Prompt #219 – A Piece of Your Mind

When most people think about poetry, they think in terms of beautiful expressions. For the uninitiated,  that usually means the stuff of spring days and flowers, love and loveliness. However, some of the most compelling poetry goes in an entirely different direction. Enter the “rant poem.” Rant poems offer poets opportunities to metaphorically stamp their feet, throw things out the window, and tell people off. Rant poems enable their writers to “let off steam” and walk away feeling good. In a rant poem, you can:

• Complain
• Criticize
• Argue
• Denounce
• Engage in a Verbal Tirade
• Spit Nails
• Tell Someone What You Really Think of Him or Her
• Tell Yourself Off for Something You’ve Done and Regret

Guidelines:

1. Pick a subject that really annoys, angers, provokes, or upsets you (something personal, something in the news, something about other people’s behaviors, etc).

2. Free write about that subject for several minutes. In this part of the process, don’t “pull your punches.”

3. Take a look at what you’ve written, and decide on the tone or “feeling” you want to highlight in your poem.

4. Think about what you want your readers to understand in your poem. In other words, what's the point of your rant?

5. Think about how you want to rant (using humor, vehemently, using sarcasm).

6. Go back to your free write and pick the details that will be a good fit for the tone or mood you want to create. Use language with “muscle.”

7. Begin writing using the details you selected from your free write, but don't be afraid to move in other directions as well.

8. Conclude with a real punch (a statement that beings your rant to closure in a unique and powerful way).

Tips:

1. Imagine yourself reading your poem aloud to an audience, then look at your poem and determine whether or not the emotion you want to convey comes through written language as well as it would if you were to read the poem aloud. Revise accordingly.

2. Punctuate purposefully. Use commas, dashes, and other punctuation marks to emphasize important parts of your rant.

3. Use adjectives sparingly. Remember that too many adjectives can be your worst enemy: most often the concept is already made clear in the noun.