On the spot!

Started by Zeffy January 30th, 2011 2:27 AM
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Zeffy

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Seen December 1st, 2022
Posted January 30th, 2021
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I decided that I want to make a collection of on the spot poems I make so I created this thread! Anyways, I will put all my "on the spot" poems here. Remember, its on the spot. No proofreading or anything. What I write goes. xD

Here's one I just made right now:

Untitled 01*

When you feel like you're being hated,
Just forget what they all said,
Soon the pain will go away,
And no one will bother your day.

Get a glimpse of what tomorrow brings,
As the birds dances and sings,
You'll feel more happy and cheery,
If you make everything a memory.

*I feel that I will be making a lot of untitled poems, so I'll just put numbers when I do. xD
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Posted January 14th, 2014
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Definitely a great poem. I love free verse, so this really hit home for me. It also had a really great moral! Agreeing with TJ, though. Numbering your poems is definitely unusual. I'd advise against it.
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Posted December 8th, 2012
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I love free verse,
I think she was going for an AABB rhyme scheme. ._. The only problem is that "hated" and "said" don't rhyme, and "cheery" and "memory" sound awkward because they don't really match in rhythm. Then again, there's no real rhythm at all to the poem, so it actually feels a little awkward in general to me. The reason why is because I keep reading the lines expecting to come to a rhyme at a certain beat, but the rhyme comes either too soon or way too late. (For example, the first lines of both stanzas are far longer than the ones after them, so because the first lines set a general sense of how many beats should be in a single line, every other line feels like it stops way too soon.)

This is what I don't like about most rhymed poetry, essentially: poets who do it and just think that they just have to rhyme every line tend to fall for one of two mistakes. The first mistake is that they don't consider the rhythm to a poem. Every poem that uses a rhyming scheme also uses meter, or a specific amount of beats per line that matches roughly with every other line in the poem or some other kind of pattern. (See limericks.) There's a reason why very little successful rhymed poetry goes without a sense of meter. It's because a rhyme scheme creates a musical tone within a poem. As in, it's meant to match and to sound pleasant in all aspects to the ear, even if the subject itself might not be entirely pleasant. (See limericks again.) A meter creates a pattern for each syllable in a line, so when a poem is read aloud, it sounds like it has a beat in the same way a song might have percussion to support the other instruments.

The second problem is that the poet ends up forcing lines to rhyme, even if the rhyme itself doesn't make much sense either grammatically or contextually. For example:

Soon the pain will go away,
And no one will bother your day.
While I understand what Zeffy means here, there's just so many better, less awkward ways to say "and no one will bother you." (For example, that.) However, this line is forced to end in a way that matches "away," so she has to settle for saying this instead of coming up with a better rhyme to say the same general thing. As a result, the line just feels like it's jammed into a rhyme because the wording itself is awkward and sounds like it matches the line above it for just for the sake of rhyming instead of to lend some additional meaning to the poem.

There's another example in here:

As the birds dances and sings,
Aside from coming right out of left field (because the line above it is talking about meditating and achieving a sense of internal harmony while this line seems like a Disney-esque cliché to represent happiness), it also disagrees with consistency and ends up sounding equally awkward. As in, "birds" is plural, but the line uses singular verbs. This wouldn't be so bad, but the abundance of S sounds combines with the listener's expectation to hear plural nouns to give this line a bit too much of a hiss, if that makes sense.

There's also a third problem that occurs with amateur poets more than professional ones. More often than naught, a writer has a tendency to make rhymed poetry shallow. As in, there's no imagery to make our imaginations run wild, and there's no deeper meaning than the one that's fairly obvious. For example, in this poem, there's not much more to it than advice to look on the bright side. (Even then, that doesn't really help a person because if, for example, you're getting bullied, just looking on the bright side won't change the fact that you're constantly getting emotionally or physically abused. Trust me on that one.) There's no imagery to make me feel the pain that the subject must be going through (which would prompt the narrator to offer this advice), and there doesn't seem to be any layers beyond this point. While I must admit poetry doesn't always have to be a literary onion (with layers on layers on layers), if there's no tug to the imagination or the heart strings, a poem just ends up feeling a little empty, like there's nothing there to get from it.

In short, if you're going to do rhymed poetry, try reading it aloud while in the process of writing it. Reading it aloud will help you listen to how a poem sounds and achieve the kind of musical effect the poem needs while avoiding that awkward situation where a line seems to rhyme for the sake of rhyming. Additionally, when going into a poem, try to remember that more than prose, a poem is meant to make a reader feel something -- either by enticing them to form a picture in their mind or by evoking some kind of emotion within them. If neither happens, you're going to end up making the poem feel like it's missing something.

Of course, this isn't to say that it was all bad. It was good for a start, and the surface meaning is rather cute. After all, I can't argue that "think positive" is a good message, and this achieves its goal of being a feel-good poem. It just needs a bit of polishing here and there and a little bit more shaping.

Beyond that, it's perfectly all right and actually fairly normal to have poems that aren't titled. If you need a famous example, Emily Dickinson never titled hers.
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Zeffy

g'day

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Seen December 1st, 2022
Posted January 30th, 2021
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But I'm not Emily Dickenson nor am I a great poet. I just made this thread to showcase the poems I made on the spot (especially from school). ;A;

I'll probably title them, but it'll take a while. I wasn't really trying to rhyme in the poem, it kinda just happened naturally, if you know what I mean. xD

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Seen August 19th, 2020
Posted December 8th, 2012
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But I'm not Emily Dickenson nor am I a great poet.
Gives you something to aspire to, though. ;)
Professional ninja. May or may not actually be back. Here for the snark and banter at most.

Need some light reading?
Anima Ex Machina (Chapter 20 now available)
The Leaf Green Incident (SWC 2012 winner)
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