How do you write poetry

[TheFifthElement]

Writing poetry isn't easy, and often I wonder where it comes from. I wonder if the fellow poets here would be willing to share the secret of how you go about writing a poem. Do you have a routine, do you use particular tools, does inspiration strike you in a particular place or a particular time of day?

Please share your poetry making secrets here :)

[Pendragon]

I have a book called Creating Poetry, which familiarized me with the vast number of forms, and gave good advice on free verse. But when all is said and done, music is my greatest inspiration. I usually write with music playing in the background, or my guitar close by. Flow is more important to me than strict form, except in poems that depend in syllable count. I bend the rules of other forms in meter and foot at times to make the flow better. I will not force rhyme, if that happens; I will try to find another word. Inspiration for subject is all around you all the time. It is pointless to say there is nothing about which to write poetry. It just depends on your viewpoint. Robert Burns wrote “To a Field Mouse”. Carl Sandburg wrote “Fog”, Lewis Carroll wrote “Jabberwocky”. Dorothy Parker wrote a short one on suicide. Emily Dickinson wrote of simple day-to-day life. Write what you know, or as Poe wrote: “Everything we do and seem, is but a dream within a dream.”

[firefangled]

There are three books I have read that helped me do two things, to be honest with myself about what I am saying and how I am saying it. To see what I am doing right and what I could do differently.

How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi, Copyright 1959
Rules for the Dance by Mary Oliver
The Sound of Poetry by Robert Pinsky

The most important four words of all three books are Pinsky's, "There are no rules." I read this later than Oliver's book, but I did not then find her book irrelevant, as he continues, there are principles. It all depends on what I want to do. Outside of poetry, if I want to present a technical document about a certain phase of software development, that document has a form and format I must use. It's like that.

In poetry, unless I want to write a Villanelle or some other form, the choices are mine.

So, what I do the most is listen. To me poetry is about sound mostly. Smooth sound, jazz sound, disruptive sound (difficult to do on purpose), rhythmic sound. I had a teacher once encourage us to read and listen to William Styron's opening passage of Set This House on Fire. It is poetry. The rhythm sounds like what he is describing. That is when I knew that poetry is in literature and therefore not relegated to just a form or even "Poets".

So, I write from sound. I may write a single line that sounds good to me and it may sit for years as a single line, then two. Every once in a while I just read all my lines and broken poems.

We have all heard, I think, that often a poem or a story or a piece of music gets going and it takes over. What you wanted to write originally goes out the window. There are poems for me that jump into my head all at once. Usually these are not really flushed out, but they just need a little TLC, which may come now or three years from now. Don't throw anything away.

When I read some poems by artists like Wallace Stevens I wonder at how technical they are and it used to be discouraging until I realized there are different kinds of technical. So there are no rules means I am in charge, but even if I do it for fun (like I do) I listen to how the words sound in relation to what I am trying to say. If I am trying to be romantic with my wife and I shout, I love you! it won't be very effective. Or if I say, you permeate my presence like the onrushing waves soak into the dry sand on the waiting shore, she will be yawning before I get it all out. When writing poems, there is me and the words. I have to be the writer and the hearer at the time.

I read poets that sound like I want to sound or similar to how I sound already. If I am feeling like my poetry is worthless and I should give up or no one is responding to what I am writing, reading a poet who sounds like me and is published and validated, validates me. If no one sounds like me, I keep going because I just might be an original. :) In the end that is what it is about. I want you to know me through what I think and feel and write. And I want that to be worth your time.

[rabid reader]

when I am dreaming or gazing into a distance, words or sentences come to me form no where. I write them down and think about them, and what they mean to me, when i decide what it is they mean to me, I then decide how best to convey that meaning, and which ever I decide becomes either poetry or story.