Dissonance in poetry is a tool we rarely use in our writing, but deliberately used it may add an unsettling emotion that may be crucial to describing unpleasant topics. I read a pretty cool article that contains many references that will help you more than I can do.

Poets usually strive to make a poem easy and pleasant to read, and often those tools are based on vocal harmonies, through the meter, rhyme, assonance, or consonance.

Creating dissonance is harder than we may think as we naturally want to sound pleasant, but today we will try to do the opposite. If it helps try to describe something unpleasant, to write off your anger, sorrow or angst.

A few ways to do this.

• Break up assonance by using all different vowels you could.
• Break up the meter, and make your poem stumble on two left feet.
• Use harsh consonants, putting some firework in your verse.

If you like you can use dissonance only in a part of your poem. I think it would make it even more effective. Think about dissonance a bit like the sound of chalk on a blackboard on the first day of summer.

Dissonance is also used in music to create emotions and reactions, and if you thought this is something that has only has come lately in modern music or hard rock, l recommend listening to this piece of baroque music:

When you have written your piece publish it on your blog linking back to dVerse. Then link it up to Mr. Linky below. Leave a comment or take part in the discussion.