. Poets take the scenes a novelist writes and transform them into something poetic. So how can we make a simple scene poetic? One tip is to contrast abstractions of a scene and physicalities of a scene. Take this scene for example:

 

“Hardy walked through a field of summer sunflowers waiting for Jane to arrive. His wrists sweat as he rehearsed the words in his head multiple times, each time messing something up. He couldn’t mess it up this time if he wanted her to say yes.”

 

This is a scene focusing on a boy, Hardy, wanting to confess his feelings for a girl of interest, Jane. How can we turn this into poetry? Let’s focus on the abstract parts of this scene—nervousness, love, and youth. The physical elements of this scene are summer, sweating, and walking. Now we can contrast these together.

 

Notice something interesting—it’s summer and Hardy’s wrists are sweating. His sweat can be explained by feeling the summer heat or having nerves. Let's lean into the latter explanation. We can accomplish this by subverting expectations: Instead of sweating in the summer, what if he shivers? We can then contrast this feeling with the warm, positive aspects of heat and love. Let’s try it out.

 

A boy waits in a hot summer field

Yet shivers in the wave of angst

Waiting to confess

Everything.

 

His mind

                   is

                        running

 

Yet time is frozen.

She cannot be taking any longer

 

The sunflowers receive warmth

Yet his heart is still cold

Untouched

Dormant

Waiting to be bloomed

By her arrival

 

We’ve told the same scene with poetry! By relying on abstract ideas and connecting them with physical things, we've made this scene poetic. But can we merge these two scenes to make a kind of fiction-poetry hybrid? Let’s try it out!

 

“Hardy walked through a field of summer sunflowers, waiting for Jane to arrive. His wrists shivered in the summer heat as he hastily rehearsed the words in his head multiple times. His heart was cold, untouched by the love of someone else—everything had to be perfect if he wanted her to say yes. Hardy then looked at the sunflowers, noticing how they all pointed towards the light, unrehearsed and unafraid to receive the Sun’s love. So Hardy dropped his lines in the back of his mind, closed his eyes and smiled. He wouldn’t be afraid to receive Jane’s love. All he had to do was ask for it.”

 

By incorporating elements of poetry in our writing, we just made this scene more vivid! You’ll notice that lots of great novels do this to ground their story visually, evoke emotion, and sustain engagement. So even if you’re a fiction writer, it still helps to know how to write a good poem. The line between fiction and poetry may not be as sharp as we think. 

 

It takes us back to the field from before, seeing the poor apple fall from the tree. Though the apple splats on the hard surface of the Earth, it learns so much more about the world than spending its days motionless on a tree. So try to write more poetry—it’s okay if you hit the ground hard. You’ll learn a lot more than if you stayed on that tree.

 

Callbacks are nice,

-The Rare Poet :)