writing

I have just read some poignantly honest poems written by high school students in a class I visited. In fact, I read these several times. Beautiful–even if they are about painful subjects! Isn’t it interesting how the beauty of poetry can touch the heart and let us look pain and tragedy in the face without making the written presentation intolerable. Perhaps that is why Shakespeare’s tragedies, with the aesthetics of iambic pentameter, have endured all these years.

Free verse has beauty in its form too—and often in its brevity.  I know that the beauty of the free verse in Out of the Dust (Karen Hesse) made even the most painful parts of the story both more powerful and more tolerable for me. In free verse, rhythms are still critical; but young writers in search of a voice may find free verse, without the encumbrance of set rhythms with rhymes, particularly freeing.

When we write in journal form, we often write without an outline as the ideas come to mind.  We gather and mesh our ideas in a first draft.   The first writing often will record events.  With each subsequent visit to that draft and the drafts that follow, we realize more and more what else we could have said and how we could have said it better.  Fortunately, we can take a different set of thoughts into each reading.

With later rewritings, our first ideas spark further recollections and emotional responses, so we write emotional responses to events.  Some of us consciously or unconsciously avoid revealing emotional responses. For others, however, the emotional responses can take over and overshadow the important concrete images and details.  We need a mix of the concrete (to wrap our minds around) and the emotional (to touch our hearts) to make our writing interesting, engaging, and lingering—while keeping the reins on the emotional parts lest the writing become overly sentimental.