You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [4]
4. Write without pause for ten minutes, beginning with the phrase It was the best. . .. Don't pause to think about what to write. Don't worry about making sense. Write as quickly as you can. Write everything that comes to mind.
5. Select five words at random from a dictionary. Write a draft of a poem using all five words. Include a kangaroo in the draft. Remember, don't think of this writing as a poem; it's a draft, a place to start. Later, you may decide to return to it. For now, just write.
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SHARPENING
THE PENCIL
When I was a student, the university brought in established poets several times a year to read their poems and talk with students about writing. We asked about the process of writing. We wanted to know what exactly a poem is, where the poets wrote, with pencil or pen? Whether they wrote in the morning or evening—every day? Where did they find their subjects? What did they do to become poets? What does it take? The responses to these questions were similar from poet to poet. Different poets keep different habits, but the process of writing is basically the same. Poets become poets by writing poems.
What a Poem Is
Robert Frost, the quintessential American poet, said that a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom." That isn't a practical description of poetry, but then poetry isn't a wholly practical endeavor. Frost's definition is the truest I know. If a poem doesn't delight its reader, if it doesn't inspire an oh or an ah, the reader sets it aside and it collects dust. If the reader isn't in some way wiser for and enriched by reading a poem, the poem has been mere entertainment. For that we have television, movies, music, comic strips and numerous other pastimes. (But, of course, poems do entertain, too.)
So what is a poem? It's something that needs to be said, and said in a way that captures the reader's attention.
A poem expresses an idea, emotion, experience or all three. It tells a story. It portrays a character. It describes a scene. It sings a song. It relates a conflict. It meditates on a walk through the woods, late in the afternoon of a brisk autumn day, as maple and oak leaves come loose in the wind and twirl down into the rustling brush. A poem does any of these, all of these, or something completely different. The question is, what does the poet want the poem to do? Or, rather, what does the poem want the poet to do? Poems work that way; they take off on their own, and the poet has to keep up with them.
Mainly, a poem is an artistic expression of the imagination that takes place in language. Even when it relates an actual event—waking to birdsong, cooking lunch, gardening or changing the oil in your car—a poem is always an artistic expression created in words. The language is more important than the event it relates. It is the medium of the art. Words are the bricks that build the house; just as a house is built brick by brick, a poem is built word by word. So even when writing a poem about an actual event, the poet filters the event through imagination and re-creates it in words. The event does not make the poem; language makes the poem, and imagination crafts the language. In essence, the poet translates the event into language, and the reader experiences the translation as an event-in-words. Through study and practice, the poet learns to craft the language so any event, even the most mundane, takes on a new life. It becomes an event worth experiencing through the art of poetry.
Poems are imagined onto the page, one word after another. The poet selects words for their economy and resonance. Each word must be the best possible word—a word that is absolutely necessary (economy) and echoes with meaning (resonance). (A great many words in English have more than one meaning, and poets often select such words to use their multiple meanings.) A poem, then, is imagination