How a Poem Comes to LIfe

To break it down into steps, here’s what I do:

  1. Have a funny idea
  2. Make up a story or a situation about the idea
  3. Think of any words I might want to use
  4. Write the framing lines
  5. Fill in the poem
  6. Let it rest
  7. Revise

Step 1: Have a funny idea

Believe it or not, the processes of creating a poem and creating a doodle are very similar. They both start with an idea. All day long, I listen to myself think. Just like with doodle ideas, what I’m listening for are thoughts that make me laugh. Funny thoughts make good poems. Sometimes when I’m thinking a lot about something not funny, I step back and I force myself to think about it in a way that makes it funny.

For this example, here is how I came up with and then wrote my poem “Vegetables, Vegetables”.

The idea came as I was looking into my back yard. I was thinking that I wanted to plant a garden. I enjoy growing things and working in the dirt because it’s peaceful. That said, I know from experience that when you plant a garden, you end up with more vegetables than one person or even one whole family can eat. Then I caught myself thinking: I like gardening, but really I just want to do the work and the growing part, but I’m going to have to give everything I grow away. Next I thought that perhaps a kid gardener, one who dislikes eating vegetables, might want to grow vegetables for the enjoyment but give them away before being forced to eat any, and that hit me as funny. Bam, poem idea.

Step 2: Make up a story or a situation about the idea

With funny idea, you can just tell someone your funny idea, or you can make up a joke or a story to go along with it and entertain them. I’d rather entertain someone, especially my sons (who are my first readers). Poems are short, so I don’t have to create a lengthy story to tell my funny thought as long as I deliver the funny concept or humorous twist. As a poet for kids, I believe my readers will be more willing to finish a poem if there’s always something funny at the end.

The story I told myself with “Vegetables, Vegetables” was: I want to plant a garden because I like doing the work, but I don’t want to have to eat any vegetables so I’ll just give them all away.

Step 3: Think of any words I might want to use

When I’m writing a poem around a particular word, Step 3 comes before Step 1 and I’ll concentrate on the word itself until I come up with a funny idea. Most of the time, though, the idea comes first. Once I’ve got a story to tell, I’ll brainstorm to think of words that the concept inspires. I make a list of these words and write them down. I probably won’t include all of the words on my list in a poem, but I at least identify some really strong words to use.

For “Vegetables, Vegetables”, the list looked like:

  • raking
  • mulch
  • dirt
  • grow
  • vines
  • sweat
  • work
  • relaxing

With that list, I started getting an idea about two important things that are a part of every poem. The first important thing is the meter. Meter in poetry is the rhythm of the poem as you read it. Some syllables have emphasis and some do not. In my experience and opinion, especially where poetry for kids is concerned, the beats and emphasis of the syllables in the words must always make a strong pattern. I prefer to use meter that sounds just like someone talking or singing a song, though some poets don’t. To me, a poem has to feel natural when spoken or it will be difficult to read. That’s a barrier I want to remove as the writer. I suss out a potential meter by combining words and seeing what beat patterns they make together.

Since most of the words in the list only had one syllable, I combined “raking” and “relaxing” and tried using them together to create one line of a poem. All I could come up with was:

For raking, relaxing bah DUM DUM bah DUM

It doesn’t seem like much, but I identified a pattern here. This line “works” because it’s easy to read, like talking. I noted that has eleven beats to it. I know from experience that some line patterns work and some don’t. I might have tried to come up with a second line to see if the poem’s meter started taking on an alternating beats-per-line pattern. Eleven beats per line usually works if every line in the poem has eleven beats. (Sometimes an eleven/eight/eleven/eight pattern works, but my success rate there is lower). I decided to attempt eleven beats on every line.

The second benefit of making the words list is that doing so helps identify words I may want to rhyme in writing. I think that rhyming is important to the poem’s readers, but as the writer, rhyming is often the last thing I do. I went over the words in the list to find rhymes for each of them (or none, in the case of “mulch”). Sometimes I do this in my head by just replacing the first letter of the word and listening for what other words come. Aching, baking, caking… maybe I don’t want to rhyme “raking” with anything. What I was looking for were rhymes that inspired whole lines of the poem to come into being already matching the meter/beat pattern in my head.

I use other tools for rhymes. I have a rhyming dictionary in my library, a rhyme app on my phone, and I employ RhymeZone.com’s web site (though it usually recommends too many words).

When I came to “grow”, I uncovered two very important rhymes: “hoe” and “row”. Both are particular to gardening. Like magic, these lines formed in my head:

When shoveling, tilling and using my hoe

and

for vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

I also came up with the phrase, “reap what you sow”, but it didn’t make a whole line.

That felt like enough to get started.

Step 4: Write the framing lines

The framing lines – the first few and last few lines of a poem – do two things. First, they set up the story or joke. Second, they deliver the punch line. If I get those lines right, the rest of the poem feels like it falls into place, believe it or not. I spend more time on these than any other lines in the poem. I usually try to set up the poem in the first or second line. In “Vegetables, Vegetables”, as an opening framing line, I wrote:

My garden’s a haven I often will go

And for the closing, I came up with a couplet:

I don’t want to eat them, I just want to grow
some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

I noticed that all three lines rhyme. Since every line is going to have the same number of beats, making every line in the poem rhyme makes sense. If the meter I’d come up with had been a different pattern of beats (eight and six beats per line are common), then alternating rhymes or rhymes on only every second and fourth line might have worked better. As it was, I thought I had enough to write more of the poem.

Step 5: Filling the poem

I always ask myself how long I want the poem to be. I try to keep a poem between eight and twenty lines. If I have a huge number of rhymes or words to use, I might make a long poem, especially if what’s at the end is really funny. If I just want to get to the end of the poem’s joke, I’ll make it brief. I think I can get three or four four-line verses out of this one and tell the whole story. Four lines per verse, I find, allows each verse to be long enough to convey one idea or thought. So I looked at what I had, and I placed them on a numbered list of verses:

  1. My garden’s a haven I often will go
  2. I don’t want to eat them, I just want to grow
  3. some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

That’s a lot of blank space. Fortunately, I really loved the very last line of the poem. Since I was going to try to make every line rhyme, I decided to try it as the last line of every verse:

  1. My garden’s a haven I often will go
  2. some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.
  3. some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.
  4. I don’t want to eat them, I just want to grow
  5. some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

I was getting closer. The easiest part to write next would be to tell what happens in the story right after the framing intro line. To come up with an idea, I reread the first line and asked myself WHY I like to go to the garden and WHAT do I do there. When thinking about these questions, I came up with these lines:

for shoveling, tilling and using my hoe

to answer WHAT I do there, and

I savor the work since it’s quiet and slow.

to answer WHY I do it. But when I tried to put them together, the verse came out like this:

  • My garden’s a haven I often will go
  • for shoveling, tilling and using my hoe
  • I savor the work since it’s quiet and slow.
  • some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

That didn’t work. Sometimes I can change a word here and there and it fits better. Sometimes it won’t. Writing a poem is like a puzzle. Some pieces almost fit, but if they don’t, then I can set them aside and try them in the next verse. Also like a puzzle piece, it’s a mistake to force a line in where it doesn’t fit. Sometimes the right thing to do is abandon a line, even if it’s got a really great vocabulary word in it.

I liked the way the first two lines worked together well enough to keep them that way.

Meanwhile, I started thinking about whether I could finish that last verse by itself. Just like asking myself WHAT and WHY for the first verse, asking myself WHEN inspired a line when I considered the earlier rhyming phrase “reap what you sow”.

At time for the harvest, I’ll reap what I sow

And then what will I do after my harvest?

  • At time for the harvest, I’ll reap what I sow
  • and give them to every last person I know.
  • I don’t want to eat them, I just want to grow
  • some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

This was coming together. To fill in the rest of the lines, I asked whether I really needed to tell more story. Twists and turns make for a good story, but they can make them unnecessarily longer. I asked myself WHAT in the process of planting a garden could go wrong?

I could be attacked by crows, of course. And “crow” rhymes with row and sow and grow, so that had potential. After thinking about it for a moment though, I realized that I didn’t want to complicate the simple story I set out to tell by adding bird attacks. It wasn’t worth telling. Most likely as I garden, I’d just get dirty, but I don’t mind the dirt. That concept made a spare line too:

Although I get dirty from head to my toe

Now it became a matter of fitting in that last line and the previous spare line I had laying around. Here’s what I had so far:

  1. My garden’s a haven I often will go
  2. for shoveling, tilling and using my hoe
  3. some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.
  4. I savor the work since it’s quiet and slow
  5. Although I get dirty from head to my toe
  6. for vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.
  7. At time for the harvest, I’ll reap what I sow
  8. and give them to every last person I know.
  9. I don’t want to eat them, I just want to grow
  10. some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

I changed “some” to “for” in the last line of the second verse to make it work better. There were only two lines left and I had no more story to tell. That’s where a poetry device came into play.

I already repeated the last line of every verse. Could I get away with repeating other lines too? Sure I could! In fact, there is a poetry pattern called a pantoum that repeats a lot of lines. (For more, go read one of my favorite pantoums by Renee LaTulippe.) Part of writing a pantoum is that the lines in the first verse of your pantoum make up the first lines in the subsequent verses of your poem. Pantoums are sixteen lines long though, and since I didn’t have more story to tell and I didn’t want to start and end the last verse with “some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row”, I made this poem into a partial pantoum and ended up with:

  1. My garden’s a haven I often will go
  2. for shoveling, tilling and using my hoe
  3. At time for the harvest, I’ll reap what I sow
  4. some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.
  5. for shoveling, tilling and using my hoe
  6. I savor the work since it’s quiet and slow
  7. Although I get dirty from head to my toe
  8. for vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.
  9. At time for the harvest, I’ll reap what I sow
  10. and give them to every last person I know.
  11. I don’t want to eat them, I just want to grow
  12. some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

That’s all of the lines I wanted to write. It was close to where I wanted it to be, but there were some words and lines that didn’t feel right. I couldn’t figure it out yet, so next came a very important step: stopping and coming back later.

Step 6: Letting it rest

Believe it or not, taking a break makes for a much better poem. It makes my mind change gears to leave and then come back to writing. This can give me new, and better ideas. It also inspires better word choices or some fun wordplay. How long a break should I take? It depends. I’ve taken breaks as short as five minutes, and others as long as eleven years (that is no joke). Usually I only take a break until my mind starts going back to the poem on its own and I start wanting to solve the problems that remain in the writing more than whatever else I’m doing. With this poem, the break took about thirty minutes.

Step 7: Revising

Once my mind was rested and I was ready to tackle the poem, revising went quickly (as it usually does). I read through the poem again, and then slowly read one line at a time out loud. Any time I read a line and it felt wrong on my tongue, or if I noticed I’d used a word too many times (and not on purpose), I made changes. Having a large vocabulary helps here, but a thesaurus can come in handy too.

As I read, I didn’t like how the first line and second line don’t seamlessly roll into each other. The grammar was the problem here, so I changed them to be:

My garden’s a haven where often I’ll go
for shoveling, tilling and using my hoe.

Two things hit me when I got to these lines:

I savor the work since it’s quiet and slow
Although I get dirty from head to my toe

First, the lines would work better if their order was switched. Second, “I savor the work since it’s quiet and slow” is just barely too hard to read, and it sounded weird when said out loud. Saying something like “I savor the labor: it’s quiet and slow” would keep the same beat pattern, rolls off the tongue, and would hit the ear a little easier. There’s a soft inner rhyme created there too, making for some wordplay that poets love.

When I got to the line, “At time for the harvest, I’ll reap what I sow”, it felt boring. I can’t explain why, but “harvest” troubled me. The line answered the important question of WHEN, but in a way that was so plain that it didn’t paint a pretty, poetic picture. As a substitute, I created the line:

“And after it’s Autumn, I’ll reap what I sow”

I liked this better because the idea of Autumn invokes a lot of senses. Autumn has so many colors and temperatures and smells associated with it, far more than just a harvest time. As for poetic device, by changing the words, I’ve also added a repeating “ah” sound to the line.

When reading, “I don’t want to eat them, I just want to grow”, I noticed that I’d used “want” twice in the same line. I revised this to be, “I don’t like to eat them, I just want to grow,” and I was happier with the emotion the line presents.

I felt done editing. Someday I may come back again and do more later. Some poems, I’ll come back to years later and fix things I never liked (like starting the second verse with “for” still irks me, but not enough to change it yet).

Here’s the final poem:

Vegetables, Vegetables

My garden’s a haven where often I’ll go
for shoveling, tilling and using my hoe.
And after it’s Autumn, I’ll reap what I sow:
some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

For shoveling, tilling and using my hoe,
Although I get dirty from head to my toe,
I savor the labor: it’s quiet and slow
for vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

And after it’s Autumn, I’ll reap what I sow
and give them to every last person I know.
I don’t like to eat them, I just want to grow
some vegetables, vegetables, all in a row.

There’s a doodle that goes with this poem. You can see them both here.

8 thoughts on “How a Poem Comes to LIfe”

  1. Thanks for the mention, Samuel! Aren’t these process posts fun to write? And also exhausting? 🙂 I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and really like the modified form you came up with. I do love a repeating line, and yours was a good candidate for it. Hmm…may need to try one of these!

  2. Great post! I’m definitely coming back to this for some of my poems. My poetry writing process isn’t so much of a process as it is hammering things out. My ideas usually start out like a crumpled ball of aluminum foil and I spend the rest of the time with a hammer trying to flatten it and get the wrinkles out. Somehow I enjoy the process but it’s not very efficient. I want to employ what you’ve written here. Thanks for sharing!!!

    1. Thank you! This article was a lot of fun to write. I put it together about the time that Kenn Nesbitt was being interviewed about his poetic process and was startled at how many similarities we have in our writing processes. I suspect that a lot of poets have a similar approach to writing poems.

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