Poem writing tips today

Literature

Poetry writing advices 2021? Onomatopoeia is not an easy word to say or spell, but it is one of the most fun and common techniques used in poetry. Onomatopoeia is simply the use of a word that imitates a sound, like bam, crash, boom, splash. Words like these appeal to the reader’s senses and bring the reader into the poem.

Make it specific. Instead of Love, for example, write about “the love between my parents.” Then try making it even more specific: “the love between my parents and the silent ways it shows itself when they are eating dinner together.” Try relating it to a certain person, place, event. Love, Death, Anger, Beauty — these concepts do not occur in a vacuum. They are not grown in test tubes. They are experienced by individual people, in particular situations. And our deepest understanding of these concepts is at the human level, through the ways they touch us personally and the people around us. Creating this human connection will give your poem a stronger emotional power for your reader. And it puts your idea in a form where you can observe it carefully and discover aspects of it that have never been described before.

What are you writing about Rachel Rabbit White? I’m writing more traditional poems, love poems. Lyrical poems. The first ten are being published as a four-week series for the literary magazine Triangle House, as a weekly installment called “Work For Love.” The artist Casey Kauffmann is doing original art for it. The poems shift constantly between the specter of being “in love,” this beautiful human phenomenon, and questioning romantic love as a site of social complicity that’s deeply socially ingrained and fucked.

Rachel Rabbit White is a practicing hedonist. Everything in the poet, sex worker, and activist’s apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is highly pleasurable to look at, use, and touch. There’s a giant white stuffed tiger; the lights are all pink and blue. In the center of the living room is a stripper pole and a neon sign that says “Blue of Noon,” a reference to Georges Bataille’s erotic novella. Not unlike Bataille, Rabbit White is a student of romance, true love, and sex. Rabbit White lies on her side next to me in a baby blue slip dress and a pair of white fishnet leggings. Everything in her apartment feels purposeful, like her keenly observant writing. Much of her poetry centers around love and its complexities. For Rabbit White, who has multiple partners, that means loving more than one person at a time. It also means loving your craft, and appreciating good films and excellent writing. Discover a lot more info on http://rachelrabbitwhite.com/.

I met Rachel Rabbit White last December. Her first collection of poems, Porn Carnival, had just come out the month before. I’d read an article about the release party, about some angel dust, a little cake-sitting, a DJ, and then something like “Rachel Rabbit White is a sex worker.” It all seemed glamorous and no-fucks-ish. And this was about poetry. I had just gotten out of prison. I was in a halfway house. Weekdays, I went to work at an office. It was a bullshit job. I was making $8/hr, paying 25 percent of the gross of my paychecks back to the halfway house for “subsistence.” I had published a novel the previous year. It was a good thing I had, or I’d have been broke. Still, she had a critic or two: people who thought the book and its promotion were at once decadent and thirsty, people who thought that things so decadently thirsty weren’t right for the culture of poesy, people who thought the hype was on account of the party, not on the merit of the art. Naturally, these were educated people. And they were entitled to their ideas, even if they were wrong.