The Poetic Turn: 5 Strategic Steps to Get Your Writing Read and Shared

(Plus, the One Thing You Can Add to Your Poem to Keep Readers Holding Their Breath)

The one ingredient of knock-out poems, poems that echo through every heart and audience, not just the MFA crowd, the element present in every poem I love, every poem I see floating around the internet—shared and reshared— is an effective poetic turn.

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

 

In our workshop this Sunday, Turns, Leaps, and Transitions, we will practice the steps to create effective turns and discuss why they are so vital for the success of your poems.

Today’s post is a preview outlining 5 vital steps to crafting a strategic and effective poetry turn. 

1. Establish a clear context and reaction. 

Vagueness and abstraction are two of the fastest ways to kill a poem. If the reader doesn’t have a specific subject, context, or emotion to latch onto, they will quickly become disinterested. The more specific something is, the more universally it’s felt. The first step to setting up an effective turn is to give your reader the essential and urgent details that render the emotional and physical landscape of a poem. Create a clear picture, then flip it on its head

2.  Establish a place to depart.

Once you have fully rendered a scene, subject, or feeling—conjured an emotion or world and thought /okay, I have said what I needed about that—establish a place to shift. Shifting is essential so a poem doesn’t feel too one-note or stale. 

3. Subvert expectations. 

Now that you have a place to shift, think about how and why you will depart. Weave in a layer of connected contrast. How can you offer the reader a different experience or emotion in the same poem? For example: Do you turn to the dark side of marriage after writing deeply about your love, or how a conversion between a mother and daughter only to realize the mother is dead? Take what the readers know and turn it, change it, challenge it. Subvert expectations to redefine how they see your writing and the world. 

Below are additional steps, a writing prompt, and a surefire strategy to keep readers invested.