Your characters' poetry style

[Brian G Turner]

knivesout wrote an excellent exercise to himself on another thread (Three (and a half) poets I have known ). Have a read of there and see what he wrote.

I'd like to extend this concept here: take any single character from your own writing, protagonist, antagonist, whatever - and write something about their style of poetry.

You don't have to actually include any actual excerpts of what they might write - notice how knivesout's examples carry a lot of power without that.

However, if you insist on writing something then please do keep it brief - the purpose of this exercise is to describe the character by reference to their creative works, rather than explore character creative works directly (which would be distracting to the aims of the exercise).

 

[Kraken]

This is a really interesting exercise - thanks for the idea! It made me work out some things about a recurring character that I hadn't considered before.


Her script is small, errors thoroughly blacked out and corrections densely layered, until only she can decipher the page.
Poems are created on the lined paper that she uses for academic notes, and sometimes on the same sheet as the start of an essay, or a reminder to herself to return a library book.
She likes the anticipation of rhymes.
Her best work describes violence that never happened; sadness that did.

If he was asked, Jordan would tell you he didn't see the point of poetry.
He is rarely parted from his laptop. He types fast and accurately, essays and code. He paints with pixels, creating realistic images; his screensaver is an avatar with her green eyes.
He finds her a contradiction; as comfortable as his own soul, necessary as his constant sarcasm, yet startling as the tang of his first taste of marmite.
He would say he's never written a poem.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Thanks for taking part, Kraken - I think you've got the spirit of it.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Hery, that was interesting! Your writing conveyed a very intimate sense of character, Kraken. Just that right mix of information and mystery, I think?

 

[littlemissattitude]

Let me give this a try, based on a character I created for a joint project with two friends.

Everything she writes is melancholy or angry. Sometimes it is both. Her script is small and neat, contrasting with the extravagance and violence of the sentiments expressed on the page. In places, the ink is blurred, diluted by the tears that she sheds sometimes as she writes of love lost to the evil that men do, of pain and rage held deep within. Her writing is what keeps her sane. Sometimes she wonders if it is worth it.

 

[polymorphikos]

Hmm... I'll see if this works.

Her poetry is slow, flowing, rolling across the page. She cares less about the content than the meter, verse, asonance and the feelings it produces. The letters crawl their way in a tangled, dissheveled hand, minute, swamped by corrections, scarred by the long blue scribbles where something has displeased her. When she writes, she writes memoirs. The irony is the abstraction, the looking through a lens. She writes her memories to forget.

 

[Seth God Of Chaos]

My turn, my turn

His writing is angry and scrawled. The rhymes flow across his mind like a wave. Why does he write? He doesn't know, but he knows he must. Writing is his only way to vent his rage. He writes of his memories and his pain, traumas unknown to regular people. His mind is a whirlwind of chaos, could it be that he was insane? Only he knows and he doesnt speak to anyone. He throws the pen across the room and gives out a scream of rage and frustration, he cant make it work, he cant make it flow. He sits at the desk, he will try again, he wont give up, he cant give up.

 

[aftermath]

oh... that was good..

His poetry is scirbbled on the page, though not from anger or speed; it's just his way. He sits down and watches people and nature, conveying the beauty or whatever other thoughts he has about them almost perfectly to the page. As he writes, the page becomes covers with black spots, lines, arrows and inserts as he goes back and rereads everything he just wrote every few minutes. When he is unable to convey his thought on the page, he becomes very angry because he take's great pleasure in having his wife read his poems and tell him how great they are.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Her words are scrawled, a confused mess, with letters repeatedly out of proportion and interfering in other words. The sentences are incomplete and confused, sometimes ending in questions. Small doodles aside the page are of symbols of death and emptiness. Across the foot of the page she has scrawled in large upper case: "I AM DEAD".