Soul Poetry

One of the questions I get the most is: where do you get your inspiration? I can honestly say everywhere! Sometimes inspiration comes like a lightning bolt and zaps my brain. When that happens, I have to have a paper and pen on hand to write down my thoughts before they disappear. Sometimes certain events, places, or people will inspire my words. I also get great ideas from poetry prompts or from a magazine’s set theme. Other times my poems come from a source of great pain. It’s in those dark moments that I feel most compelled to write. I suppose writing acts as some kind of therapy — it’s a way to examine the broken parts of me and put them back together again.

Links to Poetry Prompts

https://www.squibler.io/learn/writing/writing-prompts/best-poetry-prompts

https://thinkwritten.com/poetry-prompts

Let’s Talk about Line Breaks

Line breaks are organic. Line breaks are a mystery. But are they? Believe it or not, there is a rhyme and rhythm to line breaks. One of the biggest mistakes I made in college as an emerging professional poet was where I broke my lines. Lucky for me, I had the good fortune of having two amazing professors who guided me in this sometimes nebulous process. As an English teacher, I will say the first “rule” (if there is a such thing in poetry) is to avoid ending a line in a preposition (in the same way you’d avoid ending a sentence in a preposition when writing an essay). The second “rule” is to break lines where they make sense. Where do you want your reader to pause? A line break more or less functions as a form of punctuation. In fact, line breaks often make it unnecessary to add any punctuation at all. Let me show you some examples. First: “Half-Staff State” published in Issue 113 of Cholla Needles this spring:

Half-Staff State

wind ruffles
the red, white, and blue
ripples in a star-studded sea
but she’s cut in half today—
half her height
but still just as heavy
with the weight of loss
attempting, in vain,
to wave away the tears
of mothers, fathers—
to clean the air
of the futile waste of life
and people cry
reaching towards the pole
longing to pull the string
to hoist her back up
above the grief

All of these lines breaks are intentional – placed exactly where i want the reader to “break.” Using the em dash helps guide readers to more definitive pauses without the overuse of commas, but most of the pauses come from the line breaks themselves. Notice I did not end any lines with “with,” “to,” “of,” etc. Ending in a preposition tends to make an awkward line break, often causing the reader to “stumble” over the intended enjambment line. So, it’s fine to be “organic” with line breaks, as long as you are intentional. Lines do not have to be the same length, so if you are breaking a line for the purpose of keeping lines the same length, your reader may not read the poem the way you intended.

Let’s look at another example. I will purposely put “bad” breaks in “Sleep of Death” then show you how I actually wrote the poem with intentional line breaks for publication: (also from Issue 113 Cholla Needles):

Sleep of Death

they say
he’s sleeping more these days
and I wonder about that—
how the body needs more sleep
as it ages as
the skin softens
and thins as
bruises appear
like smashed plums as
the brain
strains to find purchase on
the ledge of memories as
eyes blink
open—closed
open—closed
as if to prepare itself to
sleep forever

Now read the way I actually wrote the poem:

Sleep of Death

they say
he’s sleeping more these days
and I wonder about that—
how the body needs more sleep
as it ages
as the skin softens
and thins
as bruises appear
like smashed plums
as the brain
strains to find purchase
on the ledge of memories
as eyes blink
open—closed
open—closed
as if to prepare itself
to sleep forever

To help guide your own line breaks, read your poem out loud. Pretend you are just an ordinary reader who picked up your poem. Where do you find yourself pausing? Taking a breath? Do the line breaks make sense? Is there a logical reason one line ends and another begins? Experiment. Try writing the poem with different line breaks. See what happens when you do not end a line in a preposition. See what happens when you choose a single word for a line. How does that impact the poem?

If you have any questions or have a poem you’d like for me to review in terms of line breaks, please send me a message. soulpoetrysubs@yahoo.com