writing poetry

[blp]

A quote from Yeats that seems pertinent:

We sat together at summer's end,
That beautiful, mild woman, your close friend,
and you and I and talked of poetry.
You said, a line may take us hours,
But if it does not seem a moment's thought
Then all our stitching and unstitching
Has been for naught.

[Veva]

we create an anthology for Veva by posting one or more poems that she might benefit from? [/INDENT][/B]

great idea....that would really help me.... please feel free

[blp]

Also, you asked for literature that would help. It's not specifically about poetry and, in fact, may seem rather unpoetic, but for any starting writer who doesn't already know it, I'd strongly recommend Strunk and White's little classic The Elements of Style.

[blp]

'I want to learn, to teach myself, to teach everyone that we must turn back against the enemy that weapon with which he attacks us: LANGUAGE.'

- Jean Luc Godard

[blp]

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

- Frank O'Hara

[PrinceMyshkin]

The Jewel

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

Jas. Wright

[blp]

Funny, I was thinking about the only actual book on poetry I've ever read, Joseph Conte's Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. It's written very clearly and I really loved it, more than I could have imagined, but still, I thought it might be a little abstruse to recommend here. As it happened, when I searched for that O'Hara poem, the page I found seemed actually to have been put up by Conte as it had a link to his homepage. Well well.

[PrinceMyshkin]

A quote from Yeats that seems pertinent:

We sat together at summer's end,
That beautiful, mild lady, your close friend,
and you and I and talked of poetry.
You said, a line may take us hours,
But if it does not seem a moment's thought
Then all our stitching and unstitching
Has been for naught.

How freaking lovely! It seems from this that I might benefit from this thread along with Veva!

[PrinceMyshkin]

Funny, I was thinking about the only actual book on poetry I've ever read, Joseph Conte's Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. It's written very clearly and I really loved it, more than I could have imagined, but still, I thought it might be a little abstruse to recommend here. As it happened, when I searched for that O'Hara poem, the page I found seemed actually to have been put up by Conte as it had a link to his homepage. Well well.

I haven’t read the Conte book nor any other “how to” book (if I can say that without meaning to sneer at it) on the writing of poetry so it is from candid ignorance that I speak of my deep antipathy to such things. For me the act of writing poetry is the very revolutionary one of trying to find or forge one’s own voice, for which one needs to get in touch with one’s least indoctrinated self. To have someone guide me towards that would be, I think, like reading a manual on how to be my unique self.

[blp]

I haven’t read the Conte book nor any other “how to” book (if I can say that without meaning to sneer at it) on the writing of poetry so it is from candid ignorance that I speak of my deep antipathy to such things. For me the act of writing poetry is the very revolutionary one of trying to find or forge one’s own voice, for which one needs to get in touch with one’s least indoctrinated self. To have someone guide me towards that would be, I think, like reading a manual on how to be my unique self.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not a how to book, it's a book of lit crit focusing on US poets who, in one way or another, follow in the traditions of Williams, Stevens and Pound: Objectivists (Zukovsky, Neidecker, Oppen), Black Mountain, New York School and the Language Poets and it's lovely in a way that I find hard to explain, very clearly and lucidly written without theory jargon and full of superb examples of the work itself, usually reprinted complete.

That said, I understand your skepticism about how-to books, but aren't we ourselves sort of trying to put together a set of guidelines here in discussing ways of approaching poetry? I've been gradually discarding my skepticism about this kind of thing over the years. Your skepticism echoes that of the friend Veva referred to at the start of this thread and I've been meaning to talk about that friend's view, so I will.

I can understand it. Any poetic ability can feel like a rather fragile gift. The Michaux quote again: 'The very ambition to make a poem is enough to kill it'. If you've already got the ability, if it's happening, why screw things up by trying to improve or 'learn your craft' or some such? Especially if, as Michaux says, it's not an act of labor.

But the ability any human has already comes out of something learned - grammar, spelling, punctuation and an almost implausibly vast vocabulary. If you or your betters had taken the attitude when you were a child that you should remain pure and untutored so as not to lose your childish spontaneity, you wouldn't be able to write a damn thing today. Learning those things gave you freedom of expression; they didn't restrict you. (Here in England, there does seem to have been an idea during the hippyish seventies that learning grammar formally was somehow oppressive and it's created a generation of otherwise intelligent people who don't know what nouns and verbs are and, struggling to find the right preposition, often end up just guessing. 'That's disrespectful on me.' they'll say. The point is not that they have a different and equally valid way of saying the thing they want to say, but that they don't really have a way at all. You can hear the discomfort and uncertainty in their voices.)

I went to art school, where, sadly, I learned almost nothing, but one thing that I was forced to get over early on was a tendency to fuss over the details. Almost everyone showed up wanting to draw and paint by sort of getting one bit right, then moving on. In life drawing classes, we were forced to do fast fast drawings: five minutes, one minute, half a minute. It felt very wrong at first and it annoyed us, but very quickly we came to see that we were better off being able to create a generalised whole, fill the page, then carve into it and that we could produce far better results than before, much closer to what we wanted all along.

I think the key thing is, there probably are how-to books that are bad and limiting, but a good one would expand one's possibilities and thereby give one greater freedom, not less. I learned about mind maps and other methods of accessing the unconscious from advertising people. They have to have quick ways of generating ideas and phrases or they don't have jobs. I remember watching this guy do a mindmap with 'toothpaste' in the middle and thinking how much better it would be to put 'otherness' in. I was doing this with a friend from art school days and we both really couldn't believe our tutors hadn't taught us stuff like this. Learning bugger-all at art school hadn't left us freer it had left us paralysed. My friend's an art teacher now and uses this stuff with his students all the time.

More recently, I've been writing a film script and it got to the point where it was almost painful to try to work on it, the thing seemed to make so little sense and have so many stupid holes in the plot. Eventually, swallowing gargantuan amounts of pride, I went and bought Robert McKee's screenwriting manual Story and very quickly realised I'd been writing with one hand tied behind my back. Effectively, I was making the old mistake I'd learned to avoid in drawing all over again, trying to get each detail right before moving on, all without any clear overall sense of the landscape I was moving around in or where I was going. Following McKee's prescription, I shelved dialogue writing and wrote about fifty pages of notes in which I answered every single one of my questions about what, who, where and when I was writing about. When I went back to scenes and dialogue, I didn't even have to refer to these, but I knew what I was doing and was able to plough through with a fluency and ease that actually made it easier to add unconventional creative touches. McKee's a good example because he's frequently caricatured as a prescriber of formulae for commercial success, turning scriptwriting into a deadening sort of form-filling exercise: three act structure, reversal here, twist here, denouement here etc. If this was in the book, it seems to have passed me by. All I got was a way of being better and more myself.

My main response to Veva's friend would be, sure, maybe you don't need to learn anything else, but if you're into poetry, why wouldn't you want to talk about how it works, learn about other approaches etc.? And I think that's what we're doing here. Still, I agree that, in the end, there's no substitute for reading great work. I read a nice thing years ago about a literature teacher who never did anything except read aloud to his student. He'd walk into the classroom with a bag of books and just read. The author of the piece said he never learned more about literature than in those classes.

[PrinceMyshkin]

A mild dissent, blp, to your very lucid exposition. A script would need to be structured, wouldn't it - and so you might argues does poetry need that too but with poetry I think there needs to be anarchy first and then - just as there are patterns within chaos - the structure might be elicited.

[blp]

Yes, anarchy first. I'm basically for that. But don't you think that's sort of what a lot of young artist's and poet's need to learn? To open things up before they narrow them down?

[PrinceMyshkin]

Yes, anarchy first. I'm basically for that. But don't you think that's sort of what a lot of young artist's and poet's need to learn? To open things up before they narrow them down?

Maybe the hardest thing for them to do is to learn to love the 2nd & 3rd etc. draft process, to throw yourself down a flight of stairs and trust you'll be able to fix yourself up afterwards.

[Veva]

Honestly, I believe you are both right.. but I realized a few hours ago that my poetry is lacking in something vital - experience. I feel that my works, both poems and short stories have some sort of juvenile veil around them... (FYI I am only 18)
Can age limit you in any way? Have you ever felt limited?

[TheFifthElement]

(Here in England, there does seem to have been an idea during the hippyish seventies that learning grammar formally was somehow oppressive and it's created a generation of otherwise intelligent people who don't know what nouns and verbs are and, struggling to find the right preposition, often end up just guessing. 'That's disrespectful on me.' they'll say. The point is not that they have a different and equally valid way of saying the thing they want to say, but that they don't really have a way at all. You can hear the discomfort and uncertainty in their voices.)

I am a child of that generation, which explains, now, why I remember nothing about learning grammar at school and why I struggle now with punctuation! It feels like a handicap. Fortunately education begins when school ends.

All sound advice blp.

Honestly, I believe you are both right.. but I realized a few hours ago that my poetry is lacking in something vital - experience. I feel that my works, both poems and short stories have some sort of juvenile veil around them... (FYI I am only 18)
Can age limit you in any way? Have you ever felt limited?

Veva, I don't thin age limits you. Have a read of some of Bakiryu's poetry - she's younger than you. You just need to open yourself up to experience, really see what's going on around you, listen, taste, touch, smell. Don't just scratch the surface but dive right into things. Examine them. Let yourself absorb things and then turn it out in your own language, with your own vision and your own interpretation. Listen to your voice and express it, and don't be afraid of 'getting it wrong', there are only opinions. It is your voice, only you can really make the best of it.