CREATIVE WRITING
CROSS-POLLINATION
Poetry can offer transferrable skills to prose writers, says Helen Stockton, as she outlines poetic techniques that will put the shine on your words
Poetry can be seen as a bit of a ‘Marmite’ genre for readers and writers alike. Many people have memories of being made to extract meaning from impenetrable verse at school or having to learn and recite whole poems by rote.
With the popularity of more prosaic forms of poetry such as blank verse, with its poetic rhythmicity but the absence of rhyme, or free verse, which as the name suggests, breaks away from the confines of traditional poetic aspects, tending to reflect the natural ebb and flow of speech, the boundaries between poetry and prose can seem confusingly blurred. No wonder, therefore, that writers sometimes see themselves as either firmly in the poetry or prose camp.
However, even if you are a writer of prose who has no intention of either reading or writing verse, there is still much that poetry can teach us which can be usefully transferred across the genre divide. Let’s consider some of the ways that poetry can inform our prose writing.
Conciseness
There are generally a lot less words involved in writing poetry than prose, so every word carries additional weight. One of the reasons we can remember excerpts from poems is because the words carry so much meaning in so little space. Let’s briefly consider an extract from Ode to Autumn by John Keats: