As National Poetry Month draws to a close, here’s a closer look at a special form of poem that can be useful for poets and prose writers. A prose poem is a poem written in sentences. It appears as a block of text without line breaks. You could think of a prose poem as a… Read more »
The world around you is a busy place, but as a writer you might also think of it as a feast. Your senses awake to a buffet of images every morning. Just take breakfast, for example: the steaming scrambled eggs awash with butter lounging on a bed of toast like fluffy yellow gods. These indignant… Read more »
What makes something a verse novel? Simply speaking, a verse novel (or novel in verse) is exactly what the name implies: a novel that is told in verse rather than prose. It’s a bit more complicated than that, though. Why aren’t works like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid called epic poems and not… Read more »
Today I’d like to welcome Caroline Starr Rose back to DIY MFA. Caroline and I met through the blogsphere in 2010, when she hosted a Verse Novel Challenge on her blog. Being a fan of verse novels, I joined the challenge and have had the pleasure of following her writing and publishing journey ever since. … Read more »
I’m guessing that after a week of reading about how great poetry is, you might be ready to dive in and read or write some poems of your own. But where to start? With all the literary resources out there, where do you go to find resources on poetry? Never fear! I’ve put together a… Read more »
It can be a challenge to wrap our minds around poetry. It’s not as straight-forward as non-fiction or fiction so many people choose to bury our heads in the sand, hoping that if we can’t see poetry then poetry can’t see us. Why not learn directly from those who have tamed the beast? That’s where… Read more »
Some time ago, I came to a realization that made me go from having a visceral hatred of poetry to suddenly rediscovering its beauty. The realization was this: It’s not that I dislike all poetry, I just dislike bad poetry. Let me backtrack a little bit. It’s 1993 and I’m in ninth grade biology class… Read more »
Today, to kick off the Master Class blog series on Poetry and Verse Novels, we have an fabulous guest post by Leslie Bulion. I first discovered Leslie’s work at BEA (BookExpo America) last year, where I came across a copy of her book At the Sea Floor Cafe. From the minute I picked up the… Read more »
