Updates On Blood Theme & Some Poetry Tips

Hi All,

Just wanna update you guys on the 'BLOOD' theme submission. We got 3 so far and all in the poetry section. Maybe you guys could support them by droping at their submission post by commenting or rating (you like be a judge, like simon or ellen or randy or the other one i forgot :p). Anyway here they are so far :

1) Against (Kap-sule Theme) by 26life

2) Writers' block (blood) by Haradanam

3) The Husseins and Perla's Pearl (Kap-sule Theme) by MissClarks

...thank you for submitting guys! ;)

I would like to encourage others to participate too. There's still much time. So get creative, take part and have fun. Send one or ten in any category, artworks, poetry or short story ya.

Ok here's something I got from a web, maybe it could help ;)

Before we talk about writing poetry, it would probably be a good idea to talk about what poetry is exactly. People have different ideas of what poetry is. To some, poetry is rhyming. To others, poetry is something boring that they were forced to study back in school. Some people love it, some people hate it.

Let’s go for the official definition. According to Wikipedia, poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent, literal meaning.

In other words, poetry is pretty words that can have multiple meanings. Now, see how easy that was?

Why should you write poetry? Well, because it’s awesome. I love poetry because it involves breaking down and analyzing the world in a very concrete way. Yeah, we’ve all got different ideas in our heads of what goes on around us, but when you write poetry you’ve got to extract those ideas and feelings. You’ve got to suss it out, to get down to the nitty gritty, to whittle everything away to its base form. When you’re down to pure emotion, thought, and feeling, you’ve got a poem.

As you probably already know, there are a ton of different types of poetry, just like there are a million types of every other kind of art. Here’s a quick rundown of the ten most common types or forms of poetry:

ABC poem – An ABC poem has five lines. The first line begins with any letter of the alphabet (usually but not always A) and the subsequent four lines start with the next letters of the alphabet. In other words, each line is in alphabetical order. Each line is a word or phrase. Here’s an example:

Ants,
Bees, and
Caterpillars
Definitely aren’t very
Edible.

Acrostic – An acrostic is a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word (usually a word that is alluded to or related to in the poem itself). It has no set form in terms of number of lines or syllables. Here’s Edgar Allen Poe’s “An Acrostic”:

Elizabeth it is in vain you say
“Love not” — thou sayest it in so sweet a way:
In vain those words from thee or L.E.L.
Zantippe’s talents had enforced so well:
Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,
Breath it less gently forth — and veil thine eyes.
Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried
To cure his love — was cured of all beside —
His follie — pride — and passion — for he died.

Ballad - A poem that tells a story such as folk tail or legend. There is often a repeated refrain.

Free Verse - A free verse poem has no parameters; there doesn’t have to be any rhyming, there’s no meter, no number of set lines, no number of syllables, nothing.

Haiku – Haikus are simple enough in theory. They are three lines long and each line has to have a certain number of syllables. The first line has 5 syllables, the second line 7 syllables, and the third line 5 syllables. Here’s a sample haiku by Tristan Higbee called “Italy”:

Europe’s sexy leg
dangles in the pool, waiting.
How can I resist?

Limerick – A limerick is a stanza of five lines, with the first, second and fifth usually having eight or nine syllables and rhyming with one another, and the third and fourth usually having five or six syllables, and rhyming separately. Limericks are usually funny and/or obscene. Here is a famous limerick:

There was an old man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
His daughter, named Nan,
ran away with a man.
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

Ode – Odes are long, typically serious poems that are written in a set style and relatively rigid format. Perhaps the most famous ode is John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.

Quatrain – A quatrain is a single-stanza poem with four lines and rhyme. It doesn’t really matter which lines rhyme; there are lots of options here. Here is a quatrain by Emily Dickinson:

The Riddle we can guess
We speedily despise –
Not anything is stale so long
As Yesterday’s surprise.

Sonnet - A poem that is 14 lines long that usually has a conventional rhyme scheme.

Tanka – A Japanese poem of five lines, the first and third composed of five syllables and the other seven. So it’s like a haiku with two more 7-syllable lines tacked on to the end.

So what makes a good poem? Great question! Here are some general tips:

- Don’t force rhyme! Rhyming dictionaries are often taken advantage of. Don’t rhyme just for the sake of rhyming. If you’re going to rhyme, make it sound natural and use words and word order that you would normally use.

- Don’t make it sound cheesy. That’s clear enough, yeah?

- Write normally. Don’t try to make it sound old. The old Victorian poems are great and the language they’re written in is beautiful, but that’s how they talked then! There’s no reason for a poem written today

- Write about what you know about. When you write from your own personal experiences, your poems will sound more genuine and real.

- Don’t be literal. The beauty of poetry is being able to compare something with something else. For example, don’t just say “She cried,” but say something like “Her eyes were leaking.” Ok, so that is a pretty bad example, but you get the point.

- Write well. Use alliteration, simile, rhyme, hyperbole, color, meter,

- Avoid cliches. Don’t talk about stairways to heaven or flying high on wings. That’s been done about a billion times already.

- Deliver the punchline. Have the last line or two really wrap up the poem well. Do this my making the lines particularly profound, witty, or entertaining.

- Be clever!