The Poetry Room

Tag: poet

  • 9 Famous Authors’ Tips for Writing Better Poetry

    9 Famous Authors’ Tips for Writing Better Poetry

    Some crazy tips you ain’t ever heard off

    Writers have all sorts of interesting suggestions and advice on how to write and the things that motivated them to write their greatest pieces of work.

    Some of their tips might be practical like, get enough sleep, or write outside in a beautiful environment, but others are downright batty.

    Each writer has their own superstitions and best practices, but I bet you’ve never heard of some of these before!

    Take a look at 9 tips on how to write better poetry from some of the greats.

     

     

    1. MAKE TIME FOR TEATIME

    Samuel Johnson once said of himself: “[I am a] hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.” The end result was that he reportedly drank 25 cups in a single sitting.

     

    2. AN APPLE A DAY …

    .. is best eaten in the tub. Agatha Christie would chow down on the fruit while taking a bath and dreaming up ideas. If fresh apples aren’t your thing, Friedrich Schiller had an alternative use: letting them rot under the lid of your writing desk. Whenever he needed a hit of inspiration, Schiller would lift the lid and let the putrid stench lead him to brilliance.

     

    3. DON YOUR BIRTHDAY SUIT …

    James Whitcomb Riley—known as the “Hoosier Poet”—would rent a hotel room and strip down to do his writing. Counterintuitively, this was actually a means of self-preservation, as the nakedness kept Riley from going to the bar.

     

    4. … HAVE A SOAK WHILE YOU’RE AT IT …

    While Riley fought to keep himself out of the world in order to write, Edmond Rostand fought to keep the world out of his writing space. He became so frustrated by interruptions that he ended up sitting naked in the bathtub to work.

     

    5. BOOK A HOTEL ROOM

    Maya Angelou holed up in hotel rooms like Riley, but stayed clothed (as far as we know). The author would rent a room in her hometown by the month as a dedicated place to do her writing. Angelou had all the decorations removed and requested that housekeeping refrain from cleaning, for fear that a valuable scrap of paper might get discarded.

     

    6. GET FRISKY

    The verdict is out about whether it helped George Sand’s (a.k.a. Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin) writing, but her lover, fellow author Alfred de Musset, found it exciting when Sand would waste no time between lovemaking and writing. That’s probably for the best, since Sand often wrote between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.

     

    7. BEFRIEND A FELINE

    Edgar Allan Poe wrote works “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume” with his beloved cat—named Catarina—sitting on his shoulder. While she wasn’t black, Catarina is also believed to be the inspiration for the 1843 story, “The Black Cat.”

     

    8. THERE’S ALWAYS OPIUM

    It’s not one to try at home: Samuel Taylor Coleridge wasn’t shy about his use of opium and even said that Kubla Khan was inspired by an opium dream. Coleridge was interrupted while writing the poem and ended up forgetting the lines he needed to complete the structure as originally intended. It wasn’t published until some 20 years later, and only then because Lord Byron encouraged it.

     

    9. ADOPT AN ALIAS

    It might serve you well to escape within yourself, just as T.S. Eliot did after the success of The Waste Land. Eliot started renting rooms in London’s Charing Cross Road and became “Captain Eliot” or “The Captain.” If that’s not enough, incorporate makeup into the mix. Captain Eliot was also fond of wearing green face powder and lipstick to look like a cadaver.

     

    Article credit: MentalFloss.com

  • Walt Whitman: 10 Of His Greatest Quotes To Inspire You

    Walt Whitman: 10 Of His Greatest Quotes To Inspire You

    One of the Most Influential American Poets of All Time

    You have probably heard of Walt Whitmen, one of the most influential poets in America, sometimes called the father of ‘free verse’. Whitman was very concerned with politics at the time and he believed there was a relationship between a poet and society.

    Whitman was clearly a profound thinker and some of his thoughts can be seen in the quotes below. I would even go to say that he was deeply spiritual.

    We have carefully selected 10 of Whitman’s best quotes below. Let us know what you think and feel free to share!

     

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    W1

     

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    W2

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    W3

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    W4

     

     

    5.

    W5

     

     

     

    NEXT 5 ON THE NEXT PAGE!

  • How To Make $225 An Hour Writing Poetry

    How To Make $225 An Hour Writing Poetry

    Turning Poetry into a Business

    We currently live in a time where job security is a thing of the past. You now have to be skilled at many things than ever before to get ahead and business are seem to be trending towards contracting rather than having full time employees.

    Being an entrepreneur seems to be the way to go!

    Welcome to what I think is a cool and creativity idea that seems to be growing and generating a tidy bit of income.

    Writing Haiku for free.

    Give these guys a topic, like your cat, a tree, peanut butter and they will haiku it for you! Venues are hiring them for $225 an hour.

    Check it out here.

     

    The idea for a poetry-writing business came about entirely by accident. In June 2013, college buddies Szentmiklosy and Zaltsman were playing with the idea of doing an interview series about entrepreneurship. They set up a little booth on a street corner in Williamsburg—which has the highest density of entrepreneurs per capita anywhere in the world—hoping to have focus-group-like conversations with anyone passing by.

     

    Since the two guys had a bit of a poetic streak, they thought they could write people haiku as a gimmick to draw them in. Little did they know that they had, in fact, landed on their own business idea. Within a week, they were asked to write haiku at a yoga festival. They agreed, and when they attended the event, they met Markuson, a performance artist who used typewriters and poetry in all her pieces.

     

    “It was amazing, like a unicorn bumping into another unicorn,” Markuson recalls.

     

    Together, they decided to collaborate and turn The Haiku Guys into a bonafide business. Their reputation spread by word of mouth, and soon everybody wanted to have haiku at their wedding, conference, or product launch. Markuson believes that people are drawn to them because poetry now seems like a foreign art; the slow process of poetry-writing often feels like a stark contrast to the fast pace of modern life.

     

    “People react in extreme ways when we write them poems,” she says. “They cry, they laugh, they tell us we can see into their souls. It’s a very vulnerable moment that people seem to get a lot of catharsis from.”

     

    Charging between $200 and $250 per hour, The Haiku Guys are able to rake in serious money by writing poems at events, especially since they sometimes attend up to six a week. None of the founders have quit their day jobs yet, though: Markuson and Zaltsman work at social media startups, while Szentmiklosy is a business consultant.

     

    “We all have jobs that we really care about and that are really important to us, so we’re not planning to become full-time poets anytime soon,” Markuson says.

     

    Article Credit: fastcompany.com

  • Who is Your Inner Poet?

    Who is Your Inner Poet?

    Which Poet Resonates With You?

    We have fallen in love with many different poets all through the years, it’s hard to pick a favourite.

    So why don’t you let this fun quiz do it for you?

    Take this quiz to discover who your inner poet is! Which poets resonate with your favourite places, food and other likes and dislikes. I’m not sure how much of this was actually researched, but we can all recognise some meaningless fun when we see it. Welcome to social media where minutes of your life get lost in a black hole.

    P.S I got Emily Dickinson

     

    Click here >> QUIZ

    poetquiz

     

  • Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty

    Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty

    For the Love of Dante

    If you love poetry then you would have definitely heard of Italian poet Dante. Writer, poet and political thinker Dante has made an impression on both theology and literature.

    Whether you have been consumed by the Inferno or have pursued some of his other works, there is no doubt that Dante is up there with the greats such as Shakespeare and Yeats.

    In celebration of Dante turning 750, being born in 1265, (wow this guy is old!), John Kleiner shares his love of the poet and describes why he is still celebrated today.

    Full article here.

     

    Dante’s seven-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday is sometime in the coming month—he was born, he tells us in Paradiso, under the sign of Gemini—and, to mark the occasion, more than a hundred events are planned. These include everything from the minting of a new two-euro coin, embossed with the poet’s profile, to a selfie-con-Dante campaign. (Cardboard cutouts of the poet are being set up in Florence, and visitors are encouraged to post pictures of themselves with them using the hashtag #dante750.) There’s talk of extending the celebrations to 2021, the seven-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death.

     

    Italian kids first encounter Dante at school, when they’re in the equivalent of seventh grade. They return to him in the eleventh grade to study the Inferno in more depth. In twelfth grade, they work on the Purgatorio. Secondary school—liceo—lasts five years, and so in what might be considered the thirteenth grade, the text for the year is the Paradiso. I recently asked the high-school-aged son of an Italian friend of mine about the experience. “It’s annoying, boring, and it never ends,” he told me. “But then you get to like it.”

     

    At the college level, the study of Dante ratchets up by slowing down. In the late nineteen-eighties, I spent a semester in Florence, where I sat in on a Dante course at the university. The entire term was devoted to the analysis of a single canto. As it happened, the canto was Inferno 19, which is devoted to simony. Dante reserves a special hole in the third sub-circle of the eighth circle of Hell for corrupt Popes; they are stuffed into it, one after another, headfirst. Their feet are then lit on fire. Among the issues the class discussed at length was how, exactly, new Popes could be accommodated. Had space been left open for all those that would come along? Or did each new arrival compress his predecessor into some kind of pontifical pesto?

     

    For the last nine months, I’ve been living in Rome, and the experience has helped me to appreciate another, more subversive side to Dante’s appeal. Though he may be force-fed to seventh graders, applauded in the Senate, and praised by the Holy See, Dante is, as a writer, unmistakably anti-authoritarian. He looks around and what he sees is hypocrisy, incompetence, and corruption. And so he strikes out, not just at the Popes, whom he turns upside down and stuffs in a hole, but also at Florence’s political leaders, whom he throws into a burning tomb, and his own teacher, whom he sets running naked across scorching sand.

     

    Article and image credit: The New Yorker

  • The Haunting Poetry of a Chinese Factory Worker who Committed Suicide

    The Haunting Poetry of a Chinese Factory Worker who Committed Suicide

    The Death of a Poet

    This is a sad tale for sure, but as unfortunate as it is this story brings out greater awareness of the conditions workers in China go through every day.

    Unfortunately this hardship resulted in the death of an unknown poet.

    His beautiful words expressed the dark emotions he felt right up to his last day.

    We might feel like going to work is tough and endure the strain of not been able to do things that we want, but gaining a little insight of the work culture in some of these factories in China, has made me appreciate the time that I do have.

    Read below.

     

    On the last day of September, a 24-year-old migrant worker in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen killed himself. Xu Lizhi jumped out of a window of a residential dormitory run by his employer, Foxconn, the huge electronics manufacturing company with a million-strong workforce that makes the majority of the world’s Apple iPhones.

     

    In most cases, Xu’s suicide would have been yet another footnote in the vast, sweeping story of China’s economic boom and transformation. He is one of a legion of young Chinese migrants who emerge out of rural obscurity to find work in China’s teeming cities, only to end up crushed by both the dullness and stress of factory jobs, insufficient wages and a steady accumulation of personal disappointments.

     

    But Xu was a poet. And, after his death, his friends collected his work and got some published in a local Shenzhen newspaper.

     

    The London Review Books cites this poem by Xu, which is a play on another verse by the famous Chinese poet Gu Cheng:

     

    We ran along the railway,
    arriving in some place called ‘the City’
    where we trade in our youth, and our muscle.
    Finally we have nothing to trade, only a cough
    and a skeleton nobody cares about.
    ‘Sleepless’

    Midnight. Everyone is sleeping soundly,
    We keep our pair of young wounds open.
    These black eyes, can you really lead us to the light?
    ‘Night Shift’

     

    The last poem Xu penned, perhaps even on the day he killed himself, signals his decision.

     

    I want to touch the sky, feel that blueness so light
    But I can’t do any of this, so I’m leaving this world
    Everyone who’s heard of me
    Shouldn’t be surprised at my leaving
    Even less should you sigh or grieve
    I was fine when I came, and fine when I left.

     

    Article and Photo Credit: The Washington Post

  • (VIDEO) How One Poet Turned Abuse Into Inspiration

    (VIDEO) How One Poet Turned Abuse Into Inspiration

    Healing Abuse Through Poetry

    A ridiculously moving poem by Saidu Tejan-Thomas, where he describes his experience with abuse at the hands of his uncle.

    Abuse is never easy to talk about, but Saidu takes on a journey of what happened to him and how he had to live with the results. You can hear the emotion in his voice and watch the tears that run down his face as he reveals one of the most horrifying things a child can ever go through.

    “Survivor implies it happened in the wilderness, somewhere far, far away from home. It was a normal afternoon with nothing to do.”

    View this inspiring video!