My relationship with poetry is…strained.  I read all of the advice about prose authors writing, practicing, and reading poetry to improve their prose writing, and I often resolve to do the same.  So, I’ll sit down with a blank page and some suitably poetic idea, and I…won’t make any progress.  A blank page ready to be filled with prose excites me, but the same page prepared for poetry might as well be a stone barricade.  After some fruitless staring, or perhaps a poor, contrived, dull, formulaic sonnet or two, I abandon the effort and return to telling the stories I want to tell in the way I want to tell them.

Nothing is necessarily wrong with that, per se, except that I am dissatisfied with the overall quality of my prose and would like to improve it.  Whenever I read an author whose writing is especially remarkable – not the storytelling, but the writing itself, the words on the page – I know that mine could be so much more than it presently is.  Authors like Dickens, or Tolkien, or even Rothfuss who form sentences that resonate in ways that sentences from other authors’ like Sanderson or Wight do not, no matter how superb their storytelling.  It is to craft beautiful prose that I would practice mediocre poetry.

Part of the problem is that I simply don’t like most poetry I’ve read.  Aside from the poetry in Tolkien, most authors who seek to imitate him with poems and songs in their stories fall far short, and the “pure” poetry I’ve read is usually either depressing or overwrought.  Maybe that’s the heritage of my educational experience with poetry, wherein every word must be carefully analyzed for the teacher’s perceived, hidden meanings.  I’ve therefore tried studying songs, instead, since those utilize many of the same techniques, but that effort has been only partially successful.  Stripped of music, there is something stale, I find, about most lyrics, as much as I respect their storytelling style.

With poetry remaining, for now, something of a mystery, I’ve turned my attention towards instead applying certain poetically derived techniques to my prose: choosing alliteration with my word choice where it fits, creating assonance or consonance, even attempting (usually without success) to create a certain consistent meter within sentences or to frame paragraphs.  What I’ve noticed in this effort is that all of these techniques, and perhaps poetry in general, consist of creating patterns.

As prose authors, we look a lot at the big picture of the story: plot, character, setting, idea, conflict.  With hundreds of thousands of words, we’re concerned with how the beginning with relate to the end, how the character will change consistently in the middle, how the magic will work, not so much with how many syllables are in one sentence compared to another.  Poetic techniques, though, are all about those small-scale patterns in the writing itself, not the storytelling.  Specific poetic forms can be quite strict, but poetry as a whole is all about patterns.

Really, all language is about patterns.  When we learn a language, we are learning to associate meanings with specific symbols and sounds and their combinations.  These patterns we consciously notice when we read or listen, but there are other patterns that form naturally with the implementation of language that are made explicit in poetry and which make certain forms and styles of language more pleasing than others.  Established poetic techniques simply take advantage, deliberately, of patterns that can arise in language organically that produce certain responses in a listener because our brains are exceptional pattern recognition machines, a little like minor versus major chords in music can evoke certain emotional responses.  This goes back to oral storytelling traditions as discussed with respect to Dine Bahane, and the performative nature of language.

These techniques can apply just as much to prose writing as to poetry.  I wouldn’t advise adding a rhyme scheme to your sentences, but using alliteration to make a description pop, or leveraging a subtle assonance to subliminally link two concepts, or even applying a loose meter to sentences or paragraphs can all make your writing more pleasing to readers or listeners, ideally without them ever actively noticing the techniques you’re using.  If poetry brings such patterns to the fore and makes them the focus, excellent prose is about concealing them in plain sight.

It’s not something that you can start applying overnight, unless you’re some kind of savant.  For now, I mostly try to look at these considerations during revisions, because I cannot yet keep all of these ideas consciously in mind and implement them whilst I write.  Besides, it would suck all the momentum and enjoyment out of the writing process.  Sometimes, though, I do find that as I’m searching for an adjective or trying to form a sentence to convey just the sentiment I want for a scene, I can look for the alliteration or some other choice in words or word order that will add a pattern to the work that will (hopefully) make the overall effect that much more pleasing.  Doing this consistently and effectively will take time a practice, but it’s something that I can work on without writing poetry.

If it wasn’t clear, all of this is a matter of personal style.  You can write excellent stories that do little or any of this deliberately – that would be more in line with Sanderson’s transparent prose concept.  There is even an argument that popular writing these days is unsuited to such contrivances.  For me, though, I think that these are techniques that can improve my writing, bring it closer to those authors whose writing itself I most respect.  Maybe poetry will never work for me.  But patterns?  Patterns I can use.