You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [6]
PRACTICE SESSION
1. Read five poems you've never read before. Write down what you like and dislike about each poem. Summarize them: What are their subjects, and what do they say about those subjects?
2. Repeat exercise one with five poems you love. Compare your notes. What similarities and differences do you see?
The Poet's Discipline
Writing poems comes easily some days, but not most. It requires discipline. If you've had a pet, you already know about discipline. The same rule for having a pet applies to writing: Take responsibility. If you want the company of a dog—a mutt, say, a shepherd-terrier-and-who-knows-what-else mix named Woodrow—that means you have a responsibility. Joan and I have lived with Woodrow for seven years. It's been work. We lug home forty-pound bags of dog food. We romp with him, and tussle, and take him to the park so he can run off his energy. We groom him. Before bed, we take him around the block and clean up after him as we go. The evening walk is now a habit. In the heavy heat of summer, in the freezing bite of winter, round the block we go, every night, Woodrow leading the way. Has he been worth the work? Definitely. With the responsibility comes the pleasure of having a faithful, loving companion.
If you want the pleasures of writing poems, you have certain responsibilities. They're only slightly different from those of having a pet. You must feed your imagination by reading poems and by looking at and listening to the world around you. You must allow your imagination room to play, to take off and run. You must groom your poems regularly, which means revising them. You must be willing to throw out the bad writing. This last responsibility is difficult, but not everything you write will be good enough to keep. The same is true for every writer. No one writes well all the time. No one. The late poet and teacher William Stafford said, "A writer must write bad poems, as they come, among the better, and not scorn the 'bad' ones. Finicky ways can dry up the sources." He's absolutely right. The good poems will come. So will the bad. Don't fret about it. Learn to recognize the difference between the good and bad, but don't regret the bad poems. It's all part of writing.
As a poet, you have one primary responsibility: to write. Write every day. Make time if you must. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, it doesn't matter when, but set aside time every day to write. I do mean every day, even if for only a short while. You'll find the responsibility becoming habit, like walking Woodrow around the block. After the habit sets in, you'll find that you need to write. Every now and then, Joan sends me to my writing room. I've become surly. I snap at her for leaving the orange juice on the counter. I complain there's nothing to do. "Go," she says, "you need to write. Get to it." The urge to write is pushing at me and I am ignoring it, but Joan knows me well. So off I go to take care of what needs to be done. I start in on a new poem or dig out an old draft that isn't working yet. I write. In a while, I feel better.
The responsibility becomes habit, and habit produces poems. If you don't write, you don't write poems. If you do write, the poems come. That's the reward and the satisfaction. That's the achievement. There's no pleasure like that of writing a good poem. And the more you write, the nearer you draw to the source of your poems, your wellspring, where the ideas and emotions gather and wait to be released.
Where Poems Come From
Sometimes inspiration visits you. The seed of a poem, the kernel of an idea, comes to you. It's a flash, the lightbulb snapping on above your head, the lightning bolt of an idea striking you. But inspiration isn't the poem. It's the beginning