“The most pleasurable moments in verse are when emotions and occurrences calculate themselves on the basis of how we can stretch a description.” – dimitrireyespoet.com
So you’ve written your poem and now is the time to reread it. There’s work to do, but you know the heart of the poem is in there, somewhere.
You edit your work line by line, checking for grammar mistakes, while also considering your overall tone, metaphor, and analogy. Lines are getting added in while phrases are getting cut out, and finally you notice something— you’ve just used a particular word 3 times in 3 lines! This can be a frustrating experience with writers, as we find ourselves toying over the exact words to represent our art and the repetition of certain words can make a poem’s rhythm fall flat.
To be clear, I’m not talking about articles like “and” “but” “to” and “the” which can also become very repetitive and tedious. I’m more concerned with the adjectives, nouns, and verbs in our work. There are countless ways that we can describe an object in terms of movement and appearance and that’s what attracts people to poetry. The most pleasurable moments in verse are when emotions and occurrences calculate themselves on the basis of how we can stretch a description. That comes from the words we use where exact wordage can turn a poem from good to great.
If you are struggling with just how to find the right words, here are 2 Poetry Hacks to Make Your Words Better.
1. Use a Thesaurus
This is the most basic way to upgrade your words and this is in due part to its simplicity. On many word processors, thesauruses are built into their systems where right clicking, double clicking, or holding your finger down on the word will toggle a thesaurus option where you can find a substitution for your word.
Though this is an option, be wary of choosing any random substitution, as many words come with their own connotations. In other words, the word you change runs the risk of changing some of the context that surrounds your poem. For example, if I wanted to use a synonym for red, and I substituted it with the word, “scarlet,” it can trigger a series of different preconceived ideas such as sickness, love, passion, anger, or sin, while replacing the word red with, “crimson,” could signal violence, death, or blood.
In the past, I’ve had my undergraduate poetry students work out a little diagram that helped get them in the headspace of connotations. At the beginning of class, or when we were discussing a certain poem, I’d put a certain word on the board, and we would see where those words actually lead us. Assuredly, it was purely based on the memories and experiences of the individual reading the poem, and that’s what makes a poem so vastly deep, no matter how many times you go to it.
2. Utilize Etymology
Another great hack is to do some historical word digging. Thinking about etymologies will have you tracing a particular word back to when it was first used and this has proven to me in the past to be quite addicting!
“Swag” for example, is used in several different ways such as a gait or merchandise, whereas it’s origins in 16th century Shakespearean English meant, “to strut in a defiant or insolent manner” or, “to sway,” or, “to boast or brag.” All of them share a similarity, but could be built around a certain definition, or gleaned in a certain light to create new meaning.
The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) is the premiere source for word nerds— boasting 600.000 words that have been recorded for 1,000 years. If you are a college student, you are in luck because you have free access to the dictionary.
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