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The Magic of Writing: Part VI

The Magic of Poetry

Now comes the hardest part. It’s time to tap your poetic voice. But you’re lucky because everyone has a poetic voice. Everyone is a poet even if they don’t know it, as the saying goes.

When writing poetry, less is almost always more. I’ve had you write a lot for this activity, but the good and the bad are all mixed together in what you’ve written. This will be true for your whole life: The good will always be mixed with the bad. You have to try to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I admit that writing poetry isn’t 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…

One More Spell

  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. 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. One last thing. I want you to write the poem on a nice piece of paper so you can display it. So copy/rewrite the poem one more time from beginning to end so that you have a good, clean copy.

You did it. The magic is yours now. Because, of course, you had it inside you all along.

The Magic of Writing

Magical Music