How do you manage all the different aspects of writing poetry?
Every time I try to write a poem I find myself incredibly stuck. It feels to me like poetry has so many different aspects- meter, structure, rhyming, lingual aesthetics (not to mention semantics), all crammed into a tightly confined structure (yes I know poetry can be very free style, but I'm interested in well structured, rhyming poetry)- that I can't possibly "optimize" them all simultaneously. It's like I can't achieve a satisfactory quality in one aspect without completely messing up the others: if I write a line that sounds nice, it'll be completely out of meter and will not rhyme with the rest, and I can't make it rhyme without giving up on that nice word I want to use, and if I try to fix the meter without changing the heart of the line then it will most likely stop making sense... It's just an endless struggle.
Do you experience these problems when writing structured poetry? If so, how do you handle them? What would you recommend that I do to start getting over this problem?
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When I was first starting out with poetry (and indeed, even to a certain extent today), I liked to begin with structure/meter, choosing a simple, regular structure and improvising an almost non-sensical set of words which had a good ring to them.
Next, I continued to practice, this time fitting rhymes at the end of my lines. I started with rhyming couplets, moving to longer rhyming stanzas. Now I had somewhat surreal rhyming lines set to a pleasing meter with a good ring to them.
After that - editing, editing, editing. Tweaking the poem rhyme by rhyme, line by line, phrase by phrase, slowly knocking more and more meaning into the lines - cutting everything I couldn't make work and continuously introducing new lines, and new rhymes, until I had a poem which actually came together. After that, keep reading through it, top to bottom, knocking out the dents and areas where it jars or doesn't properly flow.
Finally - you need to be extremely tough on cutting line out lines which just aren't working. If you have three amazing, perfect, flawless lines, but cannot for the life of you find a fourth line to fit, those three lines have to be cut or drastically reworked. Back to the drawing board, time to try again.
Addendum. Keep reading! You can never read enough and if you want to write good poetry, read good (and indeed, bad) poetry.
I cannot ever get enough of listening to musicals. I love them so much - listening to them over and over and over again, then improvising my own words on the end, jotting them down as I sing (or voice recording myself for transcription later), then editing, editing editing until I have the song I want, and swapping out the music.
I appreciate this question is old but maybe this will help someone.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28367. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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1) Stop fixing everything at once.
Write your first round to get it on paper.
On your second round, pick one thing to fix: sharpen your rhymes, for example.
Next round, work on the meter.
Let it sit for a day. Come back with fresher eyes and work on word choice.
2) Kill your darlings.
Editing oneself is one of the hardest parts of writing. What this phrase means is that you have to be willing to let go of the perfectly-turned phrase, the elegantly metered couplet, if it doesn't fit the particular poem it's in. Put it in a slush file and start the line over. Rewrite the entire poem if you can't extract the line that's blocking you.
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