You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [42]
We have two tasks, then: to discover our concerns and to discover how to express them as poems. We begin our poems with what keeps returning to us, in whatever ways. Your journal comes in handy for this. Write memories. One memory leads to another, and soon you have an autobiography, the most important moments of your life. Write your dreams, those delightful, irrational, frightening, pleasing manifestations of your subconscious. You needn't analyze your dreams (though you certainly may), but at the very least write the images dreams present to you. Dream images are some of the most vivid and powerful we experience. Write what you see and hear during your day. Listen to people talk. Watch their gestures and expressions. Both speak volumes. Notice their clothing and how they walk. Write your own lines, snippets that may spark the idea of a poem. Write your favorite lines from the poems, stories and essays you read. When you read through your journal later, you'll see patterns emerge, because the writing that affects you as a reader also reflects the concerns that inspire you as a writer.
By all means, read poems. Linger over them. Let them affect you. When you read a poem you love, study it and note your thoughts in your journal. Why do you love it? What does it make you feel? What does it make you think? Look at its images, figures of speech, sounds, rhymes and rhythms. Make note of them, too. A love of writing poetry involves a love of reading poetry. They go hand in hand. One of the first poems I wrote in my journal deals with the love of poetry. It's by Emily Dickinson, "I Dwell in Possibility," (#657):
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—
Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of Eye—
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—
Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—
I love the metaphors this poem presents: Poetry is a house we live in, and writing poems is a way to "gather Paradise." Dickinson is a superb poet to read for metaphors and for the music of poetry, especially in her slant rhymes. Her poems make me think. I feel them. Those responses often begin a poem of my own. Her poems lead me to the words I need to write down.
It's rare that we discover how to express our concerns in the first draft of a poem. The first draft is like a Sunday drive. You go to see where you arrive. You explore the territory and see the sights. You arrive somewhere and know immediately that it's the destination you sought. On a later drive, when you wish to return to that place, then you take the best route. It may not be the quickest route, but the most enjoyable, most scenic, most eventful route. It may take many drives to find the best route. The first draft is that first Sunday drive: You discover where the poem is going. In later drafts (there may be many; I wrote forty-three drafts of one poem to get it right), you work on finding the best route. You try a dozen images and keep, perhaps, three or four. You conceive five, ten or twenty figures of speech and keep two or three. You listen to the alliteration and assonance of the words you write and bring in others to compare the echoes and rhymes they make. You set down the rhythm, a good rhythm that makes the ride steady but not monotonous. Or you let the natural (but well-ordered) cadences of your words carry you from start to finish. Then in a later draft, you may find yourself on another Sunday drive,