Good literature writing tricks? Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration in a text. This can be used for emphasis or humor, such as “He practiced for a million hours.” Symbolism is when a poet uses objects, colors, sounds, or places to represent something else. For instance, snakes are often associated with evil, while white doves are related to peace. These are only a few of the techniques that have been used by poets past and present. They provide a wide variety of options for a poet to develop a unique style while expressing his or her thoughts and ideas to readers. The next time you read a poem, see how many techniques you can identify!
Think of like looking at the wind through a window. You can’t see the wind, right? The wind is invisible. But at the same time, you can see the wind because of its impact on the things that are visible. You see the leaves flapping. You see the surface of a puddle ripple. You see a girl hunched inside her coat, her hair blowing into her face. You see someone try to light a cigarette and the match go out. Abstractions like Love and Death don’t look, sound, or smell like anything. But they affect everything around them. And you can describe the places they’ve touched.
What are you writing about Rachel Rabbit White? Before, I was constantly running things through the lens of theory and philosophy, creating multiple dramatic voices in the text. I am still thinking about the phenomenology of romance, but the problem of romance is something that’s passed to you as a child, through the family, through the entire world around you. It’s something I’ve always known so intimately, so maybe that’s why in addressing it. There’s a softness, there’s lyricism. I was beating that out of the poems before.
Rachel Rabbit White is a practicing hedonist. Everything in the poet, sex worker, and activist’s apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is highly pleasurable to look at, use, and touch. There’s a giant white stuffed tiger; the lights are all pink and blue. In the center of the living room is a stripper pole and a neon sign that says “Blue of Noon,” a reference to Georges Bataille’s erotic novella. Not unlike Bataille, Rabbit White is a student of romance, true love, and sex. Rabbit White lies on her side next to me in a baby blue slip dress and a pair of white fishnet leggings. Everything in her apartment feels purposeful, like her keenly observant writing. Much of her poetry centers around love and its complexities. For Rabbit White, who has multiple partners, that means loving more than one person at a time. It also means loving your craft, and appreciating good films and excellent writing. Find many more details at rachelrabbitwhite.com.
I met Rachel Rabbit White last December. Her first collection of poems, Porn Carnival, had just come out the month before. I’d read an article about the release party, about some angel dust, a little cake-sitting, a DJ, and then something like “Rachel Rabbit White is a sex worker.” It all seemed glamorous and no-fucks-ish. And this was about poetry. Someone told me the book was good. It was getting a lot of attention. So I read it. It was fierce. It was pure. It stayed with me. It was in earnest, and yet there was no discounting the technique. The lines were as elegant as they were painful. Their intentions were as direct as they were dynamic in their complexities. It wasn’t the work of a dilettante. I haven’t gone back to check, but I think there’s only one hyacinth in Porn Carnival. And no one gets bored to death by what existential crises overtake a body in the organic co-op of whatever town Bard College is in. It isn’t that type of book. You get lines such as “these girls were at the wrong orgy,” titles such as “In the Heart-Shaped Jacuzzi of my Soul.” Which isn’t to say it’s all so… rowdy. On god, she reminds me most of Octavio Paz. Still, it’s a book about sex work, mainly.