The idea for this poem comes from Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge's book, Poemcrazy. The aim of this poetry making challenge is to explore your lesser known names using poetry to discover what these names might be. Using a structure provided by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, a poem will hopefully emerge and you can discover some of your lesser known names: My real name is Yesterday my name was Tomorrow my name will be In my dreams my name is Secretly I know my name is My friend thinks my name is The name I whisper is Your names can be as silly or serious as you wish them to be. Trot out your names and see what emerges. Feel free to improvise on the structure as well. it's perfectly okay to break the rules here. Your names and moods might change with the seasons, or across the days and years. Think about those names your friends and family call you. Inspiration might be found there. When I thought about my many names, this is what happened for me: What's In A Na...

  They say it is the line and where it is broken that provides the rhythm of a poem.  The longer the line, the more the poem sounds like natural speech.  Poets break lines for different reasons. Here are some: according to their natural breathing to emphasize a particular or words to create tension to change the pace of the poem The original version of this poem had longer lines and fewer line breaks. I was not completely happy with the outcome. It sounded a bit slow and pedestrian. The theme of my poem is not relaxed along with the focus of the writing, Leon. This made for a mismatch. In revising the poem, I needed to build more tension and increase the pace for the reader. So, you will notice my poem has quite short lines throughout the entire poem. I did this to create a greater sense of urgency around Leon's story. The poem is loosely based on a childhood memory of a kid I used to know. All our writing is informed by our lives, if we are open to these i...

Learning To Love Line Breaks When you are writing a poem it is important to keep in mind that line breaks are as important to free verse poems as end rhyme is to a poem written in rhyming couplets. You should aim to keep the words that belong together on the same line. You may wish to emphasize a word or a phrase by placing it on a line all by itself. By carrying the word over to the next line it may add a greater degree of suspense or surprise to the poem. You may arrange line breaks in your poem to create a visual effect with regard to the shape of the poem. If there is a repeated refrain, it might help to isolate those important words on a line each time, to draw greater attention to them. On other occasions, it just feels right to break the lines in a certain way. Don’t be afraid to experiment. To help you gain some experience with line breaks, I invite you to take these deconstructed poems and recreate them using your own line breaks. Have fun… ...