The Ache

I feel a sadness in my heart

A sorrow I cannot explain

It tears my pleasant thoughts apart

With every beauty comes a pain

A broken heart You won't despise

The feeling flesh excels the stone

The hurt that wets my tired eyes

Softens the heart and hardens the bones

Reviews

[JayG]

• I feel a sadness in my heart

And I have covid at the moment. So what? Poetry isn't us informing the world of how we feel. No one comes here hoping to learn how people they don't know feel today, and will turn away if we provide that, unless we make the reader WANT to know it.

Your reader wants you make THEM feel and care, by stirring THEIR emotions. The nonfiction writing skills we're given in school tell the reader that we cried at a funeral. The poet makes the reader weep.

Remember, they've been developing the techniques of poetry for centuries. And surely at least some of it is necessary. Right? So take advantage of that work. as Wilson Mizner observed: “If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.” So do a bit of research.

My suggestion is:

• For rhyming poetry, read the excerpt from Stephen Fry's, The Ode Less Traveled, on Amazon.

• For all of poetry, look at Mary Oliver's, A Poetry Handbook. You can download a readable copy at the address below, though you'll want your own hard copy in the end.
https://yes-pdf.com/book/1596

• And for fiction, read Dwight Swain's, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It's the best I've found. It's out of copyright, so you can download it from archive sites. One such is below. Copy/paste the address in the window at the top of any internet page, and hit Return to get there.

Personally? I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found to date at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

Hope this helps.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[Aneto]

Thank you for the detailed thoughts and feedback. I briefly reviewed the resources you offered, and they certainly do contain useful information. Thanks for taking the time to express your response.
~Aneto~