It Doesn't Mean A License to Rhyme

I made a promise to my loyal readers (and all the other ones) that I would cool down on the posts about the virtues of writing poetry as a way of enhancing your overall writing skills. And, even though I still firmly believe that the art of conveying your thoughts and feelings through specific structure, meter, and rhyming patterns is a great way to sharpen your literary skills, I am keeping to my word and not writing a poetry piece this time. Mostly. I am, however, going to discuss a subject that hits close to the target: poetic license.

Now, here we have an odd contradiction. The classical forms of poetry had a meter you needed to follow, rules that had to be obeyed, and a structure that turned a particular poem into a sonnet, a limerick, or what have you. Conversely, poetic license is one of the ways we, as writers, are allowed to deviate from our pre-defined structure in order to make an artistic point. Since the "poetic" part of license can also be replaced with "dramatic," "artistic," "creative," and a series of other expressive words, it doesn't have to push all the responsibility into poetry. However, since poetry has so many rules, breaking them for effect is a good way to show how this function works.

An example of using this license in a non-poetry form would be, for example, to write a particular character's perspective in the passive voice to emphasize how truly boring this character is. No editor would recommend this, but if an author found a way to sneak it into the narrative, it could be effective and therefore, violate the rules against passive voice for dramatic effect. I have read a work (that unfortunately I cannot remember) which involved a very superficial salesman, and every description from his view was a hackneyed cliché. Everything came off as a bad sales pitch - but only in his narrative voice. He spoke like any other character, but the use of tired, worn-out descriptions spoke volumes about who the character was and how he thought. Would an editor like that in a first novel? Doubtful. Would it be ingenious? Definitely.

Over the past few decades since the advent of desktop publishing becoming so mainstream, another form of poetic license has been with choices of fonts and even point sizes as forms of expression. Depending on how these things are done, they can be clever, like using a strikethrough to represent someone's self-editing, or they can be silly, like someone's quotes always being in Comic Sans. Try it if you dare, but make sure it has purpose and meaning, and isn't just something you do just because you have a bunch of fonts.

Poetic license is an opportunity to make a statement by breaking the rules. This has been done across the spectrum, from Robert Frost to Lenny Bruce, and when it's done with purpose and intention, it gets noticed. When done improperly... well, it just looks like you don't know what you are doing.