How To Write Joyful Poems

By Bonnie Contreras


Poetry takes many shapes, both in subject and technical form. While some people keenly throw themselves into it with free verse, others might find it more intimidating as a medium than prose. It does not have to be this way, however, as you do not need an extensive knowledge to write joyful poems. To begin with, it really is as simple as sitting down and writing out your feelings. Put it together as a poem, later.

All you need to do know is to put yourself in front of a word processor or a piece of paper and then write. You can try and do this for a particular amount of time or you can keep working until you feel you are done. What is important, here, however, is that you continue without pausing or editing.

It does not matter, at this stage, if you make any mistakes or if anything does just not sound as good as you think it should. Once you are finished, your next step is to look over what you have written and make a note of anything that stands out to you. You can then go on to use these to prompt poems or to arrange them into one poem if that is what you want to do.

Here, with this exercise, you should have captured an important aspect of your feelings. This will result in better content than if you were trying to abide by some idea of what you think poetry should be. You are putting what you want to say out there, and this will help you elicit a response of the emotional sort from your readers.

If you are more genuine in your words, they will be more genuine in their emotion. There are more things to know, however, when it comes to helping your work look less trite. If you want to sound original and fresh, you should, of course, avoid known cliches. This means things that you have heard too many times because the same will have gone for your reader.

Look at your notes and consider your own metaphors and similes. Thinking this way can take time, but regular writing will help you become more adept at crafting an image. If you want to, you can tackle cliches individually, by taking them, working out what you really want to say and creating a new phrase.

You should also keep in mind that, while emotion is good, you should make sure to avoid sentimentality. You want your emotion to be genuine. Do not force it into your poems and the audience will have a more personal reaction to them. Another thing to remember is to not use too many abstract words. These detract from the impact of your poem as tangible imagery will elicit more for readers.

Your readers should not be told outright that you are angry, sad or happy, they should, instead, be given concrete imagery to understand those feelings. Do not, as you write, consider editing too much, though. You need to just get your poem on the page, to start with, before you can do that. Start revising what you have written after that, and it is a very important stage that should not be skipped. You will, eventually, have the first of your joyful poems.




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