The only way to really hear how a poem sounds is to read it out loud. You can look at it all day long until eyes start crossing over on themselves, but music is not in what you see. The music lives in air between your teeth. Scanning is the map you draw so that […]

Writing a song isn’t solving for x. You don’t sit down with a pen and paper to solve a math problem, you write a song because youve got something to say, and you want to share that feeling. But then, after you’re done writing the song, you put it on and something doesn’t feel right. […]

Perfect rhyme is overrated. Rhyme works more on what people expect than anything else. You create a sound in one line, and then you choose if you’re going to meet it or not. That’s why a lot of people has trouble writing; they’re trying to keep up with the images and the meter but also […]

Before you’re able to name what you hear, you can feel the rhythm in your chest. That gallop is usually anapestic trimeter, while that steady heartbeat is almost certainly iambic pentameter. Writers is aware of this distinction instinctively, most often though struggling to demonstrate this insight on paper. Scansion isn’t so much a matter of […]