Poetry in a Nutshell

A Lesson by Ashley Arita

This is the introduction to all things poetry! Even if you have written poetry before, I still recommend to read this.

There are many types of writing. Some ancient, some new. Writing is constantly changing, used in different ways and forms. Some can inspire. Some can bring hate and chaos. Writing is an extremely powerful way to bring out emotions to others. To share your knowledge, or perhaps to cheer someone.

The one type of writing we will focus on is poetry. Poetry, in basic terms, is a type of writing where the sentences are mostly not complete, and is not written in a normal paragraph format. You may think poetry is just a waste of time, and why you would do it instead of normal, full-fledged, paragraph writing. I am not here to convince you to write poetry, however, here are some reasons that poetry is so great.

1) The lack of complete sentences add more fluency and rythym (we'll go over this!). This makes it enjoyable to read.

2) You can bring your emotions in poetry! Sadness, anger, disgust (Inside Out!), you name it! Whatever your feeling, or what somebody else is feeling, you can stuff it all in poetry!

3) It's highly flexible! Regular writing is constricted to rules, such as sentence structure, adjectives, verbs, etc. Poems are simple and can be converted to many different forms! There's haiku, lyric, or my personal favorite, free-verse! You can do a rhyming poem if your feeling a bit rhyme, or you can combine a bit of rhyme to your free-verse poem. There are no sentence pattern estrictions, or the way you type it, etc. You can do whatever you want essentially!

Those are my three reasons. Now, your probably thinking, "Ok...but now what?"

Glad you asked! Now that your ready to start your poem adventure, it's time to learn what makes a poem, which will be described in the next lesson. Stay tuned, and always remember,

"Write hard, poem hard!"