The British poet Wendy Cope once said, “the reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet’s wife can’t understand it.” A funny comment, but it deflects attention from the real reason that few people now read poetry: It’s perceived as difficult and usually irrelevant—except on special occasions like weddings, funerals or Presidential inaugurations.
It has one other fatal handicap: It’s is simply not beautiful anymore. It’s not beautiful, like Robert Frost’s or Emily Dickinson’s are. It tends to lack form, which means no meter, usually no rhyme, or other rhetorical devices that might charge the verse. Most contemporary poetry is flat, so why bother reading it?
Arguably, real poetry is always worth reading. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying writing it is easy: I’ve been working on the project for nearly 60 years, and like being in love, it is a process and never completed. But, if we don’t start somewhere, how will we ever get going?
1. Write a Lot
The first way to write great and real poetry is to write bad poetry!
Don’t be parsimonious; write lots of it. Stop thinking that because you’ve written it, it must be good! Stop wanting to be seen as “the poet” and stop taking yourself far too seriously. As Lucille Clifton said, “People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.” Just write stuff without thinking about an audience or an audience’s approval.
2. Find Role Models
Identify three poets that you like. Perhaps their personality or life style appeals to you or their achievements in the face of adversity. Of course, you must also admire their poetry.
3. Master Iambic Meter
According to Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro in their “The Prosody” handbook, 90 percent of great English poetry is written in iambic meter. This isn’t a surprise because when the unborn child first hears its mother’s heartbeat, the rhythm is iambic: di-DUM, di-DUM. To reach the deepest emotional levels in English, this pattern is paramount; it’s where life kicks in!
Iambic meter forms naturally in language’s structure: An article plus a noun (e.g. the book), a pronoun plus a verb (e.g. I write), a preposition plus a noun (e.g. at home). So, practice, practice, practice writing iambically until you become fluent.
4. Find Your Strength
Determine the form you should avoid: that is, a form that simply doesn’t work for you. You can waste a lot of time writing in a form you’ll never be great at. To use an analogy, most swimmers have a weak stroke—maybe the butterfly or back stroke. After recognizing your weakness, ask yourself why it doesn’t work for you; what is your exact problem with it?
By recognizing and eliminating your weaknesses, you can identify your strengths. I like to avoid writing haikus and sestinas! The former is too loose for my liking and the latter too constricting.
5. Aspire Higher
Consider where your own poetry fits into this 4-quadrant complex: Do you have remarkable original, striking, or unique thoughts and ideas or not? Do you use highly patterned language—usually meaning forms—or not? If not, you likely are writing prose. Three of the four quadrants can/may produce poetry. See the figure below to identify the type of poetry that results.
6. Find Your Tribe
Avoid negative people. If you must be around them, don’t disclose your ideas, activities and goals. This is especially important when, as is often the case, the negative people can’t be avoided, like family members or friends who may not share your passions.
7. Find Inspiration
Invoke the Muse! Always! Be clear that there is a distinction between writing verse, fine verse perhaps, and writing poetry. Writing verse is like limbering up, warming up, practicing for a race; but it isn’t the race itself.
We all need to limber up—write verse—to see what’s possible. We often use our heads to write verse. But poetry comes from the heart, the seat of the soul, from some deeper, spiritual place within us. We have to give ourselves over to find that place. So, we hypnotize ourselves and the Muse comes.
Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Ask yourself this question, then: What conditions—space, ritual, sound, visuals, foods, smells and so on—best induce the right and receptive frame of mind for you? Intensify those conditions to enable the Muse. One word of warning: Avoid Coleridge’s opium and Dylan Thomas’s alcohol as necessary conditions.8. Read, Read, Read
Perhaps obvious, but I feel it’s necessary to state: Read the best in the field of poetry that you feel drawn to write. Keep in mind that the average American reads about five books a year! I suggest reading a lot more than this. I read about 100 books a year; this keeps me fresh.
Please don’t just reread your own poems; that’s not a way to learn the craft. Find some great poets: Milton, Hopkins, and Yeats are three of my favorites. Find yours and imitate them.
9. Collect Ideas
Keep a notebook for ideas, annotate books, and collect quotations. Your mind, your study, your computer, and your library should be a cornucopia overflowing with materials that you can mine deeply at any time for poetic deployment.10. Aim for Beauty
Poetry should be and is beautiful, but much of what passes for poetry today is the opposite: It’s ugly, victim-laden, or mere political posturing. Worst of all, it’s just chopped-up prose.
“The true poet is ultimately dedicated to beauty,” English author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton said. This succinctly sums up what Keats said: “The excellence of every Art is its intensity, making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.” Go for beauty, whatever topic you are writing about.
