10 Top Tips for Writing Real Poetry

"Florentine Poet," 1861, by Alexandre Cabanel. Oil on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain

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?

I give tips on how to write real poetry in a free monthly newsletter, and I always encourage people to write it. So, let me give you my top 10 tips on how to get started.

1. Write a Lot

The first way to write great and real poetry is to write bad poetry!

"The Distressed Poet," 1733–1735, by William Hogarth. Oil on canvas. Birmingham Museums Trust, UK. Public Domain

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.

We have to crack a lot of oysters shells before we can find the precious pearls, just as we have to do a lot of swimming before we can enter the Olympics.

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.

Try emulating any one of them for six months or more. Pay attention to their style, techniques, themes, and choose one particular poem of theirs that resonates with you. What poem of yours is inspired by it? Show the connections.

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!

"The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry," 1845–1851, by Ford Madox Brown. Oil on canvas. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Public Domain

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.

In English literature scholar Derek Attridge’s definitive “The Rhythms of English Poetry,” he says, “the overriding preference poets have shown for duple meters [that is to say, either iambic or trochaic] can be understood as a preference for a rhythm that heightens a phenomenon already fundamental to the language but only imperfectly realised in normal speech, and thus not only makes possible the fullest use of natural English sentences in regular verse, but at the same time can create the illusion of a purified and perfected language.”

4. Find Your Strength

"Portrait of a Poet," late 18th–early 19th century, by Johann Valentin Sonnenschein. Terracotta. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain

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.

Understand the three elements of poetry “kung fu” and their relative importance. To win a fight (and write a powerful poem) consider courage first and foremost. Courage comes from the heart. That’s where the Muse resides. Avoid thinking that a poem can be written from the intellect. One writes “verse” with the intellect, but not great poetry.

The second is strength, which in poetry-speak means the themes and topics you address. The three big topics are: Death, Love, God provides a way into much else! The “size” of a topic clearly affects its significance.

The third is kung fu itself, or what we call forms and techniques. Some poets emphasize formal accomplishments: ‘Look, I can write a perfect sonnet!’ They take these as evidence of their achievement, but this is a mistake. That said, in truly great poetry all three elements are perfectly or near perfectly aligned. (For much more detail on this, see my article in The Epoch Times.)

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.

This diagram of poetry explains it in terms of the value of thoughts and the structure of the language.

My challenge to you now is to examine where you usually position your work. Ultimately, all true poets want to be in the Remarkable Thoughts/Highly Patterned Words quadrant, although they may experiment elsewhere in order to gain experience. What do you need to aspire to the highest levels?

6. Find Your Tribe

"Florentine Poet," 1861, by Alexandre Cabanel. Oil on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain

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.

Remember the despair of Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnet “Thou Art Indeed Just Lord” and its last line: “Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.” This quote reflects what the great American psychologist William James meant when he wrote: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving [my italics] to be appreciated.”

We need to find a tribe of people who appreciate what we try to do. Who are your Boosters and who are your Drainers? Be clear, and increase contact time with the former and reduce it—if not entirely eliminate it—with the latter.

7. Find Inspiration

"Calliope Teaches Music to the Young Orpheus," 1865, by Auguste Alexandre Hirsch. Oil on canvas. Museum of Art and Archeology of Périgord, France. Public Domain

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.

After her visit, we can barely say, “I wrote that.” What we might say is: The Spirit/the Muse directed me to write that! The greatest example in lyric form of this invocation is Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: The whole poem is great but the last four lines are sublime:

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

"Lady Reading Poetry," 906, by Ishibashi Kazunori. Shimane Art Museum, Matsue, Japan. Public Domain

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.

Find some great contemporaries, too. A good place to find them is at The Society of Classical Poets. Read them, identify the best, and determine why you think so. What can you learn from them? What can you use? Remember T.S. Eliot’s comment that the great poets steal from other poets!

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.

I have loads of notebooks, and more importantly, I always keep one by my bedside, since if I wake up with an idea, or from a dream, it is essential to get it down before it fades. Dream time is the really important liminal experience.

10. Aim for Beauty

"Epic Poetry" from "The Four Poems" series, circa 1741, by Claude Augustin Duflos le Jeune after François Boucher. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain

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.

I look forward to reading your epic poem in due course. Get writing.

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