Pointers and tips from our PoetrySpeaks.com poets, partners and books on how to improve your craft. Real-life advice monthly from the poets and community who live for poetry.
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– A message to the YourMic Poetry Community from SpokenWord Poet Terry Jacobus
Terry Jacobus is a featured poet in Spoken Word Revolution
Finding Poetic Voice and Inspiration
Inspiration and writing come from hard work and the soul-deep fire of perseverance, usually not an epiphany. We all have had mentors we admired; usually when this initially happens we may copy his or her style of writing poems, stories, etc. Then over time, by reading other writers and coupling that with our personal life experiences and with dogged persistence, we can develop our own specific voice. When we have found this voice, we still have the task of honing it like a sculptor into our own art form that makes an impact on the self and hopefully the feelings of others.
Sticking to our personal voice in poems or stories can be very difficult. It is hard to edit ourselves, falling in love with certain lines that may not belong to a specific piece. When you know your voice, try not to deviate from it and don't over-write. In poetry I would say that each line should be strong, as strong as the line before it, until you come to the end and when working your way up you see that each line is dependent on the other to make the poem come alive, impenetrable. Economy is power and voice is the use of that power.
If poems and stories are entertaining, accessible, and intelligent, you will know and your readers will know it too. Great writing implodes on the page affecting the reader in unique ways conducive to the mental images to which a writer leads them. Other than that it's all up to you.
~Terry Jacobus
It's All Poetry
A common misconception about youth poetry is that it’s like regular poetry, but much worse. This stands to reason: teenagers are universally resented for their physical elasticity and unrestrained hope. It is a lucky thing, then, that poetry from all ages is widely believed to be tedious and pretentious thereby unifying our larger poetic community with our smaller, springier brethren.
Still, this misconception persists, due in part to our need, even in the arts, to cling to othering and gate keeping. However, I feel that the tendency to dismiss youth poets for the crime of being young should be instantly disregarded as mere “high school drama” – an expression that belies just how entrenched social power is to our (supposed) maturity. Will a youth poet write the same as a seventy-year-old poet? Of course not, but a septuagenarian poet from the Bronx in the 1980s will write much different than a bitter old poet writing in Germany in the 16th Century will write much different than a poet ruined by a life of disappointment, loneliness, and scrofula in Mesopotamia’s Middle Bronze Age – it’s all a matter of grounding, aka, where you from.
Basically, it’s a new millennium; we be young; we rep Chicago. Recognize.
And I do believe these poems and poets to be excellent. Not youth excellent, not slam excellent, simply excellent – the perfectly distilled emotions, knowledge, and rhetoric from a collective of brilliant lunatics.
I am honored to know these near-women and almost-men, I am lucky to have learned and to grow with them.
