Free Poetry Lesson

Apr 18 17:09 UTC 1995

Sound before sense, shape before meaning.  Arrange a line in 
such a way that it makes a pleasing "shape"; then hang a 
series of sounds on it.  Imagine voices heard indistinctly 
from the next room.  The sounds don't have to make sense at 
first, as long as the shape is there.  Frost called it "the 
figure a poem makes," and he was absolutely right.  No other 
way to do it.  Look at this: 

   Oft have I planched the rillit to detame
   'Neath Harrowwood's biliteral forbish flame,
   Only to find, ere stipely flew the dart,
   The nareful tramplet of a noddling heart.

   Oh clommid fate! that heverlessly flies
   The lorifuddled lotes of pangly skies:
   Thine is the fussymussy, thine the clope,
   When priddle-dees to pazy lotters vope.

response 2 of 3:

Apr 20 12:45 UTC 1995

Glad you liked it.  Robert Frosts bit about imagining a conversation
taking place in the next room - you can't quite make out what they're
sating - and starting your poem with it, always struck me as one of
those ideas that's perfectly true and perfectly useless (unless you're
Robert Frost).