You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [2]
Why write? Because you feel this drive, impulse, force, passion. Because you think, feel, imagine and are compelled to craft the language, thus giving form to thought, emotion and imagination. William Shakespeare describes the passion in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
You feel it, too, the urge to imagine and invent, to put words on the page, to make poems. Because this urge has you, welcome. Welcome to poetry.
What to Expect
You may wonder if there's a sensible way of writing poems. Yes—and no. By that, I mean it depends. Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century English writer and critic, said, "Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason." On the one hand you have imagination, and on the other you have reason. Poetry is an odd combination of the two, and they don't go easily together, which means there's no sure-shot, 1-2-3 system for writing poems. But whether the making of poems is sensible or not, yes, you can learn to write poems.
What distinguishes one kind of creativity, one art from another is knowledge of the subject. Well, knowledge and practice. Poetry takes a lot of practice. Even established poets practice to hone their skills. But practice is not always work; sometimes it's play. Work and play are both valuable, and both lead to good poems.
That's where this book comes in. It's designed for those who feel the urge to write poetry, but haven't had the formal training and practical experience. This book will provide a bit of both. In that sense, it will also benefit those who are already writing poems and wish to revisit their early lessons in the craft. It's a place to begin, or begin again.
Remember that this is a beginning, a jumping-off spot. There will always be more to learn, just as there will always be more poems to write. There's more to poetry than any one book can contain or any one teacher can teach. But this beginning will help you on your way to writing poems you can take pride in, poems that make your readers think and feel.
For my part, I'll offer practical advice. And because poetry isn't a wholly practical endeavor, I'll offer impractical advice, too. The craft of poetry, its rhythms and rhymes, has much to do with the practical. You can acquire the craft of poetry. You can learn about similes and metaphors (we'll cover those figures of speech in chapter six). You can learn to dance along an iambic pentameter line and to vary it on occasion by stepping into a trochee (chapter six). You can learn the intricacies of rhyme schemes and sonnets (chapter eight).
These topics appear in an order that will allow you to develop your skills and build on them. We begin with the nature of words themselves, go on to such aspects of poetry as figures of speech, rhyme and meter, and come out with poetic forms and free verse. While I discuss these aspects one at a time, they don't work their magic one at a time. They're all in play simultaneously. Poems are busy places.
Practice will help you write better poems. Throughout this book, you'll find practice sessions to engage you and hone your skills. Take your time with the sessions. Some even call for several days of writing.