VOCABULARY
February 25, 2023 VOCABULARY Words, words, words, and more words. It is the lumber from which we will craft our poems. If we select poor lumber, even if we are very good at our craft, our end product will be rickety and may collapse. If I say something is "red", you begin to form a picture in your mind's eye, but if I say it is "vermillion", well that is something else entirely. It is not that the color described is necessarily more accurate, but that the sound of "vermillion" is in and of itself more resplendent in both its sound in your ear and the feel in your mouth. Each individual poem will have its own lexicon, a subset of the poet's vocabulary, thus the larger the vocabulary of the poet, the more specific and exacting each poem's lexicon may be. My first piece of advice to aspiring poets is this: Learn new words constantly. Set a goal to learn two or three new words every day. The fact is, poets need to use a more formal tone when w