Turning Point

In poetry, a volta means a turning point indicated by a change of thought, scene, emotion, or perspective. When used as a common devise in classical sonnets, the volta typically turns an idea or argument in a different and, sometimes, unexpected direction.

 

Our country needs a volta.

 

Religious leaders, politicians, law-enforcement officers, COVID patients, shop owners, CEOs, and decision-makers for homes, health care, and schools need more workable, problem-solving perspectives.

 

As I’m writing this, we’re in the church season of Lent, which rhymes and often equates with “repent.” Unfortunately, social media (or, rather, anti-social media) seem to fixate on what’s wrong in the world rather than turning toward specific solutions worth suggesting.

 

Poets also have the opportunity to work toward a worthwhile volta – not by turning toward simplistic answers that show no understanding of peoples unlike ourselves or situations unlike any we've experienced. Sometimes we make a difference simply by asking questions relevant to our times. Last night, for instance, this poem appeared to me, saying what I've been wanting to say:

 

Turning Points

The tide turns on the privileged ones
who rank themselves above the law
and have nowhere to go but down.

What will the downtrodden do
to make things right? Will they
shout and fight or give everyone
the benefit of the doubt?

Will they treat others the way
they were – or Way they wanted?
Will they return the love God gave?

Will they turn to finger-pointing –
or be fair, be kind, be brave?

 

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2021

 

…

 

 

 

Every poem doesn’t have to rhyme!

When I first began writing poems, they inevitably rhymed and bounced to their own rhythm. Most poets can probably say the same, and that’s fine! Rhythmic and rhyming lines work wonderfully well for humorous verse, nursery rhymes, and greeting card verse.

If, however, you want your poems to have a literary tone or quality, you and your rhymes may need to break up for a while! You won’t be saying goodbye forever, but when you return to rhyming, you’ll have a purpose and appropriate form.

Since haiku has been perennially popular for centuries, it makes a good place to start weaning yourself from rhymes. The brevity of its three lines and picturesque scenes from nature provide an excellent exercise in areas far more important to poetry than rhyme, for example:

• Being concise (aka “writing tight.”)

• Being highly observant (i.e., noticing – really noticing what you see and sense.)

• Using fresh comparisons of This with That (to SHOW, rather than TELL.)

To make a clean break with rhyme, consider writing prose poems, which focus on insights, thoughts, feelings, or even a mini-story, rather than rhyme.

Also, consider writing free verse, which relies heavily on the way in which you arrange and rearrange your line breaks.

As long as your free verse stays FREE of any pattern, including a rhyme scheme), the poems might scatter rhymes internally, rather than end-line, but they’re more apt to use sound echoes – word pairs that echo off of one another, creating audial interest.

Once you’ve spent some time with these alternatives to rhyme, learn how to scan a poem, which is much easier than it sounded in high school! (You can do it!)

Then, you have the tools you need to write rhyming poetry in such traditional patterns as the sonnet and villanelle. Writing in these classical forms not only gives you a strong sense of satisfaction in your work, it can elevate your level of poetry-writing into literary realms. There, you’ll be more apt to find poetry journals and anthologies waiting for your poems to fill their hungry pages.


Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-author of Living in the Nature Poem, Outside Eden, Beach Songs & Wood Chimes (for children), Faces in a Crowd, PRAISE! and Kindle e-books on poetry

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All Broken Up & other line breaks

One advantage of traditional forms of poetry hinges on the swing of a line. Instead of having to decide where and when to break each line of a poem, the pattern of your chosen form makes that decision for you.

For example, a sonnet written in iambic pentameter will be measured (meter) as five feet with iambs predominating. At the end of those five, the line breaks, and the next line of iambic pentameter begins with the same pattern repeated for 14 rhyming lines.

If you want to know more about the sonnet form, save this page and click the link below to an earlier post on the Poetry Editor blog. If you don't care, skip through the pink stuff!

Sonnets traditionally require poets to use rhythmic rhymes and argue nicely in fourteen lines

If you’re not sure what iambs and other poetic feet consist of but want to know, visit these discussions where I aimed to make the explanations as easy as possible.

Scan A Poem. Get The Picture.

Scan a poem. Catch the beat. Change the rhythm as you revise.

Accentual syllabic or metered verse

Unlike traditional forms of poetry with their consistent patterns, free verse is free of meter and free of other requirements, such as line length.

That sounds airy-light and, yeah, freeing, but this means you have to make a decision with every line. Sometimes that’s a hard call; sometimes not. Either way, line breaks can make or break a free verse poem.

Is this something to fret about as you write? No! Worry is more confining than any poetry pattern, so let poems flow. Then go back later to revise, breaking lines here or there or wherever your eyes and ears desire.

As you read each poem and revision aloud, keep your ear attuned to its musicality.

As you read each poem by sight, see if you find any evidence of a unique pattern to emphasize and make the poem pop.

In the following poem, for example, I played with line breaks on the word “break.” Then, during the revision process, I experimented with variations of “break” and “broke” and, mainly, had fun.

Play with words. Play around with line breaks. Try something new, and have a good time with your poems and your readers.


All Broken Up!
by Mary Harwell Sayler

Hey! What’s going on tonight?
My fingernail broke.
A bird broke into flight,
and, oh! The mirror broke!
Will it be all right?
Then someone breaks
the silence.

I went to bed closing
my eyes to these sights –
hoping and praying the breaks
might not last,
then morning broke
daybreak
into dawn-light,
and I happily hopped down to break-
fast.


©2014, Mary Harwell Sayler

…

Line breaks can make or break your poem

Whether you write free verse, prose poems, traditionally patterned poetry, or experimental verse, the artistry often comes with such poetic techniques as musicality, sound echoes, internal rhyme, insight, imagery, or unusual juxtaposition (comparisons, contrasts, or even weird positioning) of thoughts and pictures.

Since all types and forms of poetry need at least one or more poetic traits, they could all sound or look alike except for one big difference:

The dividing line comes in dividing lines.

As you write prose poems, for example, you divide the lines into blocks of paragraphs that look like those you normally use in writing articles, stories, books, and business letters.

As you write and scan traditional metered verse, you extend each line only as far as your choice of patterns will allow. For instance, if you write in the classical English pattern of iambic pentameter, each line scans into five feet of iambs, which, hopefully, we’ll talk about again in upcoming articles. Or, if you choose to write syllabic poetry such as haiku, you count the syllables to determine where to break each line.

And then there’s free verse.

Poets often assume that free verse is the easiest type of poetry to write since they think they can do anything they want. However, freedom comes in being free, not of poetic techniques, but of the constraints, predictability, regularity, and consistency found in counting a predetermined number of syllables, beats, or metric feet per line.

Free verse is free of pattern.

Free verse is free of refrain.

Free verse wears no uniform.

For instance, you can scatter rhymes into free verse unless those sounds start to get predictable, which means the poem has lost its freedom from a set pattern or routine.

The freedom of writing free verse comes in freely breaking lines.

Unfortunately, this freedom can also bring indecision. Choices! Choices! Where do you break each line? What look will your new poem wear? Will you go for long lines? short lines? tabbed over lines? dropped down lines? Or, will you go, not for how your poem looks, but how it sounds? Or, as yet another option, will you break lines into fragments of thought to generate mystery, shock, emphasis, or surprise?

Regardless of your goal or deciding factor, each line break needs to lend a poetic feel or quality to the poem, which brings us back to an ongoing motto:

Read each poem and each revision aloud.

Listen carefully to the effect of each word, phrase, pause, and line break. Then revise the poem until you get the effect you want.

Usually, your poetic ear will let you know what works and what does not. The last time we talked, though, I gave an example of lines broken by similarities seen in syllables noticed by the eye or mind. In the following poem, the line breaks show a choice to emphasize connotations or layers of meaning that accompanied some of the words.

Since the setting for this poem includes the uncertainties of war in general and the concerns of a World War II soldier in particular, I also wanted the line breaks to help build drama appropriate to the scene but without becoming overly dramatic, maudlin, or sentimental. The latter especially concerned me since I wrote the poem from the “I” of my father’s perspective, basing thoughts and feelings on his WWII letters – letters, which I never read until decades later, not too long after his death.

Night Flying in Uneven Lines
by Mary Harwell Sayler

Everywhere the night explodes
in darkness –
blank and black
like a deep hole cut
to accommodate a casket.

Some nights before a mission,
sleep exhumes me,
draws me
from disarming
visions: relics,
recollections, and what still
remains.




(c) 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler. Other poems from the Winning the Wars chapbook have been included on the International War Veterans Poetry website.

Breaking line with free verse

Last time we talked about how, in some ways, prose poems have more freedom than free verse since they act like little shoe boxes that let you freely drop in anything you want – from mental snapshots to contrasting thoughts that seem to have nothing to do with one another. When it comes to form, though, prose poems confine themselves to those same blocks of paragraphs that you use to write fiction and nonfiction, whereas free verse gives you the freedom to break the lines wherever you want.

The problem comes in knowing where you want to break a line and, more importantly, why.

Like prose poems, traditionally metered poetry and also syllabic verse have their own unique forms that keep them in line, but free verse gives poets so much freedom that they sometimes trip over the lines or choices. So, what’s the solution? What's a poet to do?

Experiment.

Play!

Break lines at the end of a phrase, in the middle of a phrase, or even in the middle of a word. For example:

Suspended Belief

I thought I had upgiven childhood fan-
tasies: toys from San-
ta Claus, bunny baskets, and monstrous mounds of can-
dy on All Saints Hallowed Eve.

But sipping my morning cup of Columbian
coffee with Christmas-like pleasure, I saw a man
named Juan
and his nameless donkey, bean-laden, on TV,
and I believed.

I believed in the goodness of coffee
for those who grow and pick and drink.

I believed in the kind-eyed man
and his mule – actors both,
bean-dropping on my reality.

And God?
Such belief comes so much harder than
the coffee man's assuring nod.

The One I cannot seem to see
is not so easy to believe,
and, therefore, as I live and deeply breathe,

I believe.


Mary Harwell Sayler
[Poem originally published in the now defunct Writer To Writer magazine and later in my chapbook, Speaking Peach, available through this site.]


As you probably noticed, those lines break with each “an” then “e” sound, which technically speaking, takes the poem out of the free verse realm for a while as it follows a particular pattern before, again, breaking free. Regardless, the broken pattern seemed to fit the theme of enduring faith despite the lack of logic, and, initially anyway, the lines got broken with broken words.

Does this set a pattern for you too? Not really, except to encourage you to play with something that first seems radical or even silly to see what effect you get. If the world’s weirdest line breaks work for you and the poem, great! If not, try something else, and let your ear be your final judge.

Read every poem aloud, allowing the tiny pause suggested by the end of each line break.

Listen carefully to the overall effect.

Do you like it? If not, revise until you do. With free verse, your poems have at least as many options as they have words!

To expand your options as a poet, look for upcoming articles here on traditional poetry and syllabic verse. If you have not yet studied the wealth of poetic techniques and forms available to you, check out the e-book version of the poetry home study course I wrote and used for years in working with students. The poetry dictionary for kids is fun and helpful for all ages too.



(c) 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler