When I say the word “poetry,” I bet you have a reaction, and it’s probably not a positive one. Confusion, dismissal, ambivalence, embarrassment, distaste, anxiety, ridicule, boredom — take your pick.
So many of us first encountered poetry in school, where a teacher probably treated poems like puzzles with hidden messages, or riddles with right answers. And while, sure, some poems can be like that, maybe you just didn’t get it. Maybe you were forced to read poems out loud and you struggled with the language — especially if it was something written before you were born. (God help you if it was Shakespeare.) Maybe the poets you were exposed to were almost exclusively dead and straight and male and cisgender and white, and so maybe you just didn’t see yourself in that canon of writers. Or maybe none of that is true, and you still decided that poetry, meh, wasn’t for you. Fair enough. I’m not here to convince you, not really.
But as someone who has loved poetry since I was a kid, and who has written the stuff long enough and seriously enough to dare to call himself a poet — I’m here to tell you that my training and experience as a poet overlaps a lot with my work as a copy editor. And I’d like to show you how, so that it can inform your own writing, whether you’re a workhorse who churns out thousands of words a week, or you’re someone who just wants your social posts to work harder.
Trim it down.
In general, poetry tends to use language that’s different from prose: sparer and denser and richer, with implications that are layered and complex. With fewer embellishments, there’s room for more depth. Think of it like really great food: so flavorful and so delicious that the reader can’t take in too much of it at once. This means we need to really trim things down.
In prose, the aim is similar. I’m not suggesting that you turn your Instagram posts into Japanese tankas, but concision is always a good goal. As an editor, I’m constantly deleting things: words, phrases, sentences, even entire paragraphs. You have to consider every word, and make sure it’s pulling its weight. Do you see two adjectives in a row that are near synonyms? Yeet one of them off the page. Can you replace a phrase with a single word? Do it. When you’re done, the language should be so good that your reader wants to slow down and engage with it.
Consider the rhythm.
There’s a whole method of examining poetry called prosody, where you study how the poem is built. A huge part of that is meter, which (in English) has to do with where the stressed and unstressed syllables fall, and what overall patterns exist, and where the words break out of the pattern, and why. Now, granted, the prose you’re writing isn’t going to have the rollicking staccato of a limerick or the gentle cadence of blank verse. For the stuff that we write in the marketing industry, the idea of rhythm is subtler.
One of the easiest ways to tap into rhythm is by repeating words to build momentum or emphasis. In prose, writers tend to stack repetitions at the beginning or the end of phrases. (The fancy words for these techniques are anaphora and epistrophe.) These rhetorical devices are particularly popular with orators for their powerful effect — think Martin Luther King’s iterations of “I have a dream,” or Abraham Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, for the people.” However you do it, paying attention to rhythm can be a clever way to bring the effects of a little poetry into your work.
Know the conventions.
I’m not talking here about gatherings of poets (though those do exist). Instead, I’m referring to poetic conventions. Perhaps the most obvious examples are poetic forms, drawn from traditions around the world. You’ve probably heard of sonnets, haikus, and limericks, but there are dozens if not hundreds of forms out there: sestinas, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, duplexes, rengas, abecedarians . . .
Many of these have rules about the poem’s structure: the lines, the meter, the rhyme, and so on. Some forms require repeated words or lines throughout. (In a pantoum, every line appears twice!) Poets adhere to and break these rules in all kinds of ways, often with a specific intention. For example: A sonnet is traditionally a love poem, but if you choose to mess with its patterns of rhythm and rhyme, you might do so to write about a lost love, or depict a broken relationship, or comment on something that’s not love at all.
In prose, too, it’s good to know the rules of the game you’re playing, or the room that you’re working within. Are you writing an email for accepted students? Make sure you know what they might be expecting from you. Then, you might give them what they’re anticipating, to make sure you reach them — or you might not, hoping to grab their attention in another way. Playing with the tension between your form and your audience’s expectations, and how you fulfill them (or subvert them), can be a masterful way to make your writing more effective.
Lean into figurative language.
Figurative language is a term that covers a range of techniques. But what we’re usually talking about are simile and metaphor, which compare two things by noticing how they’re alike in some way. Similes use “like” or “as”: The bee moved amid the flowers like a referee on the basketball court. Metaphors make the comparison more directly: The bee was a tiny blimp, motoring lazily between blossoms.
Now, granted, this kind of starkly poetic language would probably be out of place in the prose you’re creating. But metaphors and similes can still enrich your writing: They just need to be a bit more understated. Maybe the coffee shop near your campus is as homey as an easy chair. Maybe your donors are a cornerstone of support. It doesn’t take much to amp up your prose with language that’s more distinctive and appealing.
Embrace the unexpected.
Finally, great poems always surprise the reader. Sometimes you can even point to the spot where the poem grabbed the steering wheel and took the poet (and the reader) along for an unexpected ride. We refer to that moment as the poem’s turn. I’ve learned that, as I’m working on a poem, it’s critical to stay open, to listen for the next word or image or idea, and to try not to censor what comes, to dismiss it as silly or nonsensical or unworkable. When I succeed at this, it really can feel like what I’m writing takes over and pulls me — or pulls itself — in a new direction that wasn’t in my head at all.
In prose, we can do the same thing. Sure, a plan or an outline can be helpful. But as you’re writing, keep your ears attuned for something different: a sudden left turn that you don’t see coming and certainly didn’t plan for. Follow that path, see where it goes. That surprise and delight you feel? It’s bound to carry over to the reader. And that can make your piece more interesting and more engaging, which means that your message is more likely to get through.
