05Jul 2019 by admin

Revising Poetry: The Purpose Triangle

Tips, Writing Process
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "If you’ve considered the general purpose, audience’s purpose, and the speaker’s purpose, I promise you that your poem will immediately become cohesive. You may even want to try this hack with a poem you are stuck on."  - dimitrireyespoet.com A lot of the writing process could and should be with revising and editing. These are the stages where your poem can change dramatically and truly become something cohesive. There are many ways in which people decide to edit and while some take the more natural approach poem to poem, some form a methodology— steps to the editing process that the poet does poem to poem. Whether you are a Type A or Type B personality, the editing should always revolve around the purpose of your poem. Therefore,…
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03Jul 2019 by admin

5 Reasons to Title a Poem

Tips, Writing Process
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "One can be tooling over the mechanics of a great poem then throw it away with a generic or safe title... the title is another way to add a certain depth and complexity to the piece. It can be the bearings for your readers or it can lead them astray."  - dimitrireyespoet.com Titles are the first impression of poems because this is usually what jumps out at your readers. For one, the title usually looks different in size or line weight. It is also most likely on it’s own line, creating its own distance from the rest of the poem. Even so, with beginner poets, titles can be one of the most overlooked things in the poem. One can be tooling over the mechanics of a…
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21Jun 2019 by admin

Be The Speaker, Not The Writer

Tips, Writing Process
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "The entity in the poem solely exists on the page and through performance. It can contain pieces of us or others in our lives, but “the speaker” is an interpretation.."  - dimitrireyespoet.com A common mistake I find in writing communities (even those that have been practicing for awhile) is when people talk about the poem and they address the voice in the poem as “the poet” or “the writer.” This is to be avoided. The entity voicing their observations are having thoughts that are obviously created by the writer, but the one who pens the poem also has the poetic license to create and change the story. Therefore analyzing the poem as if the character is speaking solely about themselves is a false analysis and isn’t the…
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18Jun 2019 by admin

2 Poetry Hacks to Make Your Words Better

Tips, Writing Process
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "The most pleasurable moments in verse are when emotions and occurrences calculate themselves on the basis of how we can stretch a description."  - dimitrireyespoet.comSo 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…
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01Apr 2019 by admin

31 IDEAS for National Poetry Month 2019

Exercises, Professionalism, Tips, Uncategorized, Writing Process
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest National Poetry Month is lovingly called #NaPoMo by most poets. It's when the poetry community gets the most love by colleges, schools, art institutions, and other writers. It's the celebration of poetry as something healing, enigmatic, all-encompassing, and omnipresent.   Here are 31 ways in which you can be a part of National Poetry Month this April! 1. Watch My YouTube Channel You can find videos on poetry basics, tips, exercises, performances, vlogs, and artist interviews. 2. Read the U.S Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith is the current U.S Poet Laureate. You can also check out poet laureate’s from across the United States, as some states have their own laureate. 3. Support Poetry Podcasts Podcasts are more popular than ever. Many poets and organizations have great conversations on…
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20Mar 2019 by admin

7 Tips for Beginner Poets

Tips, Uncategorized
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "Words have the power to change moods instantly, and because of this, we should respect their importance."  - dimitrireyespoet.com When I first started making poetry videos on my YouTube channel it was to fill in the gaps of information that I wasn’t finding online. I wanted to create one single location where individuals can go to when they were learning to write poems. I also wanted the platform to model what the poet’s attitude should be like while they were creating. Now that I have many posts on the subject, it has allowed me to help those who are more experienced, and those who are just starting out. This blog for example, will be highlighting 7 Tips for Beginner Poets 1) Appreciate Poetry As a poet, you’ve…
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19Mar 2019 by admin

10 Ways to Get Involved as a Poet

Professionalism, Tips
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "Remember, the literary world is as much about community as it is about the solitary and we must keep building each other up!" - dimitrireyespoet.com Believe it or not, there were many times throughout history where poets were able to live off of their poetry and they were not the starving artists you may be thinking of. For as long as poetry existed it has done so in two facets; within the self and within it’s public. With what had started as sung lyrics passed down through the oral tradition, poetry evolved into poems that were eventually written down so others who were literate could read, share, and experience the words for themselves. As the centuries passed others continued to write poems and more people began…
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30Dec 2018 by admin

5 Tips for Writing Poetry

Tips, Uncategorized
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "No matter what you are reading, in some shape or form it will influence the work that you are producing."  -dimitrireyespoet.com 1. Make Sure You Can Thrive in Your Environment First and foremost, you have to get comfortable. Now being comfortable can take shape in several forms. Certain writers want to be in a specific setting to set a defined mood. For example, you've all heard of the "Starbucks writers." The reason those writers exist is because they like being in a space where there are a bunch of public things going on and everything just becomes white noise. So they're hearing all this stuff but they're really not listening to it. In turn, they're able to focus more on their writing. Other people like myself,…
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30Dec 2018 by admin

Writing Routine Vs. No Writing Routine

Tips, Uncategorized
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "A bad poem today prepares you for a good poem tomorrow."- dimitrireyespoet.com Hello poets. A question that I often pondered when I first started my writer’s journey was how often I should be writing. This was a particularly burning question that gave me some bouts of anxiety, especially when I was a student in an MFA program. I was in search for some definitive answer, some textbook paragraph that would tell me the appropriate hours I needed to put in, but what I found out was (as I would about many things in the creative writing world)  that the answers to many my questions were riddled in ambiguity and preference. The truth is, a question like, “How often should one be writing?” is a query even…
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28Nov 2018 by admin

What Should Beginner Poets Write About

Tips, Uncategorized
Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest "Memory is every poet’s ace because the richness of the material comes from yourself as you exist today, looking back at the person you once were." -dimitrireyespoet.com You may ask yourself, "What am I going to write about?" If you've asked yourself this question then you've already started the process of writing. There are two main ways to begin writing and they come from the speaker's perspective. The speaker is usually in fact the poet, but because poets can write about some pretty intense things they call it the speaker to create a distance. The speaker can also come in two forms: one is called the innerspeaker and the other is the outerspeaker. Outerspeaker The outerspeaker is the more general out the two voices. They can tackle…
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