The Sentence

Even if you don’t use perfect English or complete sentences, your poem will still have a relationship to the sentence and use parts of speech.

This means you need to decide how the language works in your poem. Do you want a series of fragments? Do you want complete sentences? Do you want to use punctuation in a traditional way? You can do what you want, but have a plan.

Every part of speech in a poem is important and should be considered. Please pay attention to your nouns, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, and all that jazz. However, I’m going to use verbs as an example of how to think about parts of speech intentionally.

The verb is the engine of a poem. Using unique verbs will have a different effect than using ordinary ones. Using “to be/is/am/are” all the time will make a statement, but could be banal. Using too many -ing words (aka gerunds or participles) instead of active verbs will slow down your poem and make it seem passive.

This is Stevie Smith’s Not Waving but Drowning. Notice that she uses -ing words quite a bit, but also uses active verbs to balance them.

Here’s William Blake’s The Sick Rose. The main verbs (other than “to be”) are “flies,” “found out,” and “destroy.” Pretty intense.

As an exercise, choose a poem you like and pay attention to the verbs. Then do the same for nouns. Then do the same for adverbs. Etc! 

 I will briefly say that averbs (-ly words, like “quickly”) are often called lazy—but like -ing words, they can be used if you are intentional.

That’s my little plug for intentionality with parts of speech— but what about actual sentence structure? It’s the same thing: play with it, break it, bend it, but be smart about it. 

As an example of unique sentence structure, check out e. e. cummings: anyone lived in a pretty how town.

The sky is the limit!