I love dichotomies. I don’t completely believe in them, of course, but they’re fun to play with.

So here’s one for you.

There are two kinds of people in the world: planners and wingers. The minute I say this to a group of people, everyone starts nodding. They may not be precisely sure of what I mean, but they have a pretty good idea.

A planner, I tell them, knows what she’s going to wear the next day before she goes to bed the night before. More nods. The motto of a winger, on the other hand, is, “How can I know what I mean until I see what I say?” Laughter and more nods.

I ask for a show of hands from the people who think they’re planners. Their friends tend to look pointedly at them if their hands don’t shoot up quickly enough. Everyone knows who the planners are. They’re the ones who sit around tapping their fingers at 3:00 pm when you said you’d be ready. The planners are a little embarrassed to be called out like this, and say things like “I know I’m a bit anal, but I just like to do things right.” On the inside, though, they’re pretty proud that everyone actually recognizes how organized they are.

Planners like lists. They’re irresistibly drawn to outlines. They want to know the rules in advance so they can be sure to follow them. Neatness counts for planners, and they’re likely to be as hard on themselves for lack of neatness as they are for less than stellar content.

Then I ask the wingers to raise their hands. A number of slow hands go up, accompanied by sheepish smiles. In our world, it’s not thought of too highly to be a winger, even though many of us are. We may secretly prefer to be planners, but we’re just not built that way.

The minute wingers sit down to write, the gates are up and they’re sprinting for the finish line—wherever and whatever that might happen to be. The best wingers know they’re wingers and are willing to make improvements using a very handy process we call revision. But often wingers feel that whatever they’ve created in a moment of passion can’t be changed, because they can never reconstruct that precise recipe of emotions and environmental factors. That moment was that moment and shall never return.

Most of us tend to land on one side of the fence or the other. The well-seeded and watered, neatly mowed side of the planners, or the wingers’ side, which is a bit overgrown but has all sorts of unexpected wildflowers popping up in it, and a lot of birds diving down to nibble on the tall grasses. Planners can wear white all day without smudging. Wingers could stain a clean shirt in a sterile operating room—before the patient is brought in. Wingers are prone to run-on sentences. Planners could probably diagram theirs.

But the truth is that most of us have are both planners and wingers, depending on the situation and what we need to accomplish. Planners can venture into the unknown; wingers can organize their thoughts. This is why dichotomies are tricky. We’re rarely all one thing or another.

And a good writer is usually both.

Photo Credits:

Grass: https://alpineservices.com

Wildflowers: Detail from “Celia Thaxter’s Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine,” Childe Hassam
http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/14930?sortBy=Relevance&ao=on&ft=wildflowers&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=2

“Flirtation, attention without intention.” Max O’Rell

Fill Her Up

You fill me up like a Pop-tart fills the toaster,
Sweet and hot.
You’re every recipe my grandmother made
And I forgot.
You’re all my lost relatives
Come home again.
You’re my old address, my old dress—the one I wore
To the ninth grade prom.
You’re my virginity come back to haunt me.
You’re new rains, old pains, cinquains I wrote
In the fourth grade. You’re every note
I ever passed.

You are a branch bank opening in my neighborhood
With free lifetime incomes to the first 100 customers.
You’re a high like exercise (if exercise behaved as advertised).
Like hitting butter halfway down the popcorn bucket,
Like staying in the movie for a double feature
I didn’t even pay for.

You’re a microscope that sees through my skin,
A telescope that lets me keep my distance.

You fill me up like premium gas at Costco
Caught before the cost goes up,
All that power in my tank—and at such a savings.
You fill me up like the first snow
Fills the junkyards clean again.
A million flakes to cover one defunct Caddy
And suddenly it’s young again,
It runs again.

Mimi Herman

As a child, I was so shy and self-conscious that when the school photographer said, “Smile,” tears leapt to my eyes. So in every elementary school photo, I look like I’m about to cry.

As writers, we’re often stuck with those glossy-eyed photos in our albums—and a sense that we’ve never been socially “ept,” as opposed to inept. A lot of us grew up thinking we weren’t attractive or suave or charming enough to flirt. We say to ourselves, “Right, as soon as I get my self-esteem whipped into shape, I’ll be able to flirt.”

So here’s the secret. You don’t have to be perfect to flirt. You don’t have to be good-looking, though, of course, you happen to be stunningly gorgeous. You don’t need a perfectly healthy well-balanced self-esteem. You don’t need zenlike ease, a rapier wit, a stockpile of clever rejoinders. That stuff, by the way, will come with time and practice, as a useful byproduct of flirting. All you need is situational confidence, which is something you can put on at whenever you choose to do so.

Now what does all this have to do with writing? Well, I think we run the risk as writers of serious poetry and fiction, work meant to do more than “just entertain,” of leaving our best selves off the page—our witty, charming, devious, delightful, intriguing, entrancing, and enticing selves—when we write. These are the selves you play with, the ones that are available to you when you have a little extra ease and comfort, and you trust your reader to want to get to know you.

Flirting is always about balancing opposites in delicious tension:

• generosity and reserve
• mystery and openness
• rapid-fire and lingering
• desire and self-sufficiency
• intimacy and distance
• inviting and holding back
• secrets and surprise revelations

Flirting is a gift, a way of sharing your best self, your most delicious and delightful self, with someone whose attention you desire. And isn’t that exactly what writing is?

All right, fearless readers and writers. We’ve now explored sound and meter in poetry, so we’re ready to put them together to start creating formal poems. If you create something you really like, please share it with the rest of us. We’d love to see what you’re writing.

With every kind of formal poetry, you can follow the rules precisely and create strictly formal poems, or you can relax a little, put on those jeans with the holes in the knees, and create a looser version. Either way, it’s not about proving how good a rule-follower you are. It’s about using these forms and techniques to write the poems that matter to you and your readers.

Let’s start with that classic: sonnets. If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for us. And besides, it’s only fourteen lines long.

There are two types of sonnets, each with two names, the Elizabethan/Shakespearean sonnet and the Italian/Petrarchan sonnet. English is, unfortunately, a very rhyme-impoverished language, particularly as opposed to Italian, so the Italian sonnet has a lot more words that rhyme with each other. We’re going to go for the Elizabethan version, since if you’re reading this, I’m guessing your command of English is fairly strong.

All sonnets are written in iambic pentameter: ten syllables that alternate light and heavy stresses like this: ta-TUM-ta-TUM-ta-TUM-ta-TUM-ta-TUM. If you want to know what this feels like, try limping around the room, coming down heavily every second step.

An Elizabethan/Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains (four-line stanzas) often without a break in between, with alternating rhyme, followed by a rhyming couplet (two-line stanza). So the rhyme scheme for this sonnet looks like this:

a
b
a
b
c
d
c
d
e
f
e
f
g
g

To learn more about rhyme, go to Playing with Sound in Poetry, Part 1. To learn more about rhythm, go to Playing with Sound in Poetry, Part 2.

Here’s one of my favorite Elizabethan/Shakespearean sonnets:

If I Should Learn      

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again –
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man, who happened to be you,
At noon today had happened to be killed –
I should not cry aloud – I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place –
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face;
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Try reading it while you limp around the room.* Maybe do it several times to get the rhythm in your body.  Now try writing one, just as an experiment. About anything. I wrote one about yeast once and another about apnea, so you can see the world of sonnet subjects is vast.

Remember, you can follow the rules strictly, or play with the form. If you’re just starting out, I recommend aiming for about 10 syllables per line (allowing yourself to have 9 or 11, as needed), in 14 lines, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg as above, and giving yourself the freedom to use as many slant rhymes as you want. The form is not nearly as important as taking the chance to play with different techniques, so you’ll have new ways to write the poems you want to write.

*If you want a real treat, go here to hear a Youtube version of Edna reading another of her famous poems, “Recuerdo.” I can’t get enough of her voice!

Shakespeare Portrait from http://www.cobbecollection.co.uk/art/william-shakespeare/

Edna St. Vincent Millay photograph by Arnold Genthe, Mamaroneck, NY, 1914
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_St._Vincent_Millay