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Poetry — Writing a Magical Tome: Part VI

The Art of Poetry

Now comes the hardest part. It’s time to tap your poetic voice. When writing poetry, less is almost always more. I’ve had you write a lot, but the good and the bad are all mixed together in what you’ve written. Just like they are in life.

The good and the bad will always be mixed together for you. This will be especially true when you’re collecting data for your dissertations. You will have tons of data: The challenge will be finding the best pieces of data amidst that deluge of information.

And dealing with research data is easy. Finding good poetic lines, well that’s a real art, the art of poesy, as it once was called. But, still, everyone can do it. Poetry belongs to all of us. Remember that. People have been writing poems since the dawn of time.

Anyone can write a poem. You already know the words. You just have to find them. So here we go…

  1. Close your eyes one more time.
  2. Take a deep breath. Hold it. Then gently let it out.
  3. Take another deep breath. Hold it. Call upon your writing muse. Ask for wisdom. Ask for help. Ask for kindness. (We all need kindness, after all.) Now let your breath gently out.
  4. Take one more deep breath. Hold it. Tell your writing muse you will need them now and in the years ahead with the dissertation. You will need a little writing help. Then gently let that last breath go.
  5. You’re ready to write your poem.

Look over the words and phrases you circled. Then do the following:

  1. Copy the words and phrases onto a clean page.
  2. There were 4 sections, so you might want to write the words one line at a time in roughly the order of the 4 sections.
  3. It helps to keep your lines short.
  4. You might need, though, to rearrange things a little.
  5. You will probably need to add a word or two here and there to make things come out right.
  6. Read the poem through and see if it says anything interesting.
  7. Maybe there’s a message in there. You probably don’t need a moral lesson, because everyone resists those, but maybe there’s a simple truth in this poem trying to speak to you. See if you can help that message come out.
  8. Read the poem one more time and give it a title. Sometimes there’s a line in the poem that can be the title or will call to mind a good title.
  9. If you have time, copy/rewrite the poem one more time from beginning to end so that you have a nice clean copy.
  10. Print/Save the poem for display.

You did it. Great job! Hopefully this poem has turned out nicely.

Writing a Magical Tome: Part VII

The Magic of Writing