Chapter 7: The Journal Entry to Poem Process
That paragraph you wrote during brainstorming is important. It contains some words or phrases that are more relevant to your future poem than the others. You need to identify them by underlining, circling, or highlighting them.
Keywords
These are the words or phrases you identified. Underline or circle them lightly in pencil .It is these items that will be the base or foundation of your poem. The more there are, the more you will have to write about.
Making Your Own Sense Of Things
Now it is time for the poem. The words and/or phrases will be the first lines of your poem. Put each word or phrase on a separate line. After each word or phrase, write what you think should follow them. You can use other things you wrote in the initial paragraph for this or use entirely new thoughts related to it.
If you have more lines for this part of the exercise, you will have a longer poem. Fewer lines will give you a shorter poem. Quality and honesty should be included in your goals for poetry, not quantity. Each one will be unique when applying this method.
As you view and read your poem, compare what is the same as well as what is different about it and the paragraph you wrote. They are distinct from each other although about one topic. Honestly, new poems can come from your current poem. For instance, you may want to write about the contrasting items in one poem and the similarities in another poem. It is all about freedom of choice.
Recap
This is about the construction of a poem based on its content. Taking a bare bones idea from a paragraph to keywords to what makes sense to you is how you construct a poem. Once you know what each step involves, it is easy to see how. The brevity, or brief format, of the construction process, is how prose becomes a poem. It goes from long to short.
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