When I found myself holed up at home with my husband and our nine-year-old and twelve-year-old daughters, homeschooling through the COVID-19 Pandemic, simultaneously teaching my 165 students from my laptop, I needed a creative outlet to ease my anxiety.
Having already written a creative writing workbook focusing on older teens and adults last summer, it only seemed fitting for me to write another book geared towards my own children and students’ age group. Engrossed day and night in getting all my preteens and teens through that unsettling era in our lives, I dove headfirst into creating Come Write with Me: POETRY Workbook & Journal (For Tweens & Young Teens).
The result is a standards-based, creative writing book filled with poetic knowledge and practices. This workbook and journal is an ALL-IN-ONE place to pour one’s thoughts and feelings into using prompts, guided practice, fill-in-the-blanks, structured poetry exercises, and more. Only on AMAZON, this softcover book makes a great gift for teachers, students, creative writers, poets, homeschoolers, and friends.
Metaphors got you all floating on air, sliding in and out of reveries, dancing on sunshine and rainbows? This darling poetic device can rock someone’s world or slip in between the cracks of anybody’s ordinary thoughts on paper.
Emily Dickinson nailed it with her take on hope. Of all her poems, this is easily in my top three. Her ability to capture exactly what we all think and feel then weave it into something so clipped and emotional … {sigh}.
Metaphors make great hooks for essays, fodder for existential proclamations, and, of course, sparkling nuggets of gold in an otherwise ordinary poem. For this exercise, wedge one of these bad boys into your verse and watch it go from interesting to provocative. Dig deep and let the words fly.
Here are some metaphorical phrases to get you started.
Metaphors to start a verse:
Their bed of lies …
Your heart of stone …
His iron will drove him to …
The open book that is her life …
Each chapter in his journey …
His words were food for his/her soul …
The storm inside her head kept …
His/her countenance was light and life …
Those words igniting the child’s imagination with blazing …
Metaphors to end a verse:
… broken hope but mended with gold
… hidden in the gray area of our circumstance
… lost in the sea of tranquility
… buried deep in the caverns in his heart
… cherishing all the stars in her eyes
… with all the joy bubbling over
… kindling the fire in their hearts
… reaping the harvest of bitterness
… whispered between the lines of love and hate
Now, go forth my rock-solid poet and smash some oddball thinga-ma-dillies together followed by some enlightening connection we all couldn’t see without your help! I bet you’ve gotten all warm and fuzzy and have already made your own list of metaphorical phrases to put into that phenomenal poetry of yours. I can’t wait for you to share your work with me!
Whether you’ve stumbled upon this section of my website by accident, or if you zapped one of the QR codes in my latest publication, WELCOME!
Repetition, as a poetic device, can seem like a shortcut to making your poem longer, but it’s actually a multifaceted technique that makes your poetry shiny and reflective. You’ve heard of the poem about all the miles to go before that guy can sleep. You know the one where he’s trudging through the woods on a snowy evening. Ring any bells? No? Frost, anyone? Anyone? Celine Dion borrowed his line for a song; I even stumbled across a weightloss blog that lifted the phrase, too. The point is, repetition sticks in people’s heads, so they use it (even if it’s someone else’s line). People like it, connect to it, and feel all cozy and familiar because of it. That’s not a bad thing. You want your poem to be remembered, right? Throw a catchy line in it, then lather, rinse, and repeat every stanza or so.
Notice how Adelaide Crapsey uses the phrase, “properly
scholarly attitude,” like an excuse, a weapon, a fault, a badge, and even an
unattainable burden? As the inventor of the Cinquain poem, she knows her way
around repetition in all sorts of manifestations. In this poem’s case, the
meaning of the repeated phrase changes with every utterance due to its context.
As my “Dear Writer,” section of my poetry workbook and journal explains, REPETITION comes in different flavors. You can have the standard repeating of a word, phrase, verse, or more (think couplet/quatrain, etc.) You can also sprinkle a bunch of synonyms in your poem, and voilà, there’s a concept repeated. Patterns, rhythms—you name it—do it more than once, and check off this device as done.
The other thing you might want to know about repetition as an FYI thing is that it takes on specific (Greek and Latin rooted fancy-shmancy) names depending on where you plug your repetition into your work and how. (For example: Anaphora—a word or phrase that hangs out at the front of a line … Mesodiplosis—a word or phrase that hangs out in the middle of every line …) Shall I go on? Overwhelmed much? I’ll save the full-blown college course on all these types of repetition for another blog (or workbook) … Let’s keep it simple with what’s commonly referred to as a REFRAIN (which hangs out at the end of a stanza, like in Crapsey’s poem above) for this exercise.
Here are some one-liners you can use in your work, if you
want, but no pressure, mm-kay?
… for all the reasons why.
… because no one could.
… underneath the shimmering stars.
… when I look into your eyes.
… inside my heart.
… around the merry-go-round to me.
… before we knew it all.
… into the mist they went.
… until the world grows wise.
… between the lines.
… where I find my place in you.
… beyond the realm of reality.
… behind the lies comes truth.
… somewhere inside my heart.
… after the rain came to an end.
… amid the burning embers. . .
Now, go forth, my suave poet, and use one of these prompts or
come up with your own prepositional phrase to make some memorable poetry. I
can’t wait for you to share your poetry with me!
brookeewayne.com 