Member-only story
How to Use Different Parts of Speech to Power Up Your Poetry
Or any of your creative writing endeavors
In addition to allowing me to stay in touch with friends and family from all over, social media allows me to follow writers of all types. In the past year I’ve discovered a number of impressive poets online, and I’ve really appreciated it when they’ve shared their work. Most recently, poet Lauren Camp — author of five poetry collections, including Took House, which was published in August 2020 and has won numerous awards — has shared some of her poems accepted for publication in literary journals.
As she’s shared her poems, Lauren Camp has pretty much amazed me, so much so that I began to save copies of her poems so I could study how she works her magic. And I began to realize one thing that makes her writing stand out to me involves her unique use of different parts of speech.
Consider simple words like nouns and verbs. On their own and used in their usual ways, they don’t often stop you in your tracks. But when Lauren Camp combines two nouns that aren’t usually combined — as in “the knuckle of blossoms” from her poem “Disappear” — magic happens. Other magical combinations in this poem include “busy regret” (an unusual pairing of an adjective and a noun, both of them common) and “fretting our wants” (an unusual pairing of…
