My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice: A Guide to Writing Poetry and Speaking Your Truth
128
My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice: A Guide to Writing Poetry and Speaking Your Truth
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Overview
"[This book] gives us endless ways to access our creative selves and shows us how to shape our experiences into poetry...This book reassured me that we all have the capacity to create something beautiful.'" —Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Children of the Land
Ever had an emotion or experience you wanted to express, but didn't know how? This guide by Patrice Vecchione encourages new writers of all ages to find their voices, step up and speak their truths, and articulate what matters to them most—both personally and politically—whether it be boldly to an outside audience or just privately for themselves.
Young adults are reading and writing and performing poetry more than ever before. Written in short, easy-to-digest chapters by the editor of Ink Knows No Borders, My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice includes prompts and inspiration, writing suggestions and instruction, brief interviews with some current popular poets such as Kim Addonizio, Safia Elhillo, and others, and poem excerpts scattered throughout the book.
My Shouting, Shattered Whispering Voice offers ways to express rage, frustration, joy, and sorrow, and to substitute apathy with creativity, usurp fear with daring, counteract anxiety with the joy of writing one word down and then another to express vital, but previously unarticulated, thoughts. Most importantly, here you can discover the value of your own voice and come to believe that what you have to say matters.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609809850 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Seven Stories Press |
| Publication date: | 03/31/2020 |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.98(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.52(d) |
| Age Range: | 12 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
A Chewed-Up Pencil in the Back Pocket of an Old Pair of Jeans
Once upon a time a girl lost her voice. She had been treated cruelly, and for years, she said not a yes or a no. What she couldn’t say out loud—the unspeakable and the everyday things—she turned into poems, and that led her later to reclaim her voice, anew, aloud.
Once upon another time a boy kept a journal that he filled with his life’s challenges and triumphs. When his father found the notebook he read it, and in front of the boy, he set a match to his son’s words. That would have kept many from writing again. This young man bought a new notebook, wrote a new poem, and after memorizing it, tore out the page and set a match to it himself. At the top of the next page he wrote the first word of his new poem. If his father were to read it, there would be nothing to anger him. This notebook with the mostly missing words later became the young poet’s first book. Such was the determination of the poet within him.
Our lives are made of stories and poems, from the tiniest incidents to the biggest—early childhood experiences like icing your first cake to more recent ones like a first crush. There’s hitting your first home run, the private embarrassment of cheating on a test and not getting caught, a #MeToo moment.
Writing poems is a way to uncover what most needs to be uncovered—to loosen the tongue in solitude, to make connections that can’t be made in conversation. Poems are made of questions more than answers. They can withstand sudden shifts of direction, may be full of contradictions. Poems don’t shy away from incomplete sentences. A poem of no more than three lines can defy darkness or change the wind’s direction. The poet Kwame Dawes said, “Poetry offers us the capacity to carry in us and express the contradictory impulses that make us human.”
Once upon another time there was a kid who was overwhelmed by her life. She needed a way to reckon with her confusions, those knotted and gooey ones that pressed against her. Her father’s daily shouting in Italian and English made his eyes spin, and when he called her an idiot, she wanted to disappear. She was embarrassed by the slurred speech of her mother’s drunken public outbursts. At school she felt out of place, as though the oddities of her home life were visible. In front of most others she was quiet. But inside her head loud bees were swarming.
One morning during her first year of high school, wearing the brown felt hat with the beaded sunburst on the front (the hat she wore even to bed), her long hair falling down the length of her back, she walked out of class, giving no reason. Behind the music building, late morning winter sun leaned warm against the wall and she sat down. Someone was playing drums inside a classroom. But the girl was listening to something else, something within her, and it was persistent.
Pulling out a small notebook and a chewed-up pencil from the back pocket of her jeans, the girl began to write. Unlike the dread and drudgery that came with classroom writing, this was nearly effortless. It was as if the poem were writing her. She read it once to herself. Satisfied, she returned to class.
That girl was me. For a long time, my poems stayed hidden in notebooks. I wrote to make something out of what scared me, to separate myself from the crazy instability of my home life and the sense of not fitting in xv at school. To say how it felt, I wrote to save my life. Not for a long time did I have an inkling that within me there were books to be written, that I could become a writer.
That was lifetimes ago, really. That books have my name on the spine continues to amaze and delight me. When the first copy of a new one arrives in the mail, I’m glad you can’t see me because I dance around the house, holding the book in my arms like a small partner. When I see a book of mine on a shelf in a bookstore, I touch the place where my name is printed.
In poems, paragraphs and chapters, I discover that I know more than I thought I did, that I’m braver and more daring than I believed I could be, that I’m not as different from others as I once believed, and maybe most importantly, that I’m not the idiot girl my father told me I was.
Whatever your life situation—whether you live in a city high-rise or a cabin in the woods, whether you have one parent at home or two or none, whether you know what you want to say or think you’ve got nothing worth saying—there are poems within you that only you can write. I know that as well as I know the truth of sunlight’s warmth against my face on a cold day.
That voice of yours, does it shout? Has it ever hit against a wall, shattering like glass? Or does it whisper, making no more sound than a dream does? Has your voice been yours for a thousand years or are you finding it tonight—your very own voice calling to you—so you can’t fall asleep and must write word upon word on the page of night?
What you’ll write nobody else will. Nobody else can. You’re the only one who knows what you know, who dreams what you dream, the only one who’ll turn a phrase just so, who’ll follow the word “soul” with “tricks.” If you don’t write your poems, they will never be written, and the stories of your life will go untold. If you don’t write your poems, they’ll not even have the substance of smoke. If you don’t write your poems, they’ll be lost, and with those lost poems go parts of you.
But if you do write your poems, you will find that you have more life, that it will be sturdier than it was before, and truer. The details of the world will catch your attention more than ever. Writing one poem leads to writing another. The weight that pressed against your chest is carried away by a flock of crows. With your words you can stand up for yourself and others, and more than ever the world needs the truths that poems provide.
Chances are this book’s in your hands because poetry has called your name. You’ve got poems under your tongue; they’re lurking in the crevices of your days. Don’t remain unwritten! Make your indelible stain. Tattoo yourself to the pages of your life.
My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice is divided into five sections. The first, “Poetry’s Calling: Finding Yourself on Paper,” looks at why writers write and what writing can do for us. We’ll explore what gets us to the page and look at how to deepen our encounters xvii with writing. The second section, “‘If One Part Were Touched, the Whole Would Tremble’: Poetry from the Inside Out,” focuses on poetry’s nitty-gritty—line break, voice and style, punctuation, metaphor and simile. The book’s third section, “Who Said You Couldn’t Say That?: Twenty-Five Poetry-Writing Inspirations in Twenty-One Short Chapters,” will give you lots to write about. When you’re ready to think about giving readings and publishing your poems, turn to the fourth section, “‘How Possible Might the Impossible Be?’: Getting Your Poetry Out There.” The book’s last section “Where to Go from Here: Poetry Resources,” consists of a compendium of websites and a bibliography.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
A Chewed-Up Pencil in the Back Pocket of an Old Pair of Jeans xiii
Part I Poetry's Calling: Finding Yourself on Paper
1 Why Write? 1
2 Poetry in the Beginning 6
3 The Mind of the Poet 9
4 What Writing Does for Us 12
5 Belief in the Unwritten 15
6 The Blue Mountains Far Away: The Art of Listening 17
7 Kinds of Silence 19
8 Truth, Lies, and Poetry 20
9 How Do You Know? 25
10 The Five Senses 27
11 The Sixth Sense: Intuitive Knowing 29
12 Inviting Inspiration 30
13 Who and What Defines You? 35
14 Responding to a Complicated World 38
15 Your Own Company: Writing and Solitude 40
16 The "Evils" of Procrastination 42
17 And If You Don't Write? 44
18 Losing Your Way, and Other Perils and Pitfalls 45
19 Abandoned on a Gold, Hard Street by Poetry: Writer's Block 47
20 Living with the Internal Critic 53
21 The Poet Within 56
Part II "If One Part Were touched, the Whole Would Tremble": Writing Poetry from the Inside Out
22 Loving Words 61
23 What Makes a Poem a Poem? 62
24 The Various Forms Poetry Takes: From Free Verse to the Villanelle 66
25 The Element of Sound 68
26 The Shape of It 72
27 To Punctuate or Not to Punctuate 76
28 Voice and Style 78
29 "Since Feeling Is First": The Troublesome Adjective and Getting to Original Thought 80
30 Simile and Metaphor 83
31 By Heart or By Head 86
32 Where Do You Write? 87
33 Tools of the Trade 89
34 Rules You'll Love to Follow: A Surprising List 91
Part III Who Said You Couldn't Say That?: Twenty-Five Poetry-Writing Suggestions in Twenty-One Short Chapters
35 Writing Faster Than You Can Think 97
36 I Remember: Poetry and Memory 98
37 Lost and Found 100
38 "I've Known Rivers" 102
39 These Are the Hands 103
40 "A List of Further Possibilities" 106
41 Who Said You Couldn't Say That? 107
42 Your Very Human Body 109
43 The Love Poem 109
44 Twenty Questions That Ask but Do Not Answer 111
45 Did I Hear That Right?: Overheard Conversations Transformed into Poems 112
46 The Found Poem 114
47 A Walk in the Dark 115
48 "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night" 116
49 Fear and What Eases It a Little 118
50 My Birth and my Name: "at the rupture where land became ocean" 119
51 "Nothing's Left" 121
52 The Lost Words 123
53 Into the Future: Take Yourself There Now 124
54 A Formal Form for Fun (and Hopefully Not Too Much Frustration): The Ghazal 125
55 Five for Five 127
Part IV "How Possible Might the Impossible Be?": Getting Tour Poetry Out There
56 Success and Failure 131
57 Making Your Words Stick to the Page: The Editing Process 133
58 Not by Any Other Name: Titling Your Poems 137
59 Time for a Trustworthy Reader? 138
60 Open Your Notebook and Let Your Poems Out 139
61 Sound Check: Reading and Performing Your Poems 143
62 Alternatives to Traditional Publishing 145
63 Creating a Poetry Manuscript 147
64 The Cover Letter 149
65 Book Publishing for Poets 149
66 The Poet's Perils: Rejection 152
67 Living the Poet's Life 153
68 Your Poetic License 155
69 How Writing a Poem Is Like Building a Fire 156
Part V Where to Go from Here: Poetry Resources
Websites Where You'll Find Poems, Essays, Recommended Reading Lists, Interviews, Audio, Video, and More 161
Online Poetry Workshops and Classes 163
Publishing Opportunities 163
Specific Interest Sites and Organizations 165
Annotated Bibliography 166
Acknowledgments 168
Permissions 169