(by 24 people)
What does it take to write good poetry? You'll have to create your own recipe but here are some of the ingredients.
How much poetry do you read?
Seriously - if you don't read poetry, then it's really, really hard to write anything that will appeal to anyone beyond your Mum and Dad, partner, cat or dog.
And you need to read contemporary poetry - the stuff that's being written right now, by people living at the same time as you, caught up in the same web of problems and opportunities as you.
If you've read some of the older stuff that's great, it will stand you in good stead, but you need to update your knowledge. Otherwise you'll be like someone who's heard nothing more recent than Beethoven trying to create cutting-edge techno music.
But that's not the most important reason you should read some contemporary poetry. The reason is, of course - because you'll really, really enjoy it.
Books by Poets
Poetry in the Making: An Anthology (Faber Paper Covered Editions)
Based on a radio series for children, but since he never talks down to the kids, its just as valuable for adult writers. Worth getting just for the chapter on 'Learning to Think'.
Amazon Price: (as of 10/12/2008)
Teach Yourself Writing Poetry (Teach Yourself)
Great introduction to writing poetry and getting published, from 'Bump starting the poem', through visualisation, rhythm, rhyme, tone, subject matter, drafting and revision, to submitting your work to publishers. Lots of stories, examples and exercises to get you on your way.
Amazon Price: (as of 10/12/2008)
Don't Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words
Every quarter the UK Poetry Book Society publish a magazine to accompany their selections of the best new poetry books. It features essays by the chosen poets, about the writing of their books. This is a compilation of those essays from the past 50 years - it's a Who's Who of modern poetry, including Philip Larkin, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, T.S. Eliot, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Alice Oswald, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton and Les Murray.
Amazon Price: (as of 10/12/2008)
"What's the difference between poetry and prose?" - Part 1
I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that, ultimately, there is no difference between poetry and prose. If anyone is going to try to tell me with a straight face that there is no poetry in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, William Golding, Mervyn Peake, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Yukio Mishima, I am going to recommend that they go and have a lie down, the heat is obviously affecting their brain.
So what is poetry? Sorry, it's indefinable - meaning it's not susceptible to rational definition. But you know it when you see it, or rather when you feel it. A.E. Housman had a practical 'test' for poetry - he would recite a poem while shaving, and if it made the hairs on this chin bristle, then it was a true poem. Robert Graves compared it to Keat's phrase "Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear".
So your body can act as a kind of litmus paper, alerting you to the presence of poetry, or the poetic, in whatever you are reading. And you probably know from your own experience that you can get that feeling from great novels and other works of art as well as 'poetry'.
So why all the fuss about poetry?
Let me introduce an alternative disctinction - one that was really clarified for me in Mimi Khalvati's class (see the 'Courses' module) - while there may not be a clear distinction between poetry and prose, there is a difference between poetry and verse. Have a look at a page of verse, and a page of poetry, and what's the difference?
In verse
the writing doesn't reach
the right hand
margin.
See?
And that's the only difference! Forget metre, rhyme, rhythm, imagery, metaphor, and all the hot air about the more 'refined' character of verse. The only difference between verse and prose is that verse is divided into individual 'lines' arranged on the page, whereas prose is not.
"What's the difference between poetry and prose?" - Part 2
Why bother writing in verse?
In The Poem's Heartbeat (see the 'Poetic Form' module below) Alfred Corn points out that the word 'verse' comes from the Latin 'versus' meaning 'turned around or turned back', describing the movement of the words as they 'turn back' to the left hand margin at the end of each line. He points out that this has the effect of slowing us down as we read, and considering each line individually, so that "each separate line strikes us as special entity, something with its own living character, worth examining in isolation from the rest". And if the poet has done his/her job properly, we start to notice all kinds of things going on among the words - rhythms, rhymes, echoes, images, associations, connotations, entering our awareness and prompting thoughts and feelings in response.
It's a bit like looking for sea creatures in the rock pools at the beach. If you rush around glancing in lots and lots of pools, you'll scare the animals into hiding and won't pause long enough to notice anything. But if you choose one particular pool, and lie down and keep very quiet and still, and look and keep looking - then slowly, tentatively, the creatures start to emerge from the weeds and shadows, and you become absorbed in watching this otherworldly life going on right in front of you.
So writing in lines of verse is really a way of getting the reader - and the writer - to slow down and pay attention to the words. And when you do that, the words come to life before your eyes.
Or your ears. Verse was a spoken medium before it was written down, and the division into lines can be heard and felt when a poem is read by a skilful reciter. Of course, rhythm and meter make it easier to keep track of the lines when verse is spoken aloud, which is probably why so-called 'free verse' didn't appear until poetry was more frequently printed than read aloud.
So writing or speaking in verse has the effect of concentrating our attention. And when we do this, very often we surprise ourselves by discovering that there is more to words, to our subject, to ourselves, and to the life we are living now, than we previously suspected. And this means that you are more likely to experience 'poetry' while writing or reading in verse than you are in prose.
Does that answer the question?
Poetic Form
Even 'free verse' has this quality - when you read it, when you see it, when you hear it, you can tell that it matters how the words are arranged, not just what they say. Otherwise we're likely to get the same feeling as Philip Larkin when he said: "I read poems and I think, Yes, that's quite a nice idea, but why can't he make a poem of it? Make it memorable?"
So why 'should' a poem have a definite form? Not because of 'the rules'. Not because of tradition. But because poetry is magic - and form is how you cast the spell. And the more you read poetry, and the more you savour the forms and learn about them, the more you fall under their spell. It's magical and absorbing. Try it - I dare you.
The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody, Revised Edition (Story Line Press Writer's Guides)
This is a good place to start. Corn begins with the basics - 'line and stress' and shows how these have developed into different metrical systems and verse forms. Once you finish this you'll have a good grounding in prosody (the study of versification), including some of the principles of 'free verse' which he calls 'unmetered verse'.
Amazon Price: (as of 10/12/2008)
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
An unusual anthology, organised by poetic form. So there are whole chapters of examples of the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, blank verse and so on. Also includes chapters on the elegy, pastoral, ode and 'open forms' (their version of 'free verse' - note how most people who look into versification come to the same conclusion as T.S. Eliot - there is no such thing as 'free verse'). Reading this will really sharpen your sense of poetic forms in action - and the poet-editors Mark Strand and Eavan Boland have chosen some great poems as their examples.
Amazon Price: $12.89 (as of 10/12/2008)
Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody
If you're really interested in writing 'free verse', this is a brilliant study of how it's structured and how it achieves its effects. Hartman explodes a few myths and unravels some woolly thinking, and comes to some very interesting conclusions. It's not a book for beginners, but once you've got some familiarity with the principles and practice of versification, and if you really want to explore the possiblities of non-metrical verse, this book repays careful reading. It will leave you with renewed appreciation of great free-verse poetry. And bits of it are very funny, like the outraged poetry critic in 1921 who described Pound and other advocates of free verse as "the Reds of literature".
Amazon Price: $14.95 (as of 10/12/2008)
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
OK this one's definitely not for beginners. In fact, it's arguably not for anyone but poetry obsessives - 1,383 pages of small print about every conceivable aspect of poetry and versification. It's so detailed there's even room for a couple of pages on Inuit (Eskimo) poetry. I wouldn't be without it - whatever I want to know about versification, I can guarantee this book will have something to say. Look at it this way - it's so long you'll never read all of it, so for the rest of your life there will always be something new for you to discover in it.
Amazon Price: $40.50 (as of 10/12/2008)
My Poetry Blog
Mark McGuinness | poetry
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byMy Articles
- Poetry in Practice - Creative Flow (Magma 34)
- I interviewed Paul Farley, Myra Schneider, Matthew Sweeney and Susan Wicks about their experience of creative flow while writing poetry. The link takes you to an edited version of the full article, available in the print version of Magma 34.
- Poetry in Practice - Net Gains? (Magma 32)
- A piece for Magma 32 about resources on the internet for poetry writers. The link takes you to a hotlinked version of the article, so it's easy to check out the recommended sites as you read.
- Getting in a State - Hypnotherapy and Writer's Block (The Author)
- A piece for the UK 'Journal of the Society of Authors' about writer's block, hypnosis and creative trances. Not confined to poetry, but applies as much to poets as any other writers.
General Creative Writing
Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within
I've picked this one out of many on general creative writing because he's so good at homing in on some of the real stumbling blocks we face as writers, with chapters on 'Envy', 'Fear', 'Rejection', 'Procrastination' and 'Deadline Dread'. And he's brilliant at pointing out how each of these problems contains the seed of its own resolution - if we can hang on to our commitment, patience and sense of humour.
Amazon Price: $11.53 (as of 10/12/2008)
Poetry Writing Courses
Until I discovered the Poetry School I never realised there were so many other people with the same passion for poetry, most of whom were writing to a high standard - it's tremendously encouraging and inspiring to be involved with in a really good writing class.
And do your best to find a class dedicated to poetry, rather than general creative writing. If the latter is all that's available then fine, make the most of it, but in a poetry class you should find people who can help you with the specific challenges of writing in verse.
- The Poetry School
- Fantastic courses taught by professional poets, led by the wonderful Mimi Khalvati. Mimi's Versification course is demanding but absolutely worth the effort. There are also lots of shorter courses to choose from. The new programme comes out in August each year and books up very quickly, so make sure you're quick off the mark.
- The City Lit
- Magma magazine started at Laurie Smith's course 'Poetry in the Making' at the City Lit over 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to attend the course before Laurie retired from teaching it. The course is now run by John Stammers - a great opportunity to learn from one of the foremost contemporary poets.
- The Poetry Kit Course Directory
- The Poetry Kit is a fantastic portal site listing all kinds of resources for poets. There's a long list of courses here - hopefully there will be one near you.
My Wishful Thinking Blog
My blog about creativity and coaching. The 'writing' category will take you to all the most relevant posts, but some of the general creativity posts may also be useful for your writing.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byContemporary Poetry Magazines
This is what you are aiming for
We'd all love to be 'discovered' by Faber or Bloodaxe, but the chances of that happening are pretty slim without a good track record in respected magazines. Most of these magazines publish well-known poets alongside new and up-and-coming writers.
This lens is about writing poetry rather than publishing it, but a couple of important pointers:
1. Read the magazine before you send in your poems.
2. Read the magazine's 'Guidelines for contributors' very carefully - the last thing you want to do is annoy the editor by sending in a submission in the wrong format and creating extra work for him/her.
- Magma
- I'd better come clean and admit that I'm on the editorial committee of Magma. But it IS an excellent mag - if you don't believe me, click the link and read the online version for free. The regular 'Poetry in Practice' feature is particularly useful for writers - professional poets talking about the writing of poetry. E.g. Sinead Morrissey on Writer's Block, Roddy Lumsden on 'Mistakes Poets Make'.
- The Rialto
- The nice thing about The Rialto is that it just gives you lots and lots of good poetry, with very little in the way of prose to break the flow of verse. I wouldn't want every poetry magazine to do this - part of the pleasure of poetry is exchanging opinions in articles - but it's nice to have one that does.
- Poetry London
- Always leads with a strong 'cover poet' and plenty of good poetry and prose to follow. New editor Maurice Riordan is two issues in - have a look at his Editorial for No.52 for a really good account of the process of editing a magazine. (I can't link directly as the site's built with frames.)
- The Wolf
- Lively magazine edited by James Byrne, a gentleman and a fine poet. The website includes audio recordings of poets reading their work, including yours truly, if you scroll down the page...
- poetrymagazines.org.uk
- Fantastic online archive of UK poetry magazines from the UK Poetry Library.
My Poetry bookmarks on Del.icio.us
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Mark_McGuinness
Thanks for the feedback guys. Glad I've given you some ammunition for the forums Kimberley. You've both done some great lenses - hopefully I'll have a few more soon! Posted July 20, 2006 |
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KimberlyDawnWells
Ha! Thanks for explaining the difference between poetry and prose. I can show this to the arrogant poetry-perfectionists on various forums now. ;) Posted July 19, 2006 |
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anndouglas
You've put together a really useful lens, Mark. Thanks for posting about it at SquidU so I could find it. Posted July 19, 2006 |
