Poetry Writing Exercises for the Senses
When you engage your readers’ senses by exploring taste, touch, sound, sight, and smell in your writing, you create a visceral image and give your readers something they can connect with on a physical level.
Have you ever read a passage that described a delicious meal and suddenly realized you were hungrily salivating?
Our senses are even more powerful than our cognitive memories. Mention the smell of someone smoking a pipe, the scent of freshly baked cookies, or the odor of a barnyard, and suddenly these aromas magically fill the air.
You can use the phenomena of the senses to make your poetry come alive.
Writing Poetry that Captivates
Great poetry pulls a reader out of his or her current reality and takes them to another place – even if only for an instant. A well-written poem creates a snapshot of a scene, event, or situation and draws the reader inside.
One of the first things that novice poets learn is the power of imagery. Once you can create compelling images in your poetry, you need to find a way to get your readers to step inside those images. Music does this by coupling storytelling with sound. Surely, you’ve gotten lost inside a song – completely swept away by the melody and cadence. Poetry can do the same thing, but without instruments, poets must use language to engage the senses and lure a reader into the scene.
The five senses are:
- Sight
- Touch
- Taste
- Sound
- Smell
Three Sensory Poetry Writing Exercises
The following poetry writing exercises start with the simple task of bringing sensory perception into your poetry writing, but then become more challenging by asking you to go beyond images that provoke the senses. You’ll actually step inside the senses themselves, and the results will be far more dynamic.
Each of the poetry writing exercises below can be completed for each of the five sentences. Try one or try them all. Have fun with this exercise, and be sure to check out the tips at the end for some extra insight.
- 1. Engage the Senses
- Write a poem that uses one or more of the senses to captivate the reader. Choose phrases and images that are highly descriptive and have extremely strong references to the senses. As a bonus challenge, try to include all five senses in a single poem.
- 2. Dancing Around the Senses
- Write a poem that evokes the sensations of one or more of the five senses without using nouns or verbs that are directly related to the senses themselves. Think about how the word “boom” tickles your ears just a little bit and you’ll get the idea. Examples of words to avoid: smell, scent, aroma, odor, taste, touch, feel, sight, see, view, hear, listen, etc.
- 3. Be Sensible
- Write as the sense itself. In other words, you are sound. What do you have to say to the world? You can personify the senses or think of them as a metaphor for something else so that you can step into their characters. This one is difficult, so you might try being simple and specific to start with. For example, instead of writing from the perspective of sound, write as if you are music.
Bonus Poetry Writing Tips
The poetry exercises above will help you build a piece that goes beyond imagery. You’ll create a scene, complete with all the sensations of reality. Here are a few extra tips to keep in mind as you work through these poetry writing exercises:
- Avoid clichés or any phrases that feel overused. No fresh scents, delicious tastes, or soft touches. Try to come up with ideas and images that are original.
- Show, don’t tell. This reinforces the use of imagery. Don’t say “the dog’s barking makes my ears hurt.” Instead, say “The dog shrieks.”
- Use a thesaurus to find adjectives and adverbs that are compelling and uncommon. Better yet, forgo adjectives and adverbs in exchange for more descriptive nouns and verbs. Instead of “bad smell” use “stink.” Trade phrases like “listening carefully” for words like “enthralled.”
If you try any of these poetry writing exercises, then post yours in the comments, especially if your poem is fairly short. If you publish one of these on your blog or website, be sure to leave a link in the comments.
If you have any great poetry writing exercises of your own, share them by commenting or sending in a guest post.
Have a great weekend and keep on writing!
I took on the more challenging one and just wrote one personifying music. I liked that idea and a concept immediately popped in my head, so I went with it and had fun with words as I’m known to do. However, I wonder if readers would know what I’m talking about without knowing it’s about music. I’m sure they would.
I will practice with the other exercises soon enough. I must get back to working for The Man now.
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t.sterlings last blog post..a poem: "tour de force"
Working for the man! I’m guessing your music poem is up at your blog, so I’ll be heading over to read it in just a few minutes.