My Article Published: "Poetic Play: Exploring Space, Line, and Stanza" 🎉

Beautiful photo collage courtesy of Women on Writing.

Super excited that my latest article about writing poetry was published today at Women on Writing. Read on for some tips to spark your writing practice.

Poetic Play: Exploring Space, Line, and Stanza

By Melanie Faith

Poetry presents itself visually, just as people stand in front of a closet each morning and choose a linen suit, a plain white T-shirt, a bright floral skirt, or a favorite pair of soft jeans. Even before reading the title or the first line, poetry takes up room on the page in such a unique way and offers opportunities for communicating spatially. 

Let’s take a look at some exciting ways form, line, and stanza can be used to enhance our writing.

It’s not only the words chosen; it’s the chosen lack of words, too. Say what?! Unlike prose, the majority of poetry includes purposeful use of blank space which gives ideas room to breathe, can offer emphasis, can create a shape, and so much more. Where and how are the words grouped on the page? Where are the pockets of blank space? 

While writing a first draft, poets often instinctively create these blank spaces, such as by beginning or ending a stanza. These spaces can stay throughout all subsequent drafts, or they can be added to or omitted. 

Asking ourselves questions like: If I leave a space here, how does that affect the way this line reads or the emphasis this image or word has for readers? What if I include a blank space between words within the same line? What if I indent the first and fifth lines in each stanza throughout the poem? How will that positively or negatively impact the way readers approach the poem? 

I often experiment most with blank spaces during my third drafts. I will consider where an extra pause of blank space—whether midline, before a certain word or phrase or after, or indentations—might enrich a reader’s experience of the poem. I also give myself room to delete or to reorganize any white space that I try but which I don’t think best serves the poem. 

Keeping a copy of earlier drafts in a single file so that I can scroll back and compare/contrast drafts is a tip that has really worked well in my writing practice. Printing an early draft and a latest draft to compare and contrast off-screen can also work very well when adding, moving around, or deleting white space from a poem.

  

Line by line by line. Poems can benefit from paying close attention to where a poetic line opens or closes. There’s no rule that a poem’s original opening words or phrases in a line or stanza have to stay that way forever. 

Look within your lines to see if there’s a particularly interesting word, image, or phrase that could have more emphasis if opening or closing a line instead. Feel free to dig into the line, move openings and closings of lines around, and also to insert new stanza breaks to see how the poem looks on the page. 

After playing with new openings or closings to lines, it can be helpful to read the poem aloud to see how the new lines and line breaks affect a reader’s movement through the poem. Another fun exercise: have a friend read your poem aloud to you. Are there any places where the reader pauses or any awkward spots? Conversely, where are the spots where the emphasis on certain words or images feels just right? 

Stanza bonanza. Some poems have a single stanza with lines of approximately the same length and meter, called a “stichic.” Many other poems use multiple stanzas. New stanzas can be started to pivot into a new idea or to emphasize a certain theme, phrase, or image. Or starting new stanzas can also innately seem like the best way to move a reader through a poem. 

There’s a variety of approaches for knowing when to open and close stanzas. I recommend keeping a few poetry books or anthologies handy, or perusing websites like The Poetry Society of America or The Poetry Foundation, the latter of which has a searchable database and a daily poem. Studying a few different poets’ approaches to opening and closing stanzas can give you ideas for where you might include stanza breaks and openings in the next draft of your poem. 

In your chosen poems, study how long or short stanzas are. Consider counting how many words per line a poem uses. Count lines in stanzas to see if each stanza has the same amount of lines or if there’s variety. Where and when does the poet break a stanza for a new one or even break a pattern among stanzas? Which stanza break do you like best? How does white space between stanzas add emphasis to key words, phrases, or images within the poem? 

As we craft and edit our poems, keep experimenting with the way your poems look on the page and feel when read aloud until the work presents its best formation to you. 

Try this exercise: Read three to five poems by different poets. Then, take a first draft or a stalled draft and apply two of the line, stanza, or white-space patterns you notice from the other poets’ writing to your own. This might include having three lines per stanza or opening a stanza with a color image or a concrete noun or creating a poem with two stanza breaks. Compare and contrast drafts, and try editing another poem with other poetic patterns you notice from your reading. 

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Care to learn more? Check out my August poetry course:

Never Again the Same: A Poetry Class

4 week workshop: August 8 - August 29, 2025

Instructor: Melanie Faith

Beautiful photo collage courtesy of Women on Writing.

2 of My Poems Published in October Hill Magazine's Fall Issue: Volume 8, Issue 3! 🥳

Photos by yours truly. 🤗

Splendid news to share: two of my poems, “Yellow,” and “Listening to a Grandfather-Clock ASMR Recording after Reading a Short Poem by Lorine Niedecker” were just published in the latest issue of October Hill Magazine!

Check out the opening lines of “Yellow” below, and clickey-click on this link to read the two full poems at the issue, as well as the work of many talented fellow authors as well. Also, consider submitting your own work—they were wonderful to work with.


“Yellow”

today it feels exceptionally good

to use this yellow

marker, to draw it across

the lightly lined page,

just to run as heavy as possible a line

with the fine nib

pressed into the thinner gray line

to mark it off that I’ve already

answered early work emails, had

lunch, cleaned up after, organized

my desk, sorted through a stack of books

for donation, and it feels good, too,

to hover in the air above the page

to think about drawing a sun with wavy rays,

the petals of a sprightly daisy, a compact car

negotiating a curvy road, but then…

[continued at October Hill Magazine: clicky]

"3 Significant Ways to Explore Theme in Poetry" 🍂

Super excited that my article about exploring theme in poetry was published today at Women on Writing. Check it out! I’m also taking sign-ups for my fun class that begins on Friday, October 18th—more details below about that and my latest poetry book as well. Read on! 😊

3 Significant Ways to Explore Theme in Poetry

By Melanie Faith

First whirly-twirly leaf of the season. Photographed by yours truly. 😁💗

Poetry is an evocative, word-rich art. It’s compressed language that so often tells a much, much wider, deeper, bigger story about the human journey. Read on for three tips that will make discovering and deepening themes within this art form a motivating voyage for you as a writer and a meaningful experience for your readers as well.  

Write a poem where an object expresses so much more than the sum of its parts. Think for a moment of the top two or three objects that have made a difference in your life. Maybe you still own them, or maybe you’ve lost them in a move or sold them years ago, like a first car. Maybe it’s a Christmas or birthday gift you still have that someone you love gave to you, or maybe it’s something you bought with your first or last paycheck from a job, Or perhaps it’s a commonplace item, like a pencil or pen, that has nonetheless figured prominently in your life in recent years. Describe the particulars of this object.

Poetry thrives on attention to imagery, with attention to detail. Our lives are terribly rushed, even on the “slow” days, and poetry encourages us both to slow down and to notice our world. Poetry also makes us feel gratitude for what we have and where we are in our lives at this very moment. Describing objects can be as short as a three-line haiku or a five-line tanka or as long as a sonnet or even an epic poem of many pages. Word count or style of poem is not nearly as important as being as vivid, visceral, and specific about the object and its meaning to you as possible. Write about the object as if either someone who has seen this fill-in-the-blank commonplace object a million times and even owns one can appreciate it at a whole new level, or as if someone who has never seen your unique object can intuit its worth and see it in their mind’s eye clearly. The object you choose—whether a pair of roller skates, say, or a key to your first car—will remind readers of their own experiences with roller skates or their first car. That magic connection between poet and reader shines through in object poems. 

Write a persona poem. Just like fiction, poetry can be a container for speaking in another character’s voice. Just because a poem is written in first-person POV doesn’t mean it has to be from the lens of your own life experience. Wonderful poems have been written in first-person from the point of view of fictional characters, historical leaders, artists real or imagined, you name it. You can also write a persona poem from the perspective of a non-famous, everyday person. They can be set in ancient history, modern history, present-day, or even a future we’ve not reached yet. Science-fiction or fantasy poetry? Why not?! Persona poems allow the writer to explore character creation, historical or present or future time periods, the timeless struggles and joys of being human, setting, and so much more within a compact poem. 

Many of the poems in my current collection, Does It Look Like Her? are persona poems from the POV of a painter and her young son; I’m neither a painter nor do I have a son. I found, though, while exploring my protagonist’s and her son’s lives, that through these characters I could say resonant things about being an artist, caregiver, and member of a family than I likely would have explored if writing from my own limited timeline. It’s often easier to tap into universal human experience through a character than relying solely on my own lens and experiences. Readers, too, often connect quite deeply with characters—it’s ingrained in us to put ourselves into the place of characters from the first reading we experience as small children who are being read to until we can read on our own.

Write a poem to celebrate a special occasion or to commemorate a milestone, whether yours or someone else’s. Great poems have been written to honor work anniversaries, engagements, marriage anniversaries, wedding receptions, births, retirement, graduations from kindergarten, high school, college and university, grad school, and first and last days of work. The poem can be in honor of a national holiday, an international event, a religious celebration, a place-centered poem such as celebrating the opening or anniversary of the founding of a school or organization or charity. You name it. Options abound! Any person, place, group, or stage of life is well worth exploring poetically, whether you write it for your own satisfaction, share it with a friend or partner, share at an in-person or online venue, or publish with a literary journal with thousands of readers. 

Enjoy the exercise below, and please join me for my October poetry-writing course where we’ll explore even more themes within this thought-provoking genre.

Try this exercise: Start with choosing the type of thematic poem from the three above that most interests you. Make a quick list of three or four topic ideas. Have a friend give you an idea or two as well, to lengthen your list of options. Then pick one of your ideas and write a poem draft in fifteen minutes. I recommend setting a timer—there’s something about writing a first draft with a time limit that tends to get words flowing. You can always set the timer for fifteen more minutes to expand the time for drafting if you want. Use this list to write more poems on other days. Go! 

🍁

Threading the Needle—Writing Thematic Poetry

Instructor: Melanie Faith

Start Date: Friday, October 18, 2024

Duration: 4 Weeks

Class Type: Asynchronous; it can be studied from anywhere in the world, in different time zones.

Location: Private Facebook group and email student provides when registering for the class.

Feedback: Weekly instructor feedback of exercises.


Description: Themes are important in vivid writing. Strong poetry often explores specific themes, from poems to celebrate special occasions and the natural world to poems that celebrate art and other beloved objects. In this class, students will read about 9 forms of poetry in our class texts (one craft book, How to Write Poetry: A Guided Journal of Prompts, and poetry books: Owls and Other Fantasies, The Optimist Shelters in Place, and Does It Look Like Her?, and one optional book: Letters to Joan), and then pick from the weekly themes to pen a poem for personalized instructor feedback on what is working well in their poem and what they might revisit/revise.

Weekly topics include: Nature Poetry, Occasional Poetry, Ekphrastic [Arts] Poetry, Found Poetry, Persona Poems, Narrative Poems, and more! There will also be an optional private class group for classmates to share shop talk and the instructor will provide posts of poetry-writing and literary links to inspire the writing process. Join us for this inspiring poetry course!

View the full listing for the curriculum and testimonials.

🍁

Check out my latest poetry book, Does It Look Like Her? Available now at Amazon or for signed copies, check out my Write Path Productions Etsy page.

I also wrote an amazing craft book called Poetry Power with tons of exercises and inspiration to keep your poetry pens moving; available through my awesome publisher, Vine Leaves Press. Signed copies also available at my Etsy, Write Path Productions.

⭐ My Narrative Poetry Article Published at Women on Writing's Craft Corner! ⭐

Super excited that my article about narrative poetry was published at Women on Writing today in the Craft Corner. 🪻🥳

I had a blast talking about this meaningful type of poetry as well as my own writing practice, and I packed it with tips for writers exploring this exciting form of verse!

Signed copies of Does It Look Like Her? available at my Etsy store: clickety-click. Also, available (unsigned) through Amazon: clickety-click.

Also, If you, your friends, or your students or writing group are interested in learning more about writing poetry, I have a lot more writing advice and fun prompts for poets in my Vine Leaves Press book, Poetry Power (scroll to the second book on the page for links to Poetry Power ) ! Check it out: Poetry Power: clickety click and at Amazon:clickety-click.

My Craft Article Published Today 🏊

Super excited to have this article published at Women on Writing today!

“5 Line Breaks to Inspire Your Poetry Writing”

By: Melanie Faith

 

I’ve been a practicing poet since I was 17. When I think back to the many styles of poetry I joyously tried in college and grad school and beyond, I marvel at how much my line breaks have changed and continue to evolve as I grow as a writer and with the needs of each successive project.

 

My first poems, handwritten on pale blue lined paper that I spent my weekly allowance to purchase at the local stationery store, had looping scrolls of lines across the pages, almost from margin to margin. By graduate school, while experimenting with haiku and tanka, the sparer I could make my lines the better. (I’m not a sparse-speaking person—surprise, surprise—so it was often a challenge.) Since then, my lines usually rest in the merry middle somewhere between languid, Whitmanesque flourishes and ultra-succinct compression.

 

Let’s take a closer look at line breaks and what they can mean to your own writing practice.

 

The Innate Break: This is what I call a line break that just feels right while drafting. Why’d you break the line there? You don’t know, and you’re not stopping to think about it right now. Your hand keeps the pen rolling or your fingertips typing while you focus solely on the words unspooling. You break the lines intuitively and only notice them later, when editing or writing another draft. There’s something to be said for letting the poem take the form it wants to take. A little like after learning to ride a bike—for the first draft or two it’s often not necessary to think consciously, “Should I break the line on this word or that one?”, just like you don’t think, “Right foot, make sure to pedal now. Okay, left foot, same deal. Pedal now.” There’s synchronous motion that happens in cycling and in drafting a poem. Letting that sensory flow go can lead our work to some great destinations.

 

The Emphasis Break:  Words that fall at the beginnings and endings of lines get extra emphasis for the eye and for the mind. End lines on thematic or precise word or phrase to emphasize key ideas. You can also take a poem that had innate breaks and, in the editing stage, make new line breaks on more precise images or diction choices.

 

 The Stanza Starter or Ender: Just like the opening and closing words in each line get a little extra attention from the reader, so do images or words that open and close a stanza. The stanza breaks, in fact, get even more emphasis due to white space. Whether while drafting or later editing our poetry, it can be a good idea to consider if the line you are breaking a stanza on is the best place to emphasize the poem’s theme or content. If not, consider breaking the stanza-breaking line at a new place.

 

The Form-Based Line Break: If you write poetry that has a set pattern or formal structure—such as a sonnet, villanelle, or terza rima—your line break will be based on a number of fun constraints, such as stressed and unstressed syllables, syllable count, and rhyme scheme. I have great respect for poets who find the constraints of pattern poetry motivating, although my poetic brain runs more to making my own line-break patterns. Neither style is inherently better or worse than another—they are both apt vessels for the poems you write. If you know that writing formal poems is your jam, I encourage you to try a few kinds of poems to experiment with the different end-line conventions each requires. If you usually write acrostics, try haiku. If you often write odes or limericks, try an Italian sonnet. If your last few poems were villanelles, try writing a sestina or a ballade.  There’s great variety in line breaks among formal verse that a poet could spend many years happily exploring.

 

The Variety Approach: Are you working on a chapbook or a poetry collection? Are you preparing a handful of poems (often three to five) to submit to a literary journal? In this case, it might be good to read the poems in relation to each other. Is there some variety in where and how you break your lines? Is each line separated at an optimal place and/or have you left some blank space somewhere on the page?  Also, sometimes placing poems with long lines next to poems with few lines and/or succinct lines can create a meaningful pattern for the reader and also inform any editing or new line breaks. You might also consider shuffling the order of your poems.

 

 

Use these line-break ideas as you draft, edit, or prepare submissions of your poetry. There’s no 100% right or wrong place to end a line and begin a new one, but with time, practice, and focus, and having these ideas in your pocket, you may well be surprised how quickly you up your poetry game. 

 

 Want to learn more? Check out my online poetry class that starts April 21st! Jump-Start Your Poetry Practice.✍️

Blog Tour: Craft Article about Beta Readers 🌟

Thrilled to have my craft article, “Bountiful Betas: Benefits of a Beta Reader and Tips for Finding One,” featured today as a guest post as part of my book tour for From Promising to Published at Elle Backenstoe’s blog.

An excerpt: “Beta readers can save authors a lot of time and frustration trying to figure out elements of our own work that can be hard to pinpoint—such as why a certain character feels flat or why a scene that started so well deflated within a few short paragraphs.” 

Read the rest at: Elle Backenstoe’s blog. Learn more about Elle and her forthcoming book here and here. Thanks so much, Elle!

Blog Tour: Review at Mother-Daughter Book Club.com🌟

Thrilled to have a review of my book, From Promising to Published, today at my next book-blog tour stop, Mother-Daughter Book Club.

An excerpt: “Writers looking for inspiration about how to get their work into the hands of people who can publish it will find it in Melanie Faith’s guidebook, From Promising to Published: A Multi-Genre, Insider’s Guide to the Publication Process.

Faith’s straightforward writing style makes the book feel like you are getting advice from a trusted friend. The book is divided into four sections, making it easy to navigate ahead or go back for a quick review of something already covered. The sections include how to start out as a writer, how to find the right audience and market for your work, getting paid and celebrating your successes large and small, and thriving long-term as a writer.”

Read the rest at: Mother-Daughter Book Club.com.

Many thanks to Cindy Hudson, book-club expert, author, writer, journalist, and editor. Check out books and helpful mother-daughter book club resources by Cindy at: Amazon clickety-click. Also, learn more here ab0ut Cindy’s freelance writing and editing services, which include ghostwriting, brochures, newsletters, website consulting, book-club consulting, and much more.


"3 Techniques to Write More Vibrant Poetry"

Thrilled that my craft article was published today at Women on Writing! 💗 In the market for an online poetry course that starts in November? Check out my class here. Read on for the article:

3 Techniques to Write More Vibrant Poetry

By: Melanie Faith

 

Whether we want to write free-verse or a sonnet, a haiku, or a prose poem, some key elements are universal in poetry: vivid imagery and precision of diction choices are two widely agreed-upon qualities of successful poems. The following are three less talked-about techniques that are every bit as vital that could take your verse to an exciting new level.

 

Everyday is A-Okay: Sometimes, we get the impression poems have to be about monumental subjects or events. Not always so. While there certainly are classic poems to commemorate the big-day events in life, such as high-school graduation or joining the military or marriage or the birth of a child, there are myriad more poems about small observations and tiny moments that, without art, a person could easily move past without reflection.

 

In fact, the reflections and observations that occur about ordinary topics can, indeed, be extraordinary for readers.  I’m reading a collection of poems this week where dates are the titles of each work. In some of the poems, the poet describes people and events of the day literally. In others, the speaker of the poem is obviously someone different than the author or the author combines time periods.

 

Something authentic and tangible that we observe from our day might spark a poem and then the poem could veer in an imaginative way that surprises and combines fact with fiction—also totally acceptable and, in many casing, inspiring ground for creating poems.

 

Open your poem with an image grounded in real-life, but stay open to associative leaps that serve the poem, too.

 

Empty Some Space: Poetry is a compressed art. When I first started to write poetry, as a fiction writer, my tendency was to write long lines (almost margin to margin) crammed with details. I also rarely included stanza breaks.

 

One day, in graduate school, a favorite professor took one of my poems and, in his critique, marked several places where empty space (sometimes called “white space”) would improve the poem. Mind blown! When I retyped my poem, incorporating the blank spaces, I immediately saw how the focus was stronger on each image and indeed each line and stanza break as well.

                                                                                      

Then, I did another round of emptying space: I looked for unnecessary prepositional phrases, words that were vague or place-fillers, and other ways to focus my language even more. The more I refined by taking away from the page as I edited, the more the theme cohered and strengthened.

 

Both ways of compressing poetry—including more stanzas or new stanza or line breaks to highlight certain key images or words as well as editing out cluttering or vague phrases—can go a long way to bringing resonance to your poems.

 

Dialogue it up! One literary technique I don’t see often enough in poems is dialogue. While prose frequently incorporates conversations, quotations, or the inner thoughts of characters or speakers, poetry infrequently does.

 

There are many styles of poetry that even just a line of dialogue could help to set place/setting, time period/era, tone, characterization of the speaker or character, as well as the theme. Narrative and prose poems particularly work well for integrating dialogue, but no need to stop with these formats.

 

Sonnets could include dialogue or a quoted phrase or inner thoughts of the speaker, for example. Or, a line of spoken or internal thought could become the title of a haiku, tanka, or other style of poem that sets up the body of the poem’s theme or conflict. Or a famous quote could be used as an epigraph to launch into your topic’s theme.

 

Many types of poems could benefit from dialogue, from lyric poetry and ekphrastic work (such as a line from a song or quote from an online show or another art form) to formal styles, like villanelles (where a repeated question or thought could work wondrously). The sky’s the limit!

 

 

Try this prompt: For 3 days, write down three things that happen in your daily life or 3 things you observe about your day, such as an image or an overheard piece of conversation in passing. At the end of the 3 days, pick one of the observations from your list and write a first draft of a poem from this real-life impetus. If the poem veers off of “what actually happened” or if a new image arrives, wonderful and go with it!