Poetry

Emma Totaro

Do you ever feel the pressure to write a story or poem but have no inspiration or motivation to do it? Well, you’re not alone. Plenty of writers deal with this daily.

Imagination and inspiration surround us at every moment of every day. However, we must train ourselves to actively look for it to find it. Here are five ways to find inspiration:

Spend Time in Nature

The peacefulness of listening to birds chirp, smelling freshly cut grass, or feeling the breeze on your face can often quiet the mind. Quieting the mind is an essential first step in finding inspiration. You must create a quiet space in your mind so that inspiration can seep in and fill the space.

I find that the sounds and smells found in nature are inspiring in their own way. If you close your eyes, the breeze in front of your house could turn into the breeze in the middle of the ocean; the birds in the oak tree across the street could turn into a cacophony of sound in a rainforest; the grass beneath you could turn into swaying prairies. Inspiration can come from anywhere if you clear your mind and let your imagination run wild.

Listen to People’s Conversations

Another place to find inspiration is a populated place like a coffee shop, restaurant, college campus, or park. As you sit around people, listen to the conversations people are having. Often, little snippets of their exchanges will stick out to you. Writers often use pieces of interesting dialogue they heard in public as a jumping-off point for a character or scene in their piece.

However, paying attention to specific dialogue is not the only way to garner inspiration from public places. You can study how people dress or carry themselves to imagine how a particular character would dress or react to situations. Observing people is a great way to learn how people move, respond, and subconsciously function.

Search Pinterest

One of the main ways I get inspired and come up with stories is by browsing Pinterest for interesting photos. Often, I will search for a particular aspect I am interested in pursuing; this could be something general like a genre (e.g., science fiction or fantasy) or a niche theme (e.g., aliens or forest spirits). Plenty of artists upload their work to Pinterest, so there is always an abundance of drawings that could help you world-build, create characters, or narrow in on certain themes or topics in the story-building process.

Try Different Writing Prompts

Another way people can find inspiration is by searching the internet for writing prompts. Plenty of writing prompt generators pop up with a simple search. These generators are beneficial because they push you to be creative and write things outside your typical genres or themes. Plus, you can keep generating prompts until you find one that speaks to you. Then, write away! Don’t feel pressured to stick to the prompt. The prompt is only there to get you started.

Read a Book, Listen to Music, or Watch a Movie

Rather than passively engaging in these activities to escape from reality, push yourself to actively look for inspiration in a book, song, or movie. Do you connect with a certain character? Write a character like them. Do you gravitate toward specific themes? Write a story with a different spin on those themes. Do you resonate with dramatic music? Come up with a dramatic plot line. There are many ways to actively look for inspiration, even in other finished works.

Then, once you have an idea, the next big hurdle is mustering up the motivation to write. Here are three ways to get in the right headspace to write:

Turn on Motivating Music

Some people write best when immersed in music that matches the vibe of their writing. This music often inspires other ideas and blocks out the world. By putting in headphones and putting on a favorite playlist, you are tuning out everything around you and actively engaging in the creation process.

Sit Down to Write in an Aesthetically Pleasing Spot

The setting is crucial both in stories and in real life. If your setting is not pleasing to you or is not where you can stay focused, then you will not be productive or write. You need to be somewhere that fosters creativity and productivity. This is different for every person. I highly enjoy writing outside with a pretty view on a nice, sunny day. However, some people might prefer cozying up by the fire with a blanket or sitting at their desk with bright light filling the room. Learn where you are most productive and go write there.

Turn Notifications on Silent

The one thing that ruins my creativity is endless notifications. Creativity is a zone, and notifications from your phone or computer can disrupt your creative flow and pull you out of the world you are creating. Once you find motivation and are in the zone, staying focused and writing is imperative. Good writing is intentional writing, meaning that you must intentionally set aside time to be immersed in the process.

At the end of the day, you need to actively participate. Inspiration and motivation are not going to simply fall in your lap. Inspiration requires searching and being observant. Then, you must find your productive headspace and write until your story is complete. Finding inspiration and motivation is the hardest part. Once you start writing your story, the rest will come. Keep at it and keep your eyes and ears open.

Elizabeth Rhodes

The most daunting part of writing can often be the start of the writing process. What to write? All writers, especially beginners, will often sit at their desks, paper, or computer in front of them with no words to put down. It can be frustrating to find inspiration when wanting to write the perfect poem. Wanting to write “perfection” is usually the first block that causes a writer not to write in the first place. Expecting to write something remarkable on the first try is an unrealistic expectation. No written work is perfect; revision and even scrapping are necessary. There is no shame in writing a “not so fantastic” poem on the first couple of tires. So, after this has been established, and if there are still no words written down there, here are some more tips that might be useful. 

Listen to some music. You might think music would be distracting when trying to write a poem, but in fact, for some, it can help motivate them to write. Poetry has a musical flow when written well, so listening to music can help the writer imitate musicality. Music also conveys a lot of strong emotions and has a story, which can help give ideas about what to write about. Music with lyrics or without are both helpful; it’s often more useful to listen to instrumental or chill music; that way lyrics won’t get in the way of what you are writing, but that does not mean that listening to some T-Swift won’t give you some inspiration for your next love poem!  

Talk a walk. Simply going outside can give you a lot of inspiration. Many poems are derived from nature; looking at birds or walking on grass can help create ideas and images for your poetry. Though, you don’t have to get ideas from nature; you can find inspiration from anything; you can write a poem about being stuck in traffic. The idea is that being out in different environments allows a writer to observe the world around them. It’s essential to notice the little things; taking notes while being out can be helpful so you can remember the things you have observed when you have time to write later.

Blackout poetry is also a useful tool for inspiration. Blackout poetry is creative and simple. Get any old book that you don’t mind ruining, a sharpy, and mark out any words you don’t want. Keep the inspiring words or the ones that really stick out to you. Then after you cover up the unnecessary words, see if what you have can be a poem. It’s both meditating and might inspire your next great poem.

Reading poetry is also essential for any poet, but most don’t realize it can actually inspire a poet to write. When reading other people’s work, we are more likely to learn from them and be more willing to try new forms of poetry. Listening to poetry is also helpful because poetry is best when spoken out loud; while we hear the poem, we hear the musical tone and can understand more of the author’s intent in the poem when they are speaking out loud. Poetry Foundation is an excellent start to finding audio poetry, and they even have a poem of the day that can inspire new ideas!

If all else fails, then simply start writing, it doesn’t matter what or if it’s good or bad. Just start typing or scribbling on the page. You can start off as a prose, write a list of events that happened within the last week and don’t stop, don’t quit until you have nothing left to say. Then look back and take out 90% of it. Leave the important concrete words, see what you have, shape it into a form, and create a poem. See, not too bad, right?

Inspiration does not always come, but it’s always available if you are looking in the right places for it. There are many days I don’t want to write, or I don’t know where to start. Taking a step back and looking at something I’ve previously written might inspire me to keep going, to realize that I too can be a great writer if I take the time and simply start somewhere. So, good luck with your next inspired poem!

Andrew Winslow

Poetry has become something of an enigma in our culture.  While it feels like a dying art, it simultaneously lives on.  While many people have lost interest in reading or writing it, poetry still seems to hold a sacred space in our hearts.  From those who defend the practice of poetry, I hear a lot of blame placed on an overcrowding of the market with bland or outright bad poetry.  I hear a lot about poor teachers who exhort their students that there is no wrong way to do poetry, a fact that is true, but often abused.  I think a lot of people feel like they want to try their hand at poetry at least once in their life.  Those that like the experience often want to continue writing, but the task feels daunting when confronted with the complex forms and structures outside of free verse poetry.

Many people see the plethora of poetic forms as a roadblock, a ball and chain on creativity and free expression.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  The fact is, we are drawn to a good beat, a flowing rhythm, or a clever rhyme scheme.  Just look at the modern music market, with lyrics to many songs that sound like poems when read instead of sung.  A lot of them follow the same pattern, based on style, and people love it.  Working with fixed forms is challenging, but the benefits are worth the effort.  It can make a poem come alive, make the emotions you try to express jump off the page.  In this post, I will walk through some basic examples of how to begin playing with structure and form, and show some examples of easy(er) to use fixed forms.

Reasons to Experiment with Fixed Forms

1. Using free verse is all well and good, but just because you don’t have to structure a poem in a particular way does not mean that you shouldn’t give it a structure of some kind.  Play around with the lines and stanzas.  What makes your poem look good?  What layout emphasizes the major points and emotions of the poem?  These are the two most important questions to ask when playing with structure.
2. Messing with meter and rhythm can be difficult.  Believe me, I know.  I consider myself a poet and I still struggle with it.  The easiest thing I can recommend is to pay attention to your syllable count.  Look things up if you have to, just make a pattern out of the syllables first without worrying about stresses or iambs or anything like that.  Then, and this is the most important part of crafting any poem, read it out loud.  If there are any portions that sound weird or you stumble over consistently, then try to re-work it until you find something that does work with the syllable count.  You don’t even have to know why something works or doesn’t work, as long as it sounds good you’ll be fine.
3. If you’re feeling ambitious, try one of the fixed forms.  One of the biggest mistakes I see aspiring poets make is to be intimidated by fixed forms because all they can think of is the Sonnet.  There’s a reason the Sonnet is the golden standard in English poetry, it’s really hard to master, that’s why Shakespeare was considered a genius poet.  There are much easier, though still challenging, poetic forms that don’t rely on meter or rhyme schemes.  Repetition is a good place to start. 

A Few Forms to Try

Try the Ghazal style on for size: Stanzas made of two lines each, and the end of every second line is the same word.

Next time don’t bother

Nothing gets past me, dear


I know what happens in my own house

Or did you think otherwise, dear


I don’t want to deal with this again

But I will if I have to, dear

Okay, so it’s not my best work.  I just slapped it down as an example, sue me.  But you get the idea.  You can add as many two-line stanzas as you want, so it works well for almost any size.

If you want to try something a little more ambitious, a Sestina is an interesting workout to craft.  They’re made up of six stanzas with six lines each and an end stanza of three lines, so poems written in this form are big.  The most interesting part is that the word at the end of every line gets reused throughout the poem in this pattern:

ABCDEF

FAEBDC
CFDABE

ECBFAD

DEACFB

BDFECA
Then, in the last half-stanza, the pattern can either take the form of ACE or ECA.

Notice that the word at the end of every last line in a stanza is used at the end of the first line in the next stanza.

If you feel like your rhyming is okay but you’re still unsure about meter, I would recommend one of my favorite forms, the Villanelle, which uses rhymes and repetition.  It’s made up of five three-line stanzas and one four-line stanza at the end.  All the first and last lines rhyme with each other throughout the whole poem, and the second lines all rhyme with each other too, like this:

A1 b A2

a b A1

a b A2

a b A1

a b A2

A b A1 A2

Now, here’s where the repetition comes in, all the A1 lines are exactly the same, they get repeated.  Same with all the A2 lines.  The effect is rather impressive when you put the work in.

If you want a bigger challenge with rhyme and repetition, try a pantoum.  This can get tricky, but there’s no harm in trying and coming up with something ridiculous, as evidenced by my poem about how to write a pantoum in the form of a pantoum

How to Write a Pantoum

1A It starts and ends with an opening rhyme
2B Then you move onto the next part
3A Lines 2 & 4 will be lines 1 & 3 next time
4B The Pantoum makes repetition an art

2B Then you move onto the next part
5C By doing the same thing again
4B The Pantoum makes repetition an art
6C The structure is really quite plain

5C By doing the same thing again
7D The Pantoum maintains a beat
6C The structure is really quite plain
8D The rhythm is easy and neat

7D The Pantoum maintains a beat
9A It goes as long as the author has time
8D The rhythm is easy and neat
A1 It starts and ends with an opening rhyme

There are many other styles and forms to play with.  Look up a list and try a few.  Try to stick to the form as closely as possible, because an unspoken truth of poetry is the more challenging it is to write, the more impressive the results can be.  Push yourself, but find the style that works best for you

Come read the newest edition of CBU’s literary journal and enter into the true spirit of Christmas.

Here’s a sneak peak:

Andrew Banks

Writing poetry is challenging. It’s as simple as that. The very act of setting the right words in the right order in just the right way is sometimes such an insurmountable endeavor that most simply do not attempt it, and the hard-headed ones keep at it. The number of issues, pitfalls, and conundrums writers face are innumerable. However, among the challenges that I’ve seen with many poets at the beginning of their craft both as a tutor of four years and as an editor of this Spring’s edition of The Dazed Starling, one challenge stands out as both glaring and easily fixable: they don’t know what contemporary poetry really looks like or what its tenets are, and as a result, they write in styles that are outdated and destined to flop.

However, as much as this issue has to do with a lack of familiarity, I don’t blame any young poet doing their best to attempt a Wordsworthian lyrical ballad or a Shakespearian sonnet, no more than I blame myself for attempting something so cringeworthy. I blame the fact that the first time I read a lick of contemporary poetry that made sense, (that wasn’t so blatantly avant-garde or simply some photo on Instagram), wasn’t until I took a creative writing class in my second year of my undergraduate study. I blame the fact that as a supposed major in English Literature, the only frames of reference I had to write a poem were Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Dylan Thomas. All beautiful poets in their own rights and in their own times, but not our time, not in 2022.

As much as I’ve written in first person, this issue isn’t unique to me. It is so ubiquitous, in fact, that much of the poetry I’ve read (and much of the poetry I wrote) falls back on some archaism, no matter how contemporary it attempts to be, and some read completely as if they’ve never seen any poetry written after 1850. This is likely because, if my experience serves me right, they simply haven’t read enough, as I certainly did not. Names like Dana Gioia or Mary Oliver rang no bells, felt obscure, and their poetry even more bewildering.

“Are these even poems?” I asked.

Certainly, they are. They just follow different conventions than what we, as readers and aspiring poets, are used to.

Despite the fact that this post is a rant about not hearing Gioia’s “Prayer” early enough, I am no expert in the “tenets” of contemporary poetry. For one, there are no “tenets” per se; there are only trends, broad tendencies, commonalities in poems written today that we can just barely put our fingers on. If any neophyte poet wishes to grasp these trends, I would recommend Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook as a starting point. I return to this book often as a source of inspiration and correction for my own poetry, and as such is indispensable.

Short of buying a book, however, I do want to recommend one idea to every poet that might read this that is having trouble updating their style, besides actually reading contemporary poets, two of which I have already mentioned: Write as simply and plainly as possible. Aspiring poets, myself included, are often guilty of taking off our “normal speaking” hats, and putting on our “Poetry hats,” (there is usually a quill that sticks out of the brim, very stylish), and we write in ways that to any other reader sounds like we are doing our best impression of our favorite romantic poet. Take the hat off, and throw it across the room, even hide it in your attic if you have one, because as long as you try to sound like someone else, particularly if they have been dead for over two hundred years, you will never write like yourself, or anyone else alive for that matter. I will take a cue from Mary Oliver’s book, and ask that you write as if you were speaking intimately to your reader: with intent and intensity, but not overblown, or with false poetic

Amberly Rose Garcia

2021 CBU Creative Writing Contest Honorable Mention—Poetry

Harmony Taetz

2021 CBU Creative Writing Contest Winner—Poetry

Jacob Haffner