Episode 7: Poetry Practice

The speaker is hosting a podcast episode about poetry. They want to dedicate the entire month to poetry and give an introduction to different types of poetry. They also mention some favorite literary terms and devices, as well as sharing favorite poems. The speaker gives shout-outs to various individuals and organizations that have supported their work. They talk about the importance of storytelling and helping underrepresented populations to tell their stories. The speaker also discusses their passion for writing and turning the area into a writing mecca. They encourage listeners to have courage and bravery in their writing and share a poem by Billy Collins called "Introduction to Poetry." They emphasize the importance of personal interpretation and connection when reading and understanding poetry. Welcome to Cover Creativity in the Literary Lounge, where a place where writing doesn't have to suck. I'm your host, Kinda Faith, and today I'd like to talk about poetry. If you didn't know, April is the National Poetry Month for our country. So I kind of want to do, for the month of April, I would like every single podcast this month to be dedicated to poetry in some way, shape, or form. But today's episode, I kind of like to give just an introduction to poetry. I want to talk about some poetic types, because there's tons. And then I would also like to maybe throw out a couple of my favorite literary terms and devices. And finally, I'd like to wrap up our conversation with maybe sharing some of my favorite poems. Some are written from faith-publishing authors. Some are not, so make sure that you stay tuned. But before I dive into today's topic, of course, I need to give a couple shout-outs. First is the Wichita Advanced Learning Library. They are on 711 West 2nd Street. They, and I don't know if all of the libraries in the city, but several of the libraries within the city, provide a studio. They call it the AV Studio that you can record, oh, my gosh, you can have podcasts, you can have video. It's all in a soundproof room. It's super, super cool. So definitely check them out if you haven't already. I'd like to have a shout-out to Ms. Gillespie's marketing students at Newton High School. Their marketing class has been doing an absolutely amazing job, making flyers, getting out the word about all of our events. It's super, I love, I don't know, I'm excited. I get beside myself. I'm kind of giddy. I love the fact that these kids get an actual experience in marketing and helping, you know, a worthwhile cause. Wendy Nugent at the Harvey County Now newspaper. Recently I was interviewed, actually I was interviewed, the first person I was interviewed, connected to Faith Publishing, was our book cover artist. Kate Nembhard won, check it out, an $84,000 merit scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute. And then Wendy came by and she wrote an amazing, amazing story. And then later on, Wendy interviewed me. And, of course, I'm like beside myself. Do you know how hard it was to, like, slow down my language instead of, like, talking a bajillion words a minute? I'm super happy that she is also a creative type. We had a great conversation. And we actually ended up the conversation not interviewing anymore but just brainstorming. We were brainstorming and we were discussing future projects. And, oh, my gosh, that is probably one of my most, I don't know, my favorite part of creating. I love brainstorming. I love getting ideas off of each other, bouncing off the ideas. Anyway, Wendy and I had the conversation about ghost stories because I also teach, if you didn't know, I also teach high school English. And one of my classes I teach a rhetoric of horror. And you're like, what? I know, it's like coolest class ever. And we look at different tropes in literature. We look at the vampire. We look at the thing with no name. We look at the haunted, the bad place. And actually, speaking with her, we started brainstorming about, oh, what are the haunted places around our community? And can we make the story out of that? So needless to say, I was really excited. And I think she was excited, too, about what faith publishing can do for our community and honestly for central Kansas. Maybe I'm getting a little too big for my britches. I don't care. I don't know. I just think it's important because every story matters. Every idea matters. Every accomplishment, it matters. And I'm just so proud of the fact that we can help underrepresented populations tell their stories. And we can help them gain valuable experience, kind of like the marketing and the people that are helping me edit. And, of course, I don't know, my writers and my other creators, they get to understand the creative process. And I'm just so proud that faith publishing can help that out. I don't have words, which is funny because that's the business that I'm in. I don't have words that describe how proud and how excited I am to help people make their dream of editing or marketing or creating book covers or just making creative community, how proud I am to make that a reality. So on that note, if you, I know this is a great segue, if you want to join my little writing revolution, jump on board. I don't know exactly where this crazy train is going to be going, but I think it's going to be one hell of a ride. I would love to turn this area into a writing mecca, a cultural center of sorts. You know what I'm saying? Oh, my gosh, this is going to be so amazing. I don't know. The possibilities, the possibilities are endless. But let me try to find some mindfulness and center myself. And what are we going to do next? The mantra. I know. We love it. We love it. All right. Are we ready? Today, I will face fear. Today, I will be brave. Today, I will struggle. Today, I will grow. And today, I will get through this. Huzzah! Woo-hoo! Sorry, guys. I know I'm completely laughing at myself, but I just think this is going to be so much fun. So that and my spazziness. Where do we go? Where do we go from here? How do we do this? How do we make the story of our beloved heartland into this writing mecca? Well, I think the first thing that you have to do is have a little courage. You know, it's easy to say, oh, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to be out there. Anybody that knows me, I have no problems acting a complete fool. I have nothing to lose. It's going to be fine. Right? So have a little courage. Have courage in your thoughts. Have courage in your ideas. You know, it takes courage to create and it takes bravery to share. Right? Yeah. Find your bravery. Find your courage. And let's just get writing. So are you with me? Of course you're with me. That's why you're listening to this. One of the first steps that I took in my little writing journey was to write poetry. Now, I don't know what your experience has been with poetry. A lot of the people that I've met, my students and even adults, when I mention the word poetry, I get the insert eye roll here. Right? Like I read poetry in high school and I didn't understand it. I'm just like, what do all these dead white guys have anything to do with me? They don't know anything about me. They don't know what I'm struggling with. They don't know what I'm proud of. I just didn't get it. I didn't understand until I just started writing when I was older. Just a way to process. And then I went back and I'm reading these things and I'm like, hmm, well this doesn't really suck. Maybe it's not this great, but maybe I can do something more. Maybe I can, you know, expand my knowledge a little bit. Maybe I can find different poetic forms that fit me. And I will tell you, going through, I've tried on. Again, it's like shopping. I've tried on various poetic forms. Right? A haiku does not fit me. Right? Way too tight in the waist area. You know what I'm saying? And other things I did like structure. Other things I don't like structure. So I think a lot of it, again, you shop until you find what fits you. Or you can totally pull a face. See how I did that? You can totally pull a face and you're just like, you know what? Screw it. I'm writing my own, which is also pretty liberating all into itself. Right? One of the things, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to read a poem by Billy Collins. I believe he used to be the poet laureate for our country back in the day. It's called Introduction to Poetry. Stay with me. I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouth into a poet and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to water ski across the surface of a poem, wave at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is to tie the poem up to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. It's brilliant and heavy. And I love this. I love that at the very beginning it's so easy to visualize putting light to a color slide. I think it's extremely easy to visualize water skiing, although I don't do it. How can you water ski past a poem? Like you're happy and you're excited about it. And then it turns really, really dark where it talks about tying a poem to a chair with a rope and beating it with a hose to find out. Wow, that is heavy and strong. And I love that the strength is shown in that poem. One of the great things when it comes to literature and when it comes to poetry is I firmly believe there's no wrong or right way to read and understand a poem. I think that's the best way of how we connect. So, for example, maybe you don't have any connection to tying something up to a chair and beating it with a hose. That's, you know, I don't. But the thing is, maybe I have an idea about what that means. The great thing, I'm pretty sure that there's an Internet meme floating around, you know, where you read something and let's say the author describes a blue room and your stereotypical English teacher goes on and on and on about how this blue room represents warmth and trust and maybe it represents, I don't know, the womb and freedom and la, la, la. Or it could just be a blue room. You know, you as the reader get to decide, right? You decide what that means. It's the poet's or the writer's responsibility to kind of help guide you to do that, right? We both have that same shared experience. It's all about connecting. And you can look at different, oh, my gosh, there's so many like movie clips and memes about, you know, hi, why do we write poetry? For chicks, right? It's to look cool on Valentine's Day or to show that you're in love. But there's so much more than that. There's so much more. So where do I start with this? Let's just start with the type of poem. There are a bajillion. I'm pretty sure there's a bajillion. I think the last time I checked my list I had at least 168, maybe 170 different types of poems. And that sounds like a lot. So let's just start with a few, right? These don't have to be complicated. They don't have to be hard. Remember, I want you to, you know, struggle a little, you know, be a little challenged. But it's also I don't want you to have so much frustration you're ready to, like, rage quit and, like, slam your phone to the ground, nothing like that. So let's just talk about a type of poem. One type that I really like to start out with, and a lot of students, high school students and even adults for that matter, they're familiar with it, and maybe they weren't, maybe they just didn't quite get it. And one of those poems is called an acrostic. An acrostic poem, each letter of the line when read vertically is going to spell out the subject of your poem. A lot of times I think in elementary school teachers will have kids write, like, a one word, you know. So, like, my daughter's name is Kate, C-A-T-E. And so the first line would start with a C. The second line would start with an A and then a T and then an E. You get how it goes. Well, in elementary school you just have, like, one word that starts with a T. Well, as you, you know, progress in your educational journey, you can expand that. So don't just do one word. I mean, come on. We all know that you're better than that. Expand it a little bit. So here I'm going to try something. I wrote this, like, five minutes ago. I really don't know how good it's going to be. But, you know, we all know I'm fearless today, so what the heck. So I'm going to have my poem is going to be called Faith, F-A-Y-T-H-E. Right? So those are going to be the lines down. They'll let us down and then across. So F, forever searching for poets and storytellers. A, always excited for our next adventure. Y, yelling to the rooftops about our work. T, together we create our narrative. H, helping others to find their voices. E, everyone join us on our journey. Yay. That wasn't too hard, was it? No? I didn't think so either. I think that could be fun. Sometimes you can actually use technology. Like, I have kind of mismatched emotions. Mismatched emotions. It's hard to say. When it comes to technology. But I think if you use this as a tool as opposed to a crutch, you know, something that's going to replace your knowledge, use it as a tool. Right? Everybody needs to have like the proverbial Swiss Army knife of writing in literary terms. Right? I think it can help out with everything. I do think that AI can be helpful. I think a poem generator can be kind of fun. But maybe start with it to get some ideas and then go from there. Don't have the computer or something completely right out. Right? No one knows your world except you. I think technology is amazing. But they aren't you. So I carry on. You can go, there is kind of a fun little website that I found the other day. It's poem-generator.org.uk. I don't know, that was kind of fun. It lists different types of poems that you can start with. Again, I would not suggest that you use this as your own work, but maybe this could give you a nice little starting off, like a little jumping point. Right? The second one, the second different type of poem I usually start out in my classes is a list poem. A list poem is actually relatively easy. It can be about anything. It doesn't necessarily have to rhyme. You just have a beginning and then your list, list, list, list. This could be a grocery list. This could be, oh, my gosh, what happened at a baseball game. This could be, I mean, it's whatever. So you have your beginning, then your list, and then you have an end. And, yeah, that's not hard. It's not hard at all. I can completely make you a grocery list about how I dread going to the grocery store. Like I like to take my time in the grocery store. I like to browse and see things and blah, and then, of course, I get upset. Yeah. So that would be my list. I would start out with dreading my experience, asparagus, moldy strawberries, on sale steak, yeah, whatever. And then I would have a conclusive thought. So one of my favorite poems, actually one of my favorite poets is Shel Silverstein. And it was like one of the few books I read when I was a child, and I kind of got it. And it was fun. It was super exciting. And then later, as an adult, like I love different types of music. Shel Silverstein, if you didn't know, he's the one that wrote The Boy Called Sue, a really super famous song from Johnny Cash. So Shel Silverstein used to hang out in Nashville with all of these country singers, and he's like making songs. And I find that just freaking hysterical. Anyhoo, I digress. One of my favorite list poems is called Sick. It's in the book Where Does the Sidewalk End? And look it up online or go to your local library. It's just super fun. So here it is. Quote, I cannot go to school today, said little Peggy Ann McKay. I have the measles and the mumps and the gash and a rash and some purple bumps. My mouth is wet, my throat is dry, and I'm going blind in my right eye. My tonsils are as big as rocks. I've counted 16 chickenpox, and there's one more. Oh, that's 17. Don't you think my face looks green? My leg is cut. My eyes are blue. I might have an instamatic flu. I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke. I'm sure my left leg is broke. My hip hurts when I move my chin and my belly button is caving in. My back is wretched. My ankle's sprained and my appendix abouts it each time it rains. My nose is cold and my toes are numb. I have a sliver in my thumb and my neck is stiff. My voice is weak, and I can hardly whisper when I speak. My tongue is filling up my mouth, and I think my hair's falling out. My elbow's bent. My spine ain't straight, and the temperature is 108. My brain is shrunk, and I cannot hear because there's a hole inside my ear. And I have a hangnail in my heart. What? What's that? Oh, what did he say? Oh, today is Saturday. Okay, goodbye. I'm going to play. Yay. I don't know. I think that's a fun one, a fun list poem. So, again, you're just looking for different areas. You're looking for different things that might suit you, right? Whenever I try to figure out what I want to eat or where I want to go, you know, for dinner, I always have, like, do I want something hot or cold? Do I want it spicy or mild? Do I want it crunchy or soft? Right, so I kind of go through that same exact process whenever I'm writing. Right, do I want it hot or cold? Do I, you know, do I want it spicy? Do I want it crunchy? Do I want to have a certain spice to it? So you can kind of do that same thing whenever you're writing. Again, it's kind of like shopping or, like, doing, like, the most massive filter, putting in a bajillion filters. The final one, the final poem that I'll probably talk about that just kind of helps, I wouldn't call it necessarily training wheels poetry, but it's fun. It's fun just to kind of just see what you have to say and kind of just play around with the words. Right? It's nothing too terribly crazy. The last one I like is a tanka. I always think I like tanka truck. I'm probably saying this wrong. Tanka, tanka, it's T-A-N-K-A. It's a Japanese form of poem, and it depends on the number of lines in the syllables. It does not necessarily depend on rhyme, and it's not necessarily like a haiku. So it's going to be five lines. The first line has five syllables. The second line has seven syllables. The third line goes back to five. Fourth line, seven syllables. And line five, that's your last line, is going to have seven syllables, but the last word is going to rhyme with line four. And, yeah, I will put this up, like, on a PDF so you guys know what I'm talking about. So I would do line five, five syllables, where I go for hours. Where I go for hours. That's five syllables. This is my second line. I go there to write. Third line, it is not difficult to find. Search within your heart and mind. Yay. Hopefully, I don't know, something. It's something. All right. I'm moving on. I'm moving on. I'm done with that. The final thing I'll just throw out for you today are a couple just writing focuses, a couple literations, or, sorry, some literary devices. My first one has to do with your word choice. Play with your word choice. Like, I'm not going to claim that I have the largest vocabulary because I don't. But sometimes if I hear something, I'm going to look it up, and I'm like, ooh, can I use that? I do not have a plug. I'm not getting anything from this, but my favorite website probably of all time is thesaurus.com. Go there. Check it out. Maybe you're looking for another word to replace hungry. Right? Are you famished? Do you want to devour something? Right? Kind of just, I don't know, expand your vocabulary a bit. The other one is alliteration. Alliteration is the repetition of a consonant. Not a vowel, but a consonant sound. I don't know. I've been listening to a lot of different things. So, waiting, wishing, wanting. All have that W sound. And whispering words of wisdom. Ooh, that's wonderful. Even extra special because I believe it's from Let It Be, that old Beatles song. You can't go wrong with the Beatles. And then the other one I kind of like to kind of throw out towards you, specific. Be specific. Be interesting. So, instead of saying I have a spot or a stain on my shirt, you can say the blue ink stain was in the shape of Vietnam. Okay, that's oddly specific. How about instead of I was filled with emotion, you can write, think regret mixed with pride wrapped in hunger. Ooh, that's a good one. Or my diary was filled with hope and wonder. Well, that's super great. Maybe I need something more. The pages were stained with tears and coffee rings. That completely sounds like something I would do. So, here's my call to action. Write. Just write some poetry. It's going to be for the National Poetry Month. Join in. It's fun. It's super fun. Play with your words. Not play with your food. Play with your words. Have fun. Try a poem generator. I don't know. A plot generator. A character generator. I don't know. I think those things are super, super fun. And then just try to give it a shot and do a little writing. Before I close, though, I do, again, want to remind everybody that Faith Publishing, Inc. is having a statewide high school poetry competition, a poetry contest. So, any, it's 20, oh, my gosh, I can't talk today. Let's try that again. It's a poem, no more than 20 lines. It can be on any subject. It doesn't have to rhyme. Nothing like that. I'm kind of viewing that the top 10% is going to be published in our first inaugural anthology called The Echoes of the Prairie. And the top three will get gift cards, Amazon gift cards. So, I think that's really exciting. And even the teacher who has the most student participation, he or she will receive a free copy of the anthology. So, I don't know. Write a poem. Talk it out there. Maybe it might get published. So, celebrate poetry. Celebrate writing. Celebrate people. Just have fun. Have fun and enjoy playing. Playing with wordplay. That's what I've got to tell you. So, this is Kendra Faith at A Cup of Creativity, The Literary Lounge, a place where writing doesn't have to suck. I really, really look forward to reading your work. Until next time. Bye.