This site aims to encourage your interest and develop your skill in creating poetry. It provides creative ideas for poets, writers, teachers and students of life, who choose to live creatively, compassionately and poetically.
The Poet’s Write Hand aims to excite your imagination along unknown paths. It offers mental and physical activities to help you break free from the limits of ordinary, routine thinking. Your imagination is a bottomless source of original ideas.
All of these techniques have been applied in my university classroom at Srinakharinwirot University in Bangkok, Thailand over the last ten years. Theses columns have all been published in the Bangkok Post in the last several years.
Effectively using Poetic Elements
These columns focus on the creative use of metaphor, simile, symbols and personification in your poetry. Exercises provide practice and experience using these techniques effectively and wisely. Good explanations and samples are provided for use by teachers and students alike.
Observation and Visualization Skills in Poetry
Poetry is a combination of visualization, observation, imagination and creative use of language. Visualization is more than just creating a picture in the mind. Visualization means awakening and stimulating the senses within your mind. The Poet’s Write Hand suggests extraordinary observations of ordinary things and fresh insights to inspire your senses. These activities provide excercises for observing nature, visualizing and imagination. The activities are interesting and fun in themselves, plus, will lead towards more creative writing.
These columns are inspired by fine arts such as music and painting for creative new writing ideas.
Poetic Activities for Mental, Social
Poetry is not only about writing. The Poet’s Write Hand aims to show that deep poetry comes from the will to help others, the effort of sharing and being socially concerned. Poetry displays compassion for the world and its beings. These columns provide ideas to develop social awareness, natural appreciation and spiritual insight.
These columns include explanations and examples of various metrical patterns in poetry. Practice identifying and applying metrical patterns in creative, powerful ways. A variety of rhyme techniques provide suggestions on the placement of rhymes in your poems. These are very helpful for increasing the unity and flow of your poetry.
Each of these columns presents a classic poem by some of the greatest poets in history. The poems are explored in terms of theme, structure and technique. Techniques are designed to bring deeper appreciation of the poems.
These techniques provide numerous ideas for living life more poetically, compassionately and in finer tune to the beauty of the world. Many profound quotes from classic poems and from students of poetry are included.
These columns celebrate the playful use of language, sometimes serious, sometimes frivolous, but always spontaneous and innovative.
These columns provide activities to guide you in the rewriting and revising of your poems. They include ideas concerning creative word choice, arranging word order, and using stronger images. While some poems may be great in just one draft, it is quite likely that you can improve any of your poems by returning to it at a later date and polishing it.
Activities to Enhance the Sharing of Poetry
These activities provide novel new ideas on how to present your poetry in public and in person, in a variety of innovative settings.