Writing poetry
Behind several theories of what happens to a poet during the writing of a poem – Eliot’s escape from personality, Keats’s idea of informing and filling another body, Yeats’s notion of the mask, Auden’s concept of the poet becoming someone else for the duration of the poem, Valéry’s idea of a self superior to the self – lies the implied assumption that the self as given is inadequate and will not do. How you feel about yourself is probably the most important feeling you have. It colors all other feelings, and if you are a poet, it colors your writing. It may account for your writing.
RICHARD HUGO, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (1979: 67)
Where does rhythm come from? The cellular life of a poem is its language. All language naturally possesses rhythm, even non-human languages. Rhythm is made of beats, whether of a skin drum in a frog’s throat, or a hoof’s thrum. For living creatures, rhythm is used to create and defend territory, and communicate. Song is modulated in order to carry it best through resistant matter, as whale song is through the soft walls of ocean, or an owl’s call spooling through woodland. The languages of most animals on our planet are based on sounds, and the sound carries the meaning. Rhyme and rhythm are not as artificial as you might suppose – they are natural mnemonics, occurring in birdsong and animal calls. Slow a skylark’s song and you will hear a sophisticated thematic development of beats within just one second of song, yet the bird sings continuously in real time as you pass beneath. What is the secret of poetry?
Listening to language
Metre and rhyme
Surprise in language is poetry’s open secret. When you were a child you probably loved poetry without knowing why. The rhythm of language is what engaged you, and rhyme may also have surprised poems into your memory:
Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu. |
now |
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Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu. |
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Sumer is i-cumen in – |
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Lhude sing, cuccu! |
loudly |
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Groweth sed and bloweth med |
blooms / field |
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And springth the wude nu. |
buds / wood |
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Poems are made up of lines of words that do not usually reach the far side of the page. Words themselves possess a small amount of music because they are made up of syllables, which are themselves made up of short and long speech sounds, and gradations between, just like birdsong. You can guess-measure this length by saying them aloud. As you speak them, you will also hear how we breathe out harder on some syllables than others; we stress certain syllables more than we stress others, and all the gradations between. This lends spoken language its rhythmic coloratura.
There is no final science about this; stresses change when we catch our breath, and every language has its own music – every accent too; and even the mood we are in affects the way we speak. A lover may sound their words rather differently than a murderer, although a good poet might play on this distinction. Yet, as we speak, our larynx, teeth and tongue – even our upbringing and intention – inject stress patterns into the words we speak, the beats of rhythm. Poetry raises the voice in language, and sings, says, whispers and shouts – intentionally. If poets possess verbal cunning, then, like dramatists and novelists, they exploit the lively variousness of speech too.
For ease of conversation, we talk about lines of poetry having a ‘metre’ which counts these stressed syllables and arranges them in patterns called ‘feet’; and we give terms to various patterns of stress (such as a ‘spondee’: two stresses one after the other). These patterns reveal themselves in speech without the need for śtress márks urging hark! – a spondee! The most common stress pattern in English verse is called iambic pentameter. An iamb is a ‘foot’ with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. It mákes the kínd of nóise this séntence mákes. Yet even as I speak the sounds will change. A lump of stress is catching in my throat. As you can hear, no two iambs are the same. And, given the fluidities of language and speech, stress patterns are always approximations to the real thing.
Poets play with these patterns, often intuitively, in order to create verbal effects because they have trained their ears to listen for these effects not only in speech but in listening to the rhythms in the world. Boisseau and Wallace offer an excellent example from the first line of Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Juggler’:
A ball will bounce, but less and less.
The iambic line (of four stresses) imitates the ball. As they put it, ‘Within regularity or, rather, because of it, small differences in stress give the effect of less and less force and so seem to imitate the way a ball slows to a stop in smaller and smaller arcs’ (2004: 54). Poetry is a form of creating such epiphanies through making lines of language, the internal musical arrangement of which, as with Wilbur’s ball, carries the poem into memory.
In the same way that paragraphs of prose have the effect of herding words into a point, lines of poetry are gathered into stanzas to make a triangulation of meaning, sound and shape. We sometimes use forms of poetry to shape lines and stanzas. Many of the traditional forms had their origin in song and the oral transmission of poems. Regular metre, rhymes and forms help you to remember the poem. Memory has its metres, and various verbal strategies glue words into place. Alliteration, for example, alerts us that language has a larynx, and offers an afterlife through being stickily memorable:
No trembling harp,
no tuned timber, no tumbling hawk
swerving through the hall, no swift horse
pawing the courtyard.
from ‘Beowulf’ (NP: 9)
These word strategies are terrifically important and primal. After all, poems once carried the stories of our species through time. In Aboriginal culture, songpoetry governs the mapping of territory and sacred sites. Of course, some of the newer forms of poetry have their origin in speech, or even visual appearance. However, the form known as free verse is still a shaping pattern for poetry’s language; and the form called syllabics is shaped by speech’s mathematics. Forms and patterns are shaping devices whose purpose is not to restrict but to create units of time for language, and to provide open spaces for saying and transmitting. You should try them all.
‘Rhyme’ and ‘time’ sound the same to my ear, but only because my verbal memory blends them so. As words, they look very different, and a thousand years ago many words would not have sounded the same way, as the poem about the cuckoo demonstrated. Rhyme emerges from listening to the music of language, as do line, metre and form. Like them, rhyme is elastic and subject to change. This is why poets have always exploited the range of rhyme and the essential plasticity of verbal sound. A ‘full-rhyme’ like ‘full time’ can be played on by a half-rhyme like ‘fall-time’ or ‘full room’, and many gradations between.
Repetition devices, like restrictive devices, are ways of shaping a poem, and carrying a poem forward as speech. They plant avenues of words to help drive a poem forward; they plant a simple repeating pattern to serve out rhythm; they plant a simulation of rhyme also:
I am the womb: of every holt,
I am the blaze: on every hill,
I am the queen: of every hive,
I am the shield: for every head,
I am the tomb: of every hope.
from the Irish, sixth century
Hearing your own nature
Poetry is more natural an art form than you might have been led to believe. Lines in your poetry are units of your time. Those units of time operate with the rhythm of language, the beat of your species and of you. It may be what drew you to creative writing in the first place. The heartbeat of your mother heard by you in her womb; then the nursery rhyme, the children’s song, the rhythmical poems and speech of childhood – all these lodged in your memory because of their rhythms. They are locked into you by many early synapses; and they were made because of your perfectly natural sensual pleasure in them. The music of language was your first teacher. This was the birdsong of your species; of you as a species of one individual. That song marked the territory of your perceptual world, one that grows if you keep developing the talent and ear. Poems can be seen as charms, as modulated enchantments, but they are also weapons made of speech.
Now, imagine somebody standing before you, and a fire between you and him. He places a poem and a thousand-dollar bill in the flames. How does this make you feel? As Richard Hugo suggests, how we feel about ourselves may colour how we write poems, and even account for poetry being part of our lives. It is a fine line; a question of value. As you will see, this chapter oscillates around this line. There are cherished values in writing poetry. For example, many poets teach the technical apparatus of metre and versification. I endorse such an approach unequivocally (as I hope I have shown rather than told), but only when the student has decided they are already on the side of poetry. In my experience, a purely technical focus in the early stages can make a beginning writer run for cover, leaving them with a somewhat exoskeletal idea of poetry’s structures and forms. The task here is more inward and basic. It is to invite you to see writing poems as an activity worth your time and attention, so that you may eventually feel like reaching into flames on a poem’s behalf – you may then find one day you are also that poem’s author. In the remaining part of this chapter we unfold some maps for finding our way into the language of poetry; explore some introductory modes for making poems; and explode one or two myths that may otherwise hold you back from reaching ever more deeply into language.
Writing Game
METRE AND RHYME
Write a poem of twenty lines in iambic pentameter, without rhyme. Then write a poem in iambic pentameter of fourteen lines in which you use full-rhyme. Finally, write a poem in iambic pentameter of thirty lines in which you only use half-rhyme.
AIM: It is useful for any poet to get to grips with basic metres. If, during drafting of any of these poems, you feel that the rhyme or metre is getting in the way of the poem’s success, then consider altering it, even if that disrupts the metre and rhyme-patterns.
Finding language
Processes
Poetry is the opposite of money in many fundamental ways. On the surface, it does not make its writers rich or chic; and, to publishers, poetry is a surefire getpoor scheme. As Robert Graves said, ‘There is no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money either.’ In poetry, the notion of ‘success’ is extremely relative compared with other arts. Success can simply mean sculpting one perfect quatrain; as Derek Mahon wrote wryly:
I have been working for years
on a four-line poem
about the life of a leaf;
I think it might come out right this winter.
‘The Mayo Tao’ (1999: 66)
As this poem indicates, quick gains are not made painting the room of a stanza. Other forms of compensation arrive eventually; and nowhere else is the experience of creative process, especially drafting, more of a love–hate relationship.
Poets place value on language above every other literary consideration. It can be argued that poetry is one of the crucibles, along with research science, in which language crackles and transmutes. As I remarked early in this book, the fastest-evolving species is language. Poetry sets its camps on the shifting dunes of language, and sometimes trespasses beyond those known borders. The flux and flow in language can create a sense of continual crisis when writing poetry. Given these conditions, you will have to get used to feeling that you will not really know when you have got a poem ‘right’. You may sometimes feel fraught as the language in your poems reacts against itself during rewriting. However, as you will see, reading other people’s poetry helps you find such alchemies easier to understand, if only marginally more possible to control. But sometimes the language in your poem is reacting against itself because it knows better what shape it should be taking than you do.
Writing Game
KENNINGS
A kenning is a compound poetic phrase that takes the place of the name of a person or thing. It comes from the Old Norse, to express a thing in terms of another. In Old English, the sea would be called a ‘whale-road’. A book could be called ‘a word-hoard’. Create some kennings and use them in short poems or haiku.
AIM: Kennings exist today in everyday speech – for example, ‘railroad’. Compression of image and language is important to poets, and kennings are an effective game for creating new images and metaphors, for finding fresh ways of seeing the world through language.
Inside poems
Poems are verbal contraptions: perpetual-motion machines made of words and, as Kenneth Koch reminds us, ‘Each word has a little music of its own’. In writing poems, you hear, see and feel every word, space and punctuation mark intimately. You may even find your voice in the spaces between words, or the open space around the poem. Why do we create these little self-sustaining machines made of words and their noise? Some poets write to preserve moments of significance, often small and apparently trifling instants or perceptions. As Wisl awa Szymborska says of a butterfly’s shadow passing over her hands:
Seeing such sights I lose my certainty
that what is important
is more important than the important.
(1996: 57)
Observation and memory are as talismanic to poetry as character and story are to fiction. Poems create little worlds of perceptual and temporal clarity. Robert Frost described a poem as ‘a momentary stay against confusion’. As Sylvia Plath put it:
a door opens, a door shuts. In between you have had a glimpse: a garden, a person, a rainstorm, a dragonfly, a heart, a city. I think of those round glass Victorian paperweights . . . a clear globe, self-complete, very pure, with a forest or village or family group within it. You turn it upside down, then back. It snows. Everything is changed in a minute. It will never be the same in there – not the fir trees, nor the gables, nor the faces. So a poem takes place. (Herbert and Hollis, 2000: 146)
Plath is right that our poems try to create a small and clear world that goes on recreating itself every time somebody reads it. Plath also wrote fiction. Like the best short stories, writing poems is one of the few open spaces in literature where you have the opportunity to make something resonant, complete and independent, even if that happens only a half a dozen times in your writing life. What of the world around a poem? Denise Levertov believed, ‘Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.’ What does it feel like to awaken in this way?
Writing Game
WISHES AND CURSES
Write two poems in free verse but using repeated phrases as a restrictive device to pattern your poem. Write one poem using the phrase ‘I wish that . . .’ at the beginning of every line. Write another poem in the form of a curse – choose something that has upset you deeply and curse it with this poem, each line of which begins with the phrase, ‘I curse you with . . .’
AIM: These are good beginner exercises. They produce vivid and energetic phrasing, and establish the use of a patterning device such as a repeated phrase.
Awakening language
Meaning and being
Language is made to live through poems, but the living language of poetry does not simply begin and end with the meaning of your words, and those words combed into lines and stanzas. As we discussed in previous chapters, words are sticky with meaning, history and association, and these elements are brought to life through their choice and combination – and by chance, especially the chances created by metre, rhyme and form. There is more to it than that. Poetry’s precision of expression, its accent on the sounds of language, draws the writer taken by the clatter and tilt of words. As Ted Hughes said:
Words that live are those which we hear, like ‘click’ or ‘chuckle’, or which we see, like ‘freckled’ or ‘veined’, or which we taste, like ‘vinegar’ or ‘sugar’, or touch, like ‘prickle’ or ‘oily’, or smell, like ‘tar’ or ‘onion’. Words which belong directly to one of the five senses. Or words which act and seem to use their muscles, like ‘flick’ or ‘balance’. (1967: 17)
It is important you develop a generous lexical awareness, and a feel for the sensuality of words. This lexical adventure can sometimes lead new writers astray, tempting them with wordiness or obscure diction. However difficult they might seem to be, your poems should not need to hang on a gallery wall with an abstruse explanation beside them. Any difficulties we feel we have with poetry are usually difficulties of expectation and, sometimes, mystification. There is no need to make more difficulty for the sake of it.
Expectations and mystifications are usually to do with the apparent strangeness of poetry – for example, what we think of as its language, subject and address, and even the fact we write it in lines. Yet, poetry has no ‘special’ language or subject of its own, at least not any more; and it is not addressed to a closed circle of chosen listeners. Poems do not have to mean anything significant, nor justify their existence in social or political terms. As Archibald MacLeish wrote in his poem ‘Ars Poetica’ (NP: 1381), ‘A poem should not mean / But be’.
‘It should not mean but be’ sounds implausible if you are schooled to read poems as autobiographical or cultural documents, or as material for literary analysis. For a critic or student of literature, meanings may indeed be readable into poems. There are illuminations to be had through a critical approach so long as it does not turn readers off poetry; lead them into thinking that poems exist only for this reason; or make new writers feel they must manufacture poems that fit a critical mode of reading. ‘A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning’ – Paul Valéry. And worse still, and even more truthful in its devastating brevity, ‘All bad poetry is sincere’ – Oscar Wilde. A poem, in its incubation phase, will run away from you if you proposition it in this way. For any good poet, it is simply impractical to try and charge a poem-in-process with significance (I will not say a ‘greater’ significance) or feeling (I will not say ‘genuine’ feeling). Wrestling the words into place is more than enough to be getting on with.
MAKING A SMALL TRUTH
Instead of electing to write on a high-minded subject in a self-consciously poetic way, let something small and everyday choose you. This could be a thing or even a word. Write the word or place the object in the centre of a sheet of paper, and write notes freely around it. Think about where it has come from and where it is going to; make notes on any memories it triggers in your mind; compare it to other things using simile, or transform it into something else through metaphor; use all your senses to describe it – do not use only visual description or comparison. Now freewrite about it, and underline any unusual phrases that occur. Try to combine all this material by using the form of address of a letter, but writing in lines. Think of the object or word as a cause for celebration that you are asking somebody else to share, and do not stray off the subject.
AIM: An obsessive and concentrated effect using something concrete and recognisable allows greater flexibility than writing about something abstract. In a sense, you are writing about what you know. However, there is latitude for discovering a lot more along the way, and you can learn to allow this sense of uncovering the mystery of what you think you know.
Subjects and ways of saying
The poet John Redmond believes that many new writers limit themselves by writing what he calls the ‘default poem’: ‘a simple lyric formula: an ‘I-persona’ describing its state of mind and feeling as though chatting with the reader across a coffee-table’ (2006: 17). He is right that a contemporary poem can of course be far more adventurous and bold in address – in the way the poem is expressed and to whom it is said. And it can be pointed out that, historically, poems have not behaved themselves in their registers, and could also be promiscuous about their intended audience. They have been known to swagger; slander; rave; lilt; boast; play; yarn; rage; and seduce. If you want to explore these possibilities, open The Norton Anthology of Poetry (NP; see Preface) and read, then try imitating – respectively – Lord Byron’s Don Juan (excerpts, 837); John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s ‘The Mock Song’ (552); Christopher Smart’s ‘Jubilate Agno’ (excerpt, 678); ‘Green Grow the Rashes’ by Robert Burns (747); Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ (excerpts, 1060); Edward Lear’s limericks (1041– 1043); Robert Frost’s ‘Home Burial’ (1228); ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas (1572); and John Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ (312).
It is what your poem is, not what your poem says, that makes it work. That also goes for subject matter. There is no subject off limits, as the examples above show. Yet it is not what you write about that matters most; it is how you write it. And because poetry takes many drafts to get right, it is how you rewrite it. A poem about, say, tomatoes, written with verbal panache, will deliver greater energy than a high-minded but clumsily written poem about angst. You could argue that too few poets make their cause poetry because too many are chasing hearses and ambulances, or using a poem as a kind of mirror on which they breathe their own feelings.
The problem is that some new writers have been taught to view poetry through over-serious and personal spectacles; and they have also been taught that poetry has an association with conveying truth, the whole truth and nothing but. This association is partly a result of its strong relationship with the spoken word; partly through the persuasiveness of certain poets, critics and teachers; and partly because poets in some cultures were indeed regarded as the community’s shaman. Good poems, of course, capture elementary truths, or allow these qualities to refract through certain tropes of language. Precise and playful images, for example, are prisms emitting the light of observation over and over again during reading, even if all the images are doing is celebrating something as mundane as the tomatoness of tomatoes, as in Pablo Neruda’s famous ode on that very subject.
Shaping language
Form
As with the forms of fiction, the choice you make with the form and structure of poems will inevitably begin to shape what you can do with them; and it will shape the expectation of your reader even before they begin reading. Suppose you were blindfolded and handed a vessel shaped like a wine glass but containing water. Your mind prepares itself to expect wine and, depending on the fluting of the glass, even a type of wine, or champagne. When you take your first sip, part of your mind still tastes that premonition of wine.
It is the same with poems: the shape before a reader disposes them to expect a shaped experience, even if the words in the form’s vessel are water. A sonnet shape sets up quite different expectations from a haiku. The thirty-nine-line sestina tastes quite different to a terza rima of the same length. But forms are not vessels that shape language passively. As Theodore Roethke asserted, ‘‘Form’ is regarded not as a neat mould to be filled, but rather as a sieve to catch certain kinds of material’ (Kinzie, 1999: 345). For the writer, the glass is broken; it must be melted and reblown every time you write in its form. Rather than walk you through examples of metre and form, I direct you to the excellent books on form in my Recommended reading, and to concise examinations of these matters in NP (2027) or The Norton Anthology of English Literature (NE2; 2928). In my experience, the clearest and most thorough text for writers is a book intended for ‘aspiring readers . . . of poetry’, which seems a very strong place for us all to start: Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1979).
Free verse
There is nothing free about free verse. It will not liberate a country or open a prison, and to write in free verse well is often harder than writing in form. The ‘free’ in ‘free verse’ refers to the freedom from fixed patterns of metre and rhyme, but writers of free verse use poetic devices like alliteration, figures of speech and imagery. As James Fenton puts it:
Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism . . . Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle – it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords . . . But if the land looks overgrazed, one should feel free to move on. (2002: 107)
Unfamiliarity breeds contempt. Any ingrained antagonism to form in poetry is usually an indicator that the poet hasn’t read very much poetry. Free verse has a long history, and is as ancient as Anglo-Saxon verse. To move on, let me say that free verse can be written quite brilliantly, but I would argue that good free verse is harder to write than good formal verse. At best there should be no sense of a disjunction between the old shapes and the new, or apparently new. Fenton also points out that D. H. Lawrence stands out as a practitioner whose unmetred poetry was clearly better than his metred poems (see NP: 1284). There is a no-man’s land between where his poems stop and where his prose begins. For examples to imitate, read ‘Snake’ (see NP: 1286) and ‘Bavarian Gentians’:
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark . . .
(NP: 1291)
Syllabics
You can try writing in syllabics right now by creating a haiku – a three-line poem of seventeen syllables in which the syllable count of the lines is five–seven–five. Read this poem by the author about a bird called a ‘Redpoll’:
from cherries, from holly, from
a shake of nightshade.
The line break between line two and line three ‘shakes’ the nightshade-bush of the poem as the bird flies from it. Haiku are small open spaces for precise, often resonant, observation. Syllabics as a whole are a means to organise your lines of poetry by using a strict number of syllables in a constant and continuing pattern. It is a means to organise a poem into being. The ‘found poem’ ‘The European Larch’ in Chapter Five uses syllabics. Rhyme can be used with subtlety, as in the syllabic masterpieces of Marianne Moore (see NP: 1328).
Writing Game
SYLLABLES AND SENSES
Choose a place as your subject – for example, a school, a church, a town, a shop, a restaurant, a mountain. Freewrite on this subject, then transform what you have written into a seven-line poem, each line of which has seven syllables. Choose an emotion as your subject – for example, love, envy, anger, sorrow, hatred. Ask the chosen emotion these questions and answer them in lines of poetry (do not mention the emotion): What colour is it? What animal would it be? What weather is it? What time of day is it like, and why? What does it smell/sound/look/taste/feel like? Transform your answers into a seven-line poem, each line of which has seven syllables. The final stage is to push the two poems together to make one poem of seven lines, each line of which is seven syllables.
AIM: You will need to lose fifty per cent of each poem. This is an exercise in precise patterning; in knowing what to leave out; and in leaning two ideas against each other to make something quite new leap from that pressure.
Subverting form
New writers will do well to get the hang of a form before gunning it down, although it is an effective workshop exercise to create a poem in which the structure ambushes the subject. The structure of the poem could, as it were, tell a different story from the poem’s words. While the sonnet is generally associated with love as its subject today, a good sonnet about contemporary war would surprise and subvert the form. A series of drastic limericks would similarly turn that form inside out.
DARK SIDE LIMERICKS
Read the limericks of Edward Lear (NP: 1041). Write a sequence of fifteen strict limericks which deal in the darkest or most taboo types of human behaviour; or with a subject matter, such as terminal illness, which would conventionally be realised through a ‘serious’ form, or form of address. Test these out by reading them aloud to people; if they do not get a laugh, you have succeeded.
AIM: Some forms of poetry, such as the limerick or triolet, become associated with a humorous mode of address. By turning the tables on the subject matter you introduce a tension into the form that will both incense but also compel readers.
Shaping a sequence and collection
Shorter poems are sometimes set in a sequence, unified by one or more threads, such as narrative, form and theme. This unity need not be frictionless: the shorter poems may be dissonant with each other in some ways. For example, each part might take a different point of view, and the sequence as a whole provides the arena for this variousness. Taken further, some poets order their collections carefully so that the poems in it, individually and as a whole, resonate in some way with each other and with the title of the book. In this way, the book itself becomes a type of poetic form (although you should be warned that many readers simply and naturally ‘dip’ into a poetry collection rather than read it as they would a novel).
Begin reading your poems with these ends in mind. For example, do some of the poems share the same concerns, or even images, and might they be brought together in some way to make a more powerful piece? Are there leitmotifs in sound between poems that would be clearer if the poems were grouped in some sequence? By shuffling and reshuffling your poems, is there some kind of narrative running through them, and might this be a sequence, or the best order, for your portfolio of coursework or first collection? If so, what title might illuminate these connections, or even challenge and subvert them?
Writing Game
A PERSONAL ANTHOLOGY
As we discussed in Chapter Four, writers often use their notebooks as ‘commonplace books’ to collect pieces of writing that impress them, show them something new, or speak to them emotionally and to their own need to write. When you have assembled at least 200 poems of these types, make copies of them, and begin looking at them all with the view of creating your own anthology. What unites them? Are they mostly in form or free verse? What is the gender and background of the authors? Is there a theme or themes? In multiple permutations, try ordering these poems so that they speak to one another in sequence; and ensure the final order has inner logic from a reader’s point of view.
AIM: This is excellent practice for examining poems from many angles, and for developing discrimination. You will find it helpful for when you order your own poems into a portfolio, poetic sequence or first collection. Later, should you become a poetry editor (as many poets are, however briefly), this practice will be of use in creating a poetry magazine or a published anthology of poems.
Playing with language
You can write poems in form and poems in free verse, and many variants between. You can write poems that are confessional and poems that are coldeyed. You can write poems that tell stories, and poems that lock on to one object and express it to its very atoms. Your task is to find the poems you want to write; the ones you are capable of writing well; and, if you want to become a poet rather than a ‘writer of poems’, to find poems which nobody else could compose.
Volcano and diamonds
To do this, you practise several modes of writing poetry, until you reach a way of writing where subject and form ‘click’ together, as Robert Frost put it. This destination cannot be reached without your reading a great deal of poetry. There are billions of poems in this world, and thousands being written every day. Most of these are bad poems that contain clichés of feeling and imagery; clichéd or archaic writing; prosaic, dishonest or forced expression; inelastic or inappropriate form, however ‘free’; or just common-or-garden dullness.
A volcano explodes tonnes of ash and waste on to its flanks, but the process might yield diamonds among this scree. You read a lot of poetry to develop your discrimination. Voracity shapes – it does not narrow – taste. If you possess received ideas about poetry, try unlearning them by reading more poems, and also reading poems in translation. There are many species of poem. Christmas carols; nursery rhymes; some forms of prayer; lieder; prose poetry; the blues; and concrete verse – all these are different and highly colourful species of poetry. As you will see in Chapter Nine, there are even poems that look like paintings; some poems are sculptures in gardens; and others which exist solely in electronic form.
Reading, reading aloud and memorising poetry will help you discriminate between poems that work and those that do not, and you can then exercise that discrimination on your own work. The best advice, as the poet Denise Levertov might have said, is to read until you ‘waken’. You may then feel compelled to reproduce your first excitements about poetry within your own work, since it appears a wholly natural progression that readers who are wakened in this way by poetry wish to try writing it. Therefore, make a habit of reading at least five poems every day, and make time for them (and I do not mean five haiku!). As you begin to get comfortable, begin reading whole collections at one sitting, and then try to read the entire output of one poet over a week.
Many contemporary poets limit their literary awareness by only reading other contemporary poets: a circling and encircling strategy offering low possibilities. Read backwards in time, and across languages. When seeking models for style and diction, try to be broader in your reading than poetry. As I pointed out in Chapter Five, some fiction writers read poems in order to gain a sense of the compressed sonic mathematics possible in language. You can even find ‘found poetry’ in some very peculiar prose, such as museum labels or office memos. Good fictional prose can also present you with ideas and language for poems – the best prose can be read as another type of poetry. As the poet Robert Lowell commented, ‘I felt that the best style of poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert’ (Herbert and Hollis, 2000: 108). Qualities you can borrow will include a sense for narrative and character, but you can also learn to relax – and to pace – some of the tension in your lines by seeing how a paragraph of good prose might work as lines of a poem.
Writing Game
FINDING POETRY
Take a sample of unusual or idiosyncratic prose from an obscure source, which might include labels, instruction manuals, business memos, science books, magazines about arcane subjects, or even this book. Freely adapt the prose into lines, using syllable count as the sole restriction. For example, you might break it into three quatrains, each line of which is ten syllables long. Then, read some short stories with the same end in mind, only this time create a longer poem, again using syllable count to break the prose into lines. Acknowledge the source somewhere in the poem or the title.
AIM: We looked at how we can borrow the precise aspects of language from nonfiction sources in Chapter Five. ‘Found poetry’ is a fine tradition. It seems like stealing. However, as T. S. Eliot reminded us, mature poets steal. Writing is always transformative. Some people condemn free-verse poetry as ‘chopped-up prose’. This game shows you how to chop it properly! Poetry, I said, is pervasive. This game also helps you to see the poetry in many different types of writing.
Writing poems requires a similar excess of exposure in order to create discrimination. Once again: a volcano vomits sky-high showers of ash, but there may be a small number of diamonds scorched into being. In the same way, you will probably write a lot of poetry to get a little. For example, read this poem by Donald Hall called ‘Exile’ (along with its footnote in NP: 1753):
Exile
A boy who played and talked and read with me
Fell from a maple tree.
I loved her, but I told her I did not,
And wept, and then forgot.
I walked the streets where I was born and grew,
And all the streets were new.
The footnote tells us that many versions of this poem exist and a much longer version has appeared in print. Imagine the ash and scorched earth of language around these six diamond-hard lines. If we were to replay Anatole France’s analogy between carpentry and creative writing, the space around this poem is waist-high in wood-shavings. You might write and rewrite a lot of good poetry to gain something with which you are satisfied, even temporarily – and, even then, like Donald Hall, you might still change it. Nowhere is the editor’s razor sharper and more frequently in use than in rewriting poetry. When that razor is not applied, the result can be shovel-loads of scree and ash. Think of the scholarly editions of the complete works of any major poet and the diamondto-ash ratio therein. Yet weak, leaden or plodding poetry is the path to good writing, even though the ratio between them might seem horrendous at first. One way to make this process more palatable for you is to make it challenging and even entertaining, and playing with form and pattern is probably the best way forward.
Writing Game
DRAFTING LONG TO MAKE IT SHORT
Think about an experience that is lodged in your memory, possibly a childhood event that caused you some pain, or which matured your view of yourself. Make rapid notes in prose in your notebook, probably covering about five pages. Using these notes as a starting point, begin writing about this experience from the first-person point of view, breaking the narrative into rough lines. Write this draft-poem continuously for about two hours or until you have written at least 150 lines. Place this draft-poem in a drawer for three weeks, then read it through, cutting it to five lines only. Discard the rest. There may be little connection between these lines but, by giving it a clear title, a resonant connection will become clear.
AIM: A powerful short poem, even if elliptical (as in ‘Exile’ above), is worth a hundred diluted long poems. Many beginning poets do not like to revise their work in the belief that the ‘first thought is the best thought’. This drastic exercise in deletion and discrimination will teach you to distance yourself from your draft-poems, and regard them as potential, rather than final. Play this game every week in order to generate material and ideas for short poems.
Poetry’s reasons
In the history of literature, prose is a teenager and fiction a child. Poetry (like drama) is ancient, but just as sprightly. As you have seen, it is also primal. That does not make the genre any more virtuous, but it does not make it any less trivial, either. Poetry is as pervasive as it is marginal. Poetry was, and is, a part of speech. This offers the genre a unique sense of literary currency, and a quite different set of technical demands, especially in terms of the sounds and rhythms of language, and its rich and various formal possibilities.
If you possess a vocation, then you follow that calling but, if you do not, there are other significant incentives for writing poems. First, we live in a world obsessed with the visual and, as we discussed in Chapter Two, language can be mistreated and misappropriated. Poetry will help you listen for language’s music, and reintroduce you to the pleasure of taking pains with it. Second, you might choose poetry as the first of your literary apprenticeships. It hones skill with language – especially precision, phrasing and image – and develops your mind so you find it easier to shift sideways into less condensed genres. As Charles Baudelaire said, ‘Always be a poet, even in prose.’ You will eventually grow accustomed to feeling fraught with language, and this quality makes poets a very adaptable species of writer – many good novelists were, or are, practising poets. Third, and significantly, poetry’s pennilessness allows it to float free of the book-buying marketplace. This creates open spaces for latitude, playfulness and for acts of fabulously invisible integrity.
A place for the genuine
Let us hold the light over that final reason. Most poets need not write with one eye on a fickle audience and the other on the publisher’s balance sheet. You can take longer to achieve the poems you need to write. Poetry is relatively clean in that sense. You do not have to ‘fake it’ in writing, even if you write from behind a mask or take on a dozen voices. Indeed, it is probably impossible to fake the real thing. As Marianne Moore wrote in ‘Poetry’ (NP: 1329):
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.
Richard Hugo (in the epigraph to this chapter) is on to something in implying that, in poetry, some important part of the self is revealed. Elizabeth Jennings pushed this further, claiming that ‘if lack of compassion, meanness of spirit, envy or cowardice are present in the poet’s nature they will be evident in his verse. You cannot fake anything if you are trying to write serious poetry’ (Curtis, 1997: 16). I am less certain about this, since poetry is also, as Wallace Stevens would have it, a kind of supreme fiction. Yet, if this quality of creative conduct attracts you as a reader, then poetry may possibly suit you as a writer simply because it will suit your character. However, do not get the impression that the pursuit of poems is purely a solemn or stern concern.
You can have a lot of serious fun trying out poems, and it costs nothing but reading, practice and experiment. You are given permission to ‘fail again and fail better’ without imperiling the livelihoods of others (obviously most poets do something else than write poems to get by). However, as I wrote in Chapter One, vocation is important to many professions, and the impulse to write and the desire to be a writer are not the same thing. Given poetry’s nature, that calling becomes magnified. You really must be driven about poetry to stick with it, so long as you feel that making good poems is its own reward. Even performance and slam poets serve long apprenticeships; theirs is a hard industry, and only small minorities of poets visibly succeed. We now turn to the worlds of writing as performance.
Writing Game
ADAPTING EXPERIENCE
Think of a vivid childhood experience. Make a list of things you remember and adapt this list into a short poem. Then, attempt to wipe your mind of any experience of poetry or writing, and write a recollection of a childhood experience of language or reading. Draft a poem that introduces this experience of language and try to write it in such a way that it mimics the experience as exactly as possible. Try to bring these two poems together to make one poem.
AIM: It has been said that poems are adaptations of your own experience. These two small exercises attempt to remind the writer how individual and strange is our relationship with words and language, and how a writer’s personal reading, listening and writing are intimately linked within any poem.
Recommended reading
As with fiction, there is a glittering hoard of handbooks about writing poetry, and the finest are written by good poets. In my experience, the leading texts are Michelle Boisseau and Robert Wallace’s Writing Poems (Longman Pearson, 2004), and Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (Chicago University Press, 1999). The former provides an excellent and thorough introductory text which does not confuse the would-be writer with mystification or false promises. The latter offers a bracing and beautifully written introduction to advanced technical matters. Taken together, they provide a penetrating explanation and exploration of every facet of writing poetry, and a sense of progression in craft and art. Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s The Poet’s Companion (Norton, 1997) offers a confident and thorough survey, and is especially strong on the choices of subject matter. Both William Packard’s The Art of Poetry Writing (St Martin’s Press, 1992) and James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry (Penguin, 2002) are lessons in writing economically, clearly and yet personally about poetry, as well as having the effect of making the reader feel like they are meeting the possibilities of the craft for the first time. John Redmond’s How to Write a Poem (Blackwell, 2006) is a small masterpiece of concision, and has a very interesting take on the ‘address’ and ‘design’ of a poem. Peter Sansom’s Writing Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1994) has been a gracious guide for many new British poets. Mary Oliver discusses the precisions and voice of poetry in A Poetry Handbook (Harvest, 1994). This is a strong text for a writer with little or no experience of reading poems. Should you be one of these unfortunate many, you can begin to fill that deficit by reading the generous An Introduction to Poetry (Longman, 1998) by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. If you need further enthusing, you will find yourself immediately converted to the cause of reading poetry by John Lennard’s radiant The Poetry Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2006). Two fascinating books from quite different figures will introduce you to the angular psychologies of poetic practice: Clayton Eshleman’s Companion Spider (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (Norton, 1979). If you are ever short of Writing Games, you will find an open mine of them in The Practice of Poetry (HarperResource, 1992) edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. Writing Games based on form and design can be derived from many books, not least The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (Norton, 2000) by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, in which these two excellent poets discuss and demonstrate poetic form. Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (Random House, 1979) is a strong introduction to historical styles and practices with distinctive examples. Ron Padgett’s Handbook of Poetic Forms (2nd edition, Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 2000) presents, explains and discusses more than seventy traditional and modern poetic forms, with examples and variations. Jeffrey Wainwright’s Poetry: The Basics (Routledge, 2004) offers a rapid and persuasive set of demonstrations. In the brief but classic Rhyme’s Reason (Yale Nota Bene, 2001), John Hollander provides a luminous survey of verse and verse forms, with examples supplied delightfully by the author; and Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Ohio University Press, 1999) presents a rigorous overview. The open-minded but scrupulous Poetic Rhythm by Derek Attridge (Cambridge University Press, 1995) provides a strong introduction to rhythm and metre. Some websites allow you to experience other ‘forms’ of poetry, including electronic poetry (see Chapter Nine). The Electronic Poetry Center is the place to begin (at www.epc.buffalo.edu). Listening to poems read aloud allows you to experience and understand their full performance, but readings may not be available in your area. There are many websites for the spoken word, but for poetry the Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org) and the Poetry Archive (www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do) carry online recordings, as well as essays by and about contemporary poets and links to other poetry sites. There are many rhyming dictionaries on the market. Rhyme tends to charm through echo and expectation rather than clang. Therefore the most useful resource is The Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 2006), whose radical organisation relies more on indirect rhyme, sound’s sidetracks and echoes. Its lists of rhymed words not only blend traditional/ancient with modern/contemporary but also introduce place names and technological and scientific terms. Lastly, Preminger and Brogan’s New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, 1993) is the definitive, brick-wide handbook for working poets – it squats like a bookend alongside your dog-eared thesaurus and dictionaries.
