You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [43]
None of this is easy. Nor should it be. A good poem takes time and work. Not every Sunday drive brings you to a place you'll return to, but part of that drive, a seldom-traveled road or two, will be worth returning to on another day, on your way elsewhere. Each first draft is a practice session. You discover something about the craft of poetry, or several things. You discover a subject, or two or three. No time you spend writing is aimless time. Each draft teaches you something. Each gives you something to improve the next time. Like chefs, doctors, baseball players, carpenters and everyone else who practices a craft by doing it, poets practice their craft by writing. The more you write, the more Sunday drives you take, the quicker you discover where you're going, the quicker you discern the best routes. Writing makes you a better writer.
By writing consistently, with daily dedication, you seek out your subjects and hone your skills. You deepen your engagement with the language. You discover and address your concerns. You also allow fortunate mistakes to happen. Just because you didn't intend some word or phrase doesn't mean it isn't valuable. As Robert Frost said, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." Let your poems go their own ways. Follow them. Suppose in writing about your first romance, you write the word sad instead of glad, or vice versa. Suppose you write homely instead of honey—oops. Calling Dr. Freud! But slips happen. A word comes out dramatically different from what we intended. That's okay. Such a slip may be a fortunate mistake, a stroke of luck. A poem that may have been a ho-hum memory of a first romance takes an unexpected turn. It leads us down a seldom-traveled road to a place we've never been before. Freudian slips are interesting because they seem to get at the heart of things. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. We'll never know if we don't explore the opportunity. Let luck lead you sometimes. Don't be so intent on saying one thing that you fail to say something better. Let go of what you want your poem to say and listen to what it does say.
That's one way of freeing your imagination. Another is to look at your subject from a different point of view. How would your mother and father remember your first illness? What would your first love say about that romance? What does a house builder think of the family that makes the house a home? Imagine other points of view, other characters. You can develop a persona, a specific character who speaks the poem. The term persona comes from the Latin word meaning "mask." For the sake of the poem, you can put on a mask and craft a dramatic monologue, a poem in which the speaker relates a dramatic moment in his or her life. The ballad "The Unquiet Grave" is a dramatic monologue. For a fuller taste of persona and dramatic monologue, read Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," Robert Frost's "A Servant to Servants" and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." You can free your imagination by stepping outside yourself and creating a persona to examine your subject.
You can also free your imagination by selecting words purely for their sounds and then working with their denotations and connotations. If the sound is good, make use of the meaning. You can bring dream images into your poem and treat them as though they're real. You can select twenty words at random from the dictionary and use each in a poem. You can write a poem about going to a place you've never been—and should it be an actual or imagined place? You can imagine an important decision you made and where you'd now be had you chosen otherwise. You can imitate a poem you admire. You can practice metaphors, as in a teacup of joy, and make it real: Imagine joy's aroma and taste. Is it served with crumpets? Is it served in the parlor, the garden, the dungeon? And who sips this teacup of joy with you? Let your imagination take your poems where it will. It has its own rhymes and reasons, although it may express them slyly.
What if? What