Hi, I was told by my friend that if you can write poetry then you just can and you don't need to educate yourself further in "creative writing", but I feel that I need some sort of supervision, if there is any literature you could recommend me to become a better writer of poetry, please feel free to post it here...thanx
Stop asking where is God and keep asking where the hell is human!
One of the best tips I ever read was to avoid abstraction. The actual advice went, go through your work and highlight the abstract stuff in pink and the concrete stuff - imagery and so on - in yellow. Is there too much pink? See what you can take out and replace with imagery, e.g. not, 'I felt sad', but, for instance, 'Everything turned grey' or 'I was a bug on its back who couldn't even be bothered to kick anymore.' And is there too much yellow? There's no such thing as too much yellow.
If poetry was innate then I would agree, but even eating is something learned. I believe poetry to be a cultural development and we are inclined to write poetry because of the enjoyment we have in reading it ... for the most part. The life of poetry is language, but you don't have to delve into a dictionary or grammar book, because poetry doesn't require that. What is important, at least to me, is learning the language of poetry itself: imagery, metaphor, symbolism etc.
some of this is so familiar to us that it seems natural, but it's learned. Knowing the physics of poetry will give you control of the medium. I would recommend The Poet's Dictionary: http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dictiona...0754297&sr=1-1
It will also help you understand technical aspects of the poems you like.
Last edited by NickAdams; 12-31-2008 at 04:14 PM.
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ab⋅strac⋅tion /ębˈstrękʃən/ [ab-strak-shuhn]
–noun 1. an abstract or general idea or term.
2. the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.
3. an impractical idea; something visionary and unrealistic.
4. the act of taking away or separating; withdrawal: The sensation of cold is due to the abstraction of heat from our bodies.
5. secret removal, esp. theft.
6. absent-mindedness; inattention; mental absorption.
7. Fine Arts. a. the abstract qualities or characteristics of a work of art.
b. a work of art, esp. a nonrepresentational one, stressing formal relationships.
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Origin:
1540–50; < LL abstractiōn- (s. of abstractiō) separation. See abstract, -ion {Avoiding abstraction as a general rule might be good for those just initiating themselves into poetry but there is the limitation...abstraction infiltrates poetry... contemporary and classic... on a massive scale}
Read. Read like crazy. Read the poems here. Go to a bookstore and browse among the anthology of poems until one grabs your eye, then read. Don't labour to understand what you read. Poetry doesn't always or often translate rationally. Find things that please you for any old reason and read some more. Without planning it, you will be picking up the things you need to know - not to imitate them, though that can be helpful as a starter, but to allow them to provoke echoes in your own mind.
I agree, but I think the principle is good for starting poets because it shows them how to begin to be creative, specific and thoughtful about what they want to say.Originally Posted by quasimodo1
Thank you all for your suggestions, I will definitely try out all your recommendations. What I would also like to know is what do you people write about and how? I mean if something worth writing about happens to you, do you grab the pen immediately, or you keep it in mind and work on it gradually? And is your poetry mostly personal (I mean about emotios)?
Stop asking where is God and keep asking where the hell is human!
Mine's pretty much all about emotions and pretty much all personal. I usually don't write about things immediately. Do you know the old dictum that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility? Can't remember who said it.
I guess a lot of poets write poems straight off, start at the beginning and write poetically through to the end, but there are other ways. I never really set out to write poetry, I was initially just taking notes - often taking them to figure out what I was interested in, to find subjects as much as develop them. Sometimes I found that I could then go through my notes, discard the crap and have something that looked like a poem. I'd recommend this fairly quick, freeform scribbling, not just for the surprising literary results it can give you, but also for the psychological effect, which seems to me inseparable. Stuff comes up you couldn't have expected, structure seems to appear unbidden and, rather as in dream analysis, problems begin to feel like they're being worked out without you quite knowing how.
First, I want to endorse the excellent suggestions made just before this by blp. To that I would add this: allow your subconscious to offer up a phrase. It needn't be a complete sentence, just some seemingly random words about your thinking or feeling at the moment. Trust those words. Attend to whatever rhythm or assertion they make and then follow to what seems to come up next. Stop when you seem to have run out of steam, then read over what you've written. Look for what seems extraneous or redundant... cut and if necessary add.
I'll gladly return the compliment by fully endorsing what Prince says and I'll expand just a little further again. If your unconscious doesn't seem willing to offer up a phrase, you may find it suprisingly responsive to warming-up exercises: word association and mind maps work well. If you're not sure what a mind map is, google it. The way I do them is to write something in the middle of the page I might want to investigate or think about ('otherness', 'hunger', 'longing', 'Louise' etc.), draw a circle around it, then write my associations with it around it, draw circles around them and extend outward with further associations, some of which may also be linked.
You can also spruce up your skills and further nudge the unconscious by playing around with some of the poetic forms in the poetry games and contests section. Simple, but clearly defined forms such as haiku and clerihew, will often force surprising results from you and give you a kind of playground in which to build your skills and confidence. I'm biased because I started it, but I'd also recommend just letting rip in the write a really bad poem thread. Over and over again in that thread, people discover just how difficult it is to be really bad - a confidence builder if ever there was one.
Without wishing to overwhelm you, you could also look into some of the generative processes used by groups such as the surrealists and the Oulipo. Not nearly as daunting as that might sound. A lot of these are very simple games, for instance a game in which two people write questions and answers without knowing what the other is doing, for instance these by Suzanne Muzard and Andre Breton:
What is a kiss?
A divagation, everything capsizes.
What is daylight?
A naked woman bathing at nightfall.
What is a bed?
A fan quickly opened. The sound of a bird's wing.
You might not want this sort of thing to be your actual work (I have no interest in being a surrealist at all), but it's another good way of oiling the gears.
I don't know how to make poems. I don't consider myself a poet and I don't particularly locate poetry in poems, nor am I the first to say it. Poetry -- as transport, invention or music -- is always an imponderable that can be found in any genre, a sudden widening of the World....a gift of nature, a grace, not a piece of labor. The very ambition to make a poem is enough to kill it.
-- Henri Michaux
That's an ace quote.
Want to know what I think about books? Check out https://biisbooks.wordpress.com/
What is an answer?
A question that has yet to be asked.
I know. Signature worthy really, except I don't fancy having such a long signature. Both that and the surrealist question game poems are courtesy of Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry (volume 1 of 2).
Hey that's cheating!
we create an anthology for Veva by posting one or more poems that she might benefit from? To begin, here are a couple of favourites of mine:
Danse Russe
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
If I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt around my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely...”
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
Wm Carlos Williams
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions.
Robert Hass, excerpt from "Privilege of Being," from Human Wishes
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