mango

[Erthona]

Even though I had written poetry since age 4, I was attracted to it more as I approached my twenties because my grammar skills were so poor, and I thought that you didn't need grammar in poetry. I wrote very "free verse" stick to the wall poetry. That is I just crammed a bunch of words or cool sounding phrases together, through it against the wall to see what stuck. Fortunately I was part of a writing group whose other three members had PhD's in English. If I was young today, I would never progress with all the wonderful "support" for mediocrity that permeates most of the larger poetry sites. However, because they chewed my ass for being unclear, ungrammatical, unintentionally ambiguous, and other egregious writing faults such as poor punctuation and typography, I can even do passably well in prose today, as well as poetry. I think I am now about where I should have been going into college. Let me tell you, one can progress a lot faster with computers and the internet, than typewriters and a stack of reference books. I actually use to use the grammar checker in Word quite a lot and it showed me some poor patterns that I repeated often. Of course it also spouts a lot of garbage, but that just forced me to look up what it was talking about and why. Grammar in English is insane because not until right before I finished high school, we still thought that English came from Latin like French, Spanish, or Italian. Unfortunately, it took us that long to realize that English is Germanic in origin, and it only has all these Latin root based words because of the French Norman invasion of 1066 (bloody French!). Now we are still in the process of creating grammar through backward engineering.

Something you might want to try is called, accentual verse. You count the accents in a line, rather than trying to write in a meter such as iambic. Of course anyone who wants to call themselves a poet, should be well versed (pun intended) in all of the major forms, most of which in English involve iambic, trochee, or dactyl. In Wiki under poetry, these is a list of the basic meters, and if you go to the specific article, there will usually be examples. On line dictionaries usually show a rudimentary stress guide, especially on multi-syllable words. One of the things that has benefited myself was reading examples of a particular form and then trying to compose in that form. Iambic tetrameter is one of the easiest, either that or Ballad meter. Of course a lot of it has to do with ones ear, and how well you hear the rhythm/cadence/beat.

Merry Christmas

Dale