Ink & Ivyby Aya Saleh

The workshop

The Craft

How poems are built, how they are read to their depths, and how you might make one of your own tonight.

The Forms

Sonnet

14 lines · iambic pentameter

An argument with a hinge. The Shakespearean turns at line 9 and clinches in a couplet; the Petrarchan breaks 8 against 6. Use it when a feeling needs to be reasoned with.

Villanelle

19 lines · two refrains

Obsession given architecture. The repeated lines return like a thought you cannot put down — which is why Dylan Thomas used it to rage against a father's death.

Blank Verse

unrhymed iambic pentameter

The heartbeat of English speech. Shakespeare's plays and Milton's epic live here: grand enough for God, natural enough for grief.

Elegy

any form · one purpose

A poem that mourns, then attempts consolation. Watch how the grief refuses the consolation — that refusal is usually where the poem gets honest.

Ode

stanzaic · exalted address

Sustained attention to one thing until it opens: an urn, a nightingale, autumn. Praise, in poetry, is a form of close looking.

Free Verse

no fixed meter

Not the absence of form but form invented per poem. The line break becomes your only instrument — so break where meaning hesitates, never where it is comfortable.

The Instruments

Metaphor
Says one thing is another, and means it. The engine of poetic thought.
Enjambment
A sentence spilling past the line's end — suspense, breathlessness, refusal to stop.
Caesura
A pause inside the line. Where a poem catches its breath, or its throat.
Assonance
Repeated vowel music, binding lines below the level of attention.
Volta
The turn. The moment the poem changes its mind about itself.
Synecdoche
A part standing for the whole — a hand for a person, a sail for a ship.

Writing a Poem, in Five Movements

  1. I

    Begin with an image, not an idea

    Ideas make essays; images make poems. Start with the thing you can see — a chipped cup, a hospital corridor, rain on a bus window. The meaning will find its way in behind it.

  2. II

    Ask what the feeling is defending against

    Anger is often grief with armour. Nostalgia is often fear of the present. Write toward the thing underneath; that is where the reader is waiting.

  3. III

    Choose a shape, even a private one

    Constraint is not a cage but a trellis. Decide the line length, the stanza, whether it rhymes. Then let the form pressure you into a phrase you would never have chosen freely.

  4. IV

    Read it aloud and cut the polite words

    Delete every 'very', 'somehow', 'really', and each adjective doing the noun's job. If a line survives being spoken in an empty room, it can survive a reader.

  5. V

    Give the ending an open door

    Do not explain the poem in its final line. End on an image, a turn, or a silence — and let the reader step through carrying their own life.

Reading a poem psychologically

Ask four questions of any poem. Who is speaking, and to whom? Nobody speaks into a vacuum; find the listener. What is being avoided? Notice the subject the poem circles but will not name. Where does the language break? A shift in rhythm, register or syntax is the mind flinching. What does it want from you? Comfort, witness, absolution — every poem is a request.

Bring the Oracle your poem