The Incendiary Lit Heroic Crown Affair Day 2!
All the following posts will be much less intense, for all those that the first day (and pre-write) didn’t scare away.
Today’s plan is to work on Sonnet 15 some more. You should have a rough draft of the poem already, and if not, welcome to my world. Sorry, I work and am working on a new project also that I’m very excited about. I’ll get one done and revise tonight, I promise.
The verbs will be the first place to scrutinize. In Sonnet 15 moreso than any other sonnet each word needs to carry its own weight, as the lines are both first and last lines of separate poems. Look for common, simple words like do, did, have, was, had. They’re called auxiliary verbs. They are ‘helping verbs’ which means they help other words instead of standing on their own. A good verb is probably the strongest type of word, you shouldn’t waste a word that could really set the line apart from the familiar to ‘help’ an adjective. Adjectives are like pawns. They’re very important to the poem’s infrastructure, but nouns and verbs run the show. Even if there aren’t any auxiliary verbs, there’s always stronger and weaker verbs by comparison. Weigh your verbs against each other. Even if they’re still fairly strong, just consider other options. Look through a thesaurus. It’s not a literary crime. It doesn’t make you a thesaurus-poet. You’re not stilting your writing, you’re enhancing it. Obviously you’ll only make changes that both sound, and are more appropriate for their context. So, if anyone had hesitations about using a thesaurus, as I know many young poets are, relax. It’s like alcohol, great in moderation (and perhaps even slight excess on occasion).
Before you go through, though, there’s a little exercise. Here’s how I’d do it, for efficiency. Click here, and then open a new window. change the size of the new window so it’s less than half of the screen size. Load http://dictionary.reference.com there. Go over the list of verbs I posted (or if anyone can find a better list, please let me know) and if a particular word strikes you, look through your poem and see if there’s a place for that word in Sonnet 15. If not, write it in a file where you’ve got your other ILHCA exercises. If you don’t have an ILHCA file or folder, make one. Haha, that’s very important. Easier access means you may actually utilize these words.
And before you take off your poetic cap, look over that list of perspectives, or poem ideas for the surrounding sonnets. If you don’t have a list of ideas for your heroic crown’s individual sonnets, well shame on you. Make one now. Consider the line repetition when thinking of the sequence’s, well, sequence. Sonnet 1 begins with Line 1 of Sonnet 15. That’s the first line of your whole sequence that the reader will see. Make sure you hook them with something. Leave something interesting unanswered. Or mention something very quirky in the poem that will potentially perk the reader’s attention so they wonder if the thing (be it a porch swing with one chain broken that no one had the heart to fix, Jerome’s missing fingers, whatever) will come back. Hoping that it will. That’s what you really want to accomplish with the first sonnet. You want the reader speculating about what’s coming next, because they’ve got a long ways to go.
Try to narrow down each line of Sonnet 15 to three possible perspectives/aspects (ie poem’s contribution to the whole of the sequence). If you have definite ideas that work with particular lines from Sonnet 15, power to you. That’s what you want. The pieces to fall together. If they haven’t fallen together yet, fear not. We’ve just begun. The puzzle will begin to take shape by the end of next week, I promise.