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How to Write Poetry

Do you want to learn how to write poetry or how to improve as a poet? Would you like step-by-step advice on how to get poetry ideas and turn them into poems? You're in the right place! Find answers to these questions: "What should I write poems about?" "How should I decide the right form for my poem?" "What are common poetry problems that affect the work of new poets, and how can I avoid them?" "People say it's not the size that matters, but what you do with it -- how does this relate to poetry?"

A Definition of Poetry
Here, you'll find a definition of poetry based on some of its important characteristics. This is just one of many pages on this website about poetry techniques, types of poetry, and how to write poems. At the bottom of this page, you'll find links to related topics.

What is poetry? The question "What is poetry" used to be easier to answer. If it rhymed and had a regular meter (a type of rhythm), it probably was a poem. As they say, "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck. These days, not all poems rhyme or fit into standard forms. And if you look for a response to the question, "What is poetry?" you'll find lots of musings about how extremely important and meaningful poetry is, how it's the true essence of our world, the oxygen that keeps us alive, etc. Some of this is interesting, but most of it isn't very helpful if what you're looking for is an actual explanation. One reason why it's so hard to get a straight answer on the subject is that people disagree about what should and shouldn't be considered poetry.

But here are some general differences between poetry and prose (prose is writing that's not poetry), that you can use as a practical definition of poetry.

Definition of poetry - line structure: The easiest way to recognize poetry is that it usually looks like poetry (remember what they say about ducks). While prose is organized with sentences and paragraphs, poetry is normally organized into lines. Here's part of a poem by Robert Herrick (15911674). See how it looks like poetry?

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he 's a-getting, The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he 's to setting. Now here's the same part of the poem, organized in a paragraph as if it were prose.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: and this same flower that smiles to-day tomorrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, the higher he 's a-getting, the sooner will his race be run, and nearer he 's to setting.

If you print a page in prose, the ends of the lines depend on where the margin is. With a bigger font size or a bigger margin, the lines are shorter. But in poetry, the poet decides where the lines end. This choice is an essential part of how we hear and see a poem. It affects how fast or slowly we read, and where we pause when we're reading. It causes certain words to stand out more or less. It affects the way the poem looks to us on the page; for example, is there a lot of white space, giving us a feeling of lightness and air, or are the words packed solidly together? Read more about poetic lines here.

Definition of poetry - importance of physical aspects of language: Poetry, more than prose, communicates through the way the words sound and way the poem looks on the page. Think of how music can make us feel things - angry, irritable, peaceful, sad, triumphant. Poems work in the same way, but instead of sound and rhythm created by instruments, they use the sound and rhythm of words. In songs with good lyrics, the melody combines with the words to create an intense feeling. Similarly, in poetry, thesound of the words works together with their meaning for more emotional impact.

The look of the poem on the page adds still another dimension. Some poems have smooth shapes, some have delicate shapes, some have heavy, dense shapes. The breaks in the lines lead our eyes to certain areas. There are even poems with shapes that intentionally imitate what the poem is about, for example, a poem about a waterfall could have lines that trickle down the page.

Definition of Poetry - concentrated language: The words in poems are doing several jobs at the same time. They do one thing with their meaning, and another thing with their sound. Even their meaning may be working on more than one level. An important characteristic of poetry is compression, or concentrated language. I don't mean "concentrated" in the sense of paying close attention. I mean it in the sense of concentrated laundry detergent, or concentrated orange juice. A half-cup of concentrated laundry detergent does the same work as a cup of regular detergent; a poem typically gets across as much meaning as a larger amount of prose. Concentrated orange juice has the water taken out; a good poem has similarly been intensified by removing the non-essential words. This is one reason why poems are often short.

Definition of poetry - emotional or irrational connection: Prose normally talks to the logical part of the reader's mind. It explains and describes things; it makes sense. Poetry does all this too, but it also tends to work at an emotional or irrational level at the same time. Often, some part of a poem seems to speak directly to the readers' emotions. It gives readers a peaceful feeling or an eerie feeling, goosebumps, or it makes them want to cry, even though they may not be sure why they are reacting this way. One way that poems do this is through the use of sound. Poems also tend to suggest things beyond what they actually say; often what causes the strongest emotions is not what the poem describes, but what it make the reader imagine. Some parts of poems come like dreams from deep places in the mind that even the poet may not understand, and they touch something similarly deep in the reader.

A few quotes on the definition of poetry Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." Here, Shelley points out an important aspect of poetry, which is to find fresh ways of looking at things we think we know well." Sir Philip Sidney: "Poetry is a speaking picture..." This idea emphasizes the physical aspect of a poem, that it's a piece of artwork made out of words. Adrienne Rich: "Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe...." She means "concentrated" in the sense of concentrated laundry detergent. Language, she says, is our way of relating to the universe. So by strengthening language, poetry strengthens our relationship with the universe.

Jean Cocteau: "Poetry is indispensible - if I only knew what for."

Poem Structure - Lines and Stanzas

This page is an introduction to poem structure and poetry techniques. Whats the best way to divide your poetry into lines? (Hint: "at random" is not the right answer!) Learn more below. This is just one of many pages on this website about how to write poetry. At the bottom of the page, you'll find links to related poetry topics.

Poem structure - the line is a building block The basic building-block of prose (writing that isn't poetry) is the sentence. But poetry has something else -- the poetic line. Poets decide how long each line is going to be and where it will break off. That's why poetry often has a shape like this: Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying.

That's the beginning of a poem by Robert Herrick. No matter where it is printed, the first line always ends with the word "may" and the second line with the word "a-flying" because the poet has written it this way. If you print a piece of prose such as a short story, the length of the lines will depend on the font size, the paper size, margins, etc. But in poetry, the line is part of the work of art you have created. The length of the lines and the line breaks are important choices that will affect many aspects of the reader's experience: The sound of the poem - When people read your poem out loud, or in their heads, they will pause slightly at the end of each line. The speed of reading - Shortening or lengthening the lines can speed up or slow down the way people read. How the poem looks on the page - Does the poem look light, delicate, with a lot of white space around the lines? Or are the lines packed solidly together? Emphasis - Words at the end of a line seem more important than words in the middle.

Poem structure - types of lines

If you are writing a poem in a standard form such as a sonnet, your choices about line length are somewhat restricted by the rules of the form. But you still have to decide how to fit the ideas and sentences of your poem over the lines. When you fit natural stopping points in a sentence to the end of your line, the reader takes a little pause. When a sentence or phrase continues from one line to the next, the reader feels pulled along. If your line break interrupts a sentence or idea in a surprising place, the effect can be startling, suspenseful, or can highlight a certain phrase or double-meaning.

Lines that finish at ends of sentences or at natural stopping points (for example, at a comma) are called end-stopped lines. Here's an example:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying:

Lines that in the middle of the natural flow of a sentence are called run-on or enjambed lines. Here's an example:

But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former. Here, Herrick interrupts the phrase "worst times" with a line break between "worst" and "times," focusing extra attention on the word "worst."

If you are writing in free verse, you have even more decisions to make than a poet writing in a traditional form. You can decide to use short lines or long lines, or to vary the length. You can decide to stack your lines evenly along the left margin, or to use a looser or more graphical form. Some poets even write poems that are in the shape of the thing they are writing about, for example, a circular poem about the moon. You have many options, but these choices should never be made randomly.

Poem structure - stanzas In prose, ideas are usually grouped together in paragraphs. In poems, lines are often grouped together into what are called stanzas. Like paragraphs, stanzas are often used to organize ideas.

For example, here are the two final stanzas of the Robert Herrick's poem. In the first of these stanzas, he is explaining that being young is great, but life just gets worse and worse as you get older. In the second one, he is saying: "So get married before you're too old and have lost your chance."

That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former. Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry: For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry. For a more detailed explanation of poem structure, I recommend the book Writing Poems by Boisseau, Wallace, and Mann. (This page makes use of some ideas from the book's third edition, by Robert Wallace, HarperCollins 1991.)

Poem structure - decisions about form So many decisions to make -- line length, line breaks, arrangement, speed, rhythm. How should you choose? The right form for your poem depends on, and works with, the poem's content, or what it's about. If the poem is about flying, you probably don't want lines that feel slow and heavy. If you're writing a sad poem, short bouncy lines might not be the way to go.

You may feel overwhelmed by so many issues to think about. How can your inspiration flow freely if you have to keep track of all of these aspects of a poem? The answer is to do the work in two stages. 1. First, let your ideas flow. 2. Then, go back to the poem later and work on improving the poem structure and form. In the second stage, it's a good idea to experiment a lot. Try breaking the lines and different ways and compare the effects. Try changing the order of things. Try reorganizing things to move different words to the end of the lines so that the reader's attention goes to them. You've got nothing to lose -- you can always go back to an earlier version.

As you go through this process, ask yourself:

What is my poem about? What feeling or mood do I want the reader to have? Do I want the poem to move quickly or slowly? Are there places I want it to speed up or slow down? What words or phrases do I want to highlight? There are a lot of things to consider. But the more poetry you write -- and read, the more natural and instinctive some of these decisions about poem structure will become to you.

Poetry Meter
This page explains what poetry meter is... and why you should care. This is just one of many pages on the CWN website about poetry techniques and how to write poetry. At the bottom of the page, you'll find links to related topics such as poem structure and rhyme schemes. Poetry meter - so what? Meter is a way of measuring a line of poetry based on the rhythm of the words. But why should you care? As a reader, knowing about meter helps you understand how a poem is put together. You can see what rules the poet was following and how he or she used or went outside those rules. This lets you guess what was going through the poet's mind. If you want to write poetry, knowing about meter will make you a better poet. First, it helps you understand what poets have done in the past, so that you can learn from them. It allows you to use traditional forms such as sonnets. Even if you prefer to write in free verse, you should learn about traditional forms. Being aware of traditions gives you more flexibility to use aspects of them when you want to, or to "break the rules" in a more interesting way. Poetry meter - stressed syllables and the iambic foot Meter measures lines of poetry based on stressed and unstressed syllables. I'll explain. When we speak, we put the stress on a certain part of each word. For example, take the words "apple" and "fantastic." When we say the word "apple," we stress the first syllable, the "ap" part. We say "AP-ple," how not "apPLE." When we say the word "fantastic," we stress the second syllable. We say, "fan-TAS-tic," not "FAN-tastic" or "fan-tas-TIC." In poetry, a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables is called a foot. For example, look at this line from Shakespeare: "No longer mourn for me when I am dead." The rhythm is, "bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH. We read it like this: "no LON-ger MOURN for ME when I am DEAD." The type of foot Shakespeare used here is called an iamb. An iamb or an iambic foot has the rhythm bah-BAH. An unstressed syllable, then a stressed one. The iamb is the most common kind of foot in English poetry. Here are three examples of words that have an iambic rhythm (bah-BAH).

above (we say, "a-BOVE") support (we say, "sup-PORT") hurray (we say, "hur-RAY"). Here's a sentence written in iambic meter: "His noisy snoring woke the neighbors' dog." Bah-BAH bahBAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH.

Poetry meter - other types of foot: The trochee or trochaic foot. This is the opposite of an iamb -- the rhythm is BAH-bah, like the words "apple," and "father." The anapest or anapestic foot. This sounds like bah-bah-BAH, like the words "underneath" and "seventeen." The dactyl or dactylic foot. This is the opposite of an anapest -- the rhythm is BAH-bah-bah," like the the words "elephant" and "stepmother." Poetry meter - counting the feet When we think about the meter of poem, in addition to looking at the kind of foot, we count the number of feet in each line. If there's one foot per line, it's monometer. Poetry written in monometer is very rare. If there are are two feet per line, it's called dimeter. Here's a sentence in trochaic dimeter: "Eat your dinner." BAH-bah (1) BAH-bah (2). Three feet per line = trimeter. Here's a sentence in iambic trimeter: "I eat the bread and cheese." BahBAH (1) bah-BAH (2) bah-BAH (3). Four feet per line = tetrameter. Here's a sentence in trochaic tetrameter: "Father ordered extra pizza." BAH-bah (1) BAh-bah (2) BAH-bah (3) BAh-bah (4). Five feet per line = pentameter. Here's a sentence in iambic pentameter: "I'll toast the bread and melt a piece of cheese." Bah-BAH (1) bah-BAH (2) bah-BAH (3) bah-BAH (4) bah-BAH (5). Six feet per line = hexameter or Alexandrine. A sentence in iambic hexameter: "I'll toast the bread and melt a piece of cheese, okay?" Bah-BAH (1) bah-BAH (2) bah-BAH (3) bah-BAH (4) bah-BAH (5) bahBAH (6). Seven feet per line = heptameter. You get the idea... Poetry meter - meter and rhythm When you read metered poetry, such as a sonnet in iambic pentameter, you may notice that the meter is sometimes sounds uneven or is hard to hear. Meter is just a form of measurement. The real rhythm of a poem is more complicated than that:

None of us talk like robots. We give certain words and sounds more emphasis than others in a sentence, depending on a number of factors including the meaning of the words and our own personal speaking style. So not all of the stressed syllables have the same amount of stress, etc. We pause at the ends of ideas or the ends of sentences, even if these occur partway through a poetic line. So this creates a rhythmically variation. When the sentence ends or has a natural pause in the middle of a line of poetry, that's called a caesura. Poets vary meter or make exceptions in order to create desired rhythmic effects. All of these elements combine to give each poem a unique music.

Rhyme Schemes
This page is an introduction to rhyme schemes. Do you know the pattern of a limerick, a sonnet? How to write a poem with special sound effects? More below! This is just one of many pages on this website about poetry techniques. At the bottom, you'll find links to more pages about how to write poetry. Rhyme schemes and sound effects Rhyme is an important tool in the poet's toolbox. Traditional poetry forms such as sonnets often use rhyme in specific patterns. But even if you are writing free verse, you can use rhyme to when it helps you create desired effects.

Rhyme schemes - why rhyme There are many reasons why you might choose to use rhyme: To give pleasure. Rhyme, done well, is pleasing to the ear. It adds a musical element to the poem, and creates a feeling of "rightness," of pieces fitting together. It also makes a poem easier to memorize, since the rhyme echoes in the reader's mind afterward, like a melody. To deepen meaning. Rhyming two or more words draws attention to them and connects them in the reader's mind. To strengthen form. In many traditional forms, a regular pattern of rhymes are at the ends of the lines. This means that even if the poem is being read out loud, listeners can easily hear where the lines end, can hear the shape of the poem. Rhyme schemes - internal rhymes and end rhymes When the last word in a line of poetry rhymes with the last word in another line, this is called an end rhyme. Many traditional poetry forms use end rhymes. When words in the middle of a line of poetry rhyme with each other, this is called aninternal rhyme. Below is part of a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Can you find the internal rhymes and end rhymes?

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea. In this example, "blew"-"flew," and "first"-"burst" are internal rhymes. "Free" and "sea" are end rhymes.

Rhyme schemes - true rhymes and off-rhymes "Smart" and "art"; "fellow" and "yellow"; "surgery" and perjury" -- these are all examples of true rhymes, or exact rhymes because the final vowel and consonant sounds (or the final syllables in the longer words) are exact matches to the ear. "Fate" and "saint"; "work" and "spark"; are examples of off-rhymes, or slant-rhymes. In each case, part of the sound matches exactly, but part of it doesn't. Off-rhymes useassonance and consonance: Assonance is a similarity between vowel sounds (the sounds made by your breath, written with the letters a,e,i,o,u,and sometimes y) "Sing,"lean", and "beet" are an example of assonance because they all have a similar "e" sound. Another example is "boat,"bone", and "mole," which all have a similiar "o" sound. Consonance is a similarity between consonant sounds (consonants are the letters that you pronounce with your lips or tongue, not with your breath: b,c,d,f,g,h,j,k,l,m,n,p,q,r,s,t,v,w,x,z and sometimes y). "Lake,"book", and "back" are an example of consonance because they all have the same "K" sounds, even though the vowel sounds in these words are different. When the same consonants are used at the beginning of the word (for example, the words "sing" and "sell"), that is called alliteration. You might choose to use off-rhymes instead of true rhymes, or in addition to them, to create a subtler effect.

Using off-rhymes also gives you more choices of words to rhyme. This often makes it possible to create more original or surprising rhymes. How many pop songs can you think of that rhyme "heart" with "apart?" And when you hear the words "heaven above" in a song, you can bet that the word "love" is lurking nearby. There are only a few words that rhyme with "love," so they are used over and over again. Offrhymes can help to remove some of that predictability so that you can come up with more interesting rhyme.

Rhyme schemes The pattern of rhymes in a poem is written with the letters a, b, c, d, etc. The first set of lines that rhyme at the end are marked with a. The second set are marked with b. So, in a poem with the rhyme scheme abab, the first line rhymes with the third line, and the second line rhymes with the fourth line. In a poem

with the rhyme scheme abcb, the second line rhymes with the fourth line, but the first and third lines don't rhyme with each other. Here's an example of an abab rhyme scheme from a poem by Robert Herrick:

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying. Here's an example of an abcb rhyme scheme.

The itsy bitsy spider (a) Went up the water spout (b) Down came the rain (c) And washed the spider out (b) This one's aabccb:

Little Miss Muffet Sat on a tuffet Eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider And sat down beside her And frightened Miss Muffett away. Here's a sonnet by Shakespeare. The rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; (a) Coral is far more red than her lips' red; (b) If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;(a) If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.(b) I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,(c) But no such roses see I in her cheeks;(d) And in some perfumes is there more delight(c) Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.(d)

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know (e) That music hath a far more pleasing sound; (f) I grant I never saw a goddess go; (e) My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: (f) And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare (g) As any she belied with false compare. (g) Can you figure out the rhyme scheme in this limerick by Edward Lear (1812-1888)? (Answer below):

There was an old man of the coast Who placidly sat on a post But when it was cold He relinquished his hold And called for some hot buttered toast.

How to Write a Poem - Poetry Techniques 1

Here are some tips that can help you write better poetry. How to write a poem - what to write about? The first step in any poem is coming up with something to write about. Don't feel that you have to choose profound or "poetic" material. Anything can be the subject for a poem. Great poems have been written about such topics as a gas station (Elizabeth Bishop,"The Filling Station"), a clothesline full of laundry (Richard Wilbur, "Love Calls Us to the Things of the World"), and pieces of broken glass on the beach ("Amy Clampitt, "Beach Glass").

It's easiest to write a good poem about something you know well, that you have experienced first-hand, or that you have nearby so that you can observe it carefully. This is because what makes the poem profound and interesting will be the hidden details or qualities you discover, or what the subject reminds you of, your unique perspective. With poems, as with other things (or so I hear), it's not the size that matters, it's what you do with it.

If you're stuck for inspiration, check out the CWN poetry prompts for lots of poetry ideas.

How to write a poem - getting outside yourself

In his book Poetry in the Making, the poet Ted Hughes talks about how to write a poem about an animal. The key, he says, is to concentrate hard enough on the animal, to choose the words that best capture the animal you have in your mind. You can use this approach with any subject matter. In the beginning, you don't have to worry about "style," about writing in a "beautiful" or a "poetic" way. In fact, if you start to think about "being poetic," it can distract you from what you're actually writing about and hurt your poem. Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone who was trying to impress you? Then you know how boring this can be. The person is really thinking about himself or herself, not about the conversation. Similarly, if your attention is focused on "being poetic," if you are worrying about what impression your poem will make, then that takes your attention away from the animal or weather or whatever the subject of your poem is.

Even if the poem's about you or your life, try to take the perspective of a careful reporter when you write it down. You should focus on accurately communicating an aspect of your experience, instead of focusing on what impression you are making when you do it.

How to write a poem - expressing your insights So far, I've talked about paying careful attention to your subject matter. But paying attention is obviously not enough - you also have to communicate your insights to the reader. Here are some tips that will help: 1. Don't state the obvious. Everyone knows that grass is green, and that snow is cold. If you mention grass, readers will suppose it is green unless you inform them otherwise. It's not necessary to mention the color of the grass unless you have something to say about it that the reader doesn't already know. 2. But don't force originality. If the grass is actually green, you don't have rack your brain for another way to express the color just to be "different." Keep looking, focus on your subject matter, to find the real details that make it unique, the hidden meaning. 3. Choose the right words. I'm not talking about words that are "poetic" or "impressive," I'm talking about words that express your subject matter. In his essay about animal poems, Hughes talks about words as if they themselves were living animals, each with a certain appearance and sound and way of moving. Think of the words "glow" and "glitter." Both describe light, but different kinds of light. When I see the word "glow," I think of a gentle warm light coming from inside of something. When I see the word "glitter," I think of many tiny pieces of light reflecting off of a hard surface. The word "glitter" gives me more of an idea of motion. The sounds of the words also create different feelings. "Glow" has a soft, round sound; "Glitter" has a hard sound and is broken into two parts, like light that is fragmented or moving.

How to Write a Poem - Poetry Techniques 2

This is Part 2 of the CWN series on how to write a poem. Poetry techniques - expressing the invisible In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how to choose something to write about, and how to start turning your subject into the poem. The poetry techniques I've recommended all have to do with careful observation of your subject matter. But what if you're not writing about a person, place, animal, plant, or thing, but about a feeling or an abstract concept such as Love or Death? How can you observe and describe something that can't actually be seen or heard? Here are some suggestions:

1) Think of like looking at the wind through a window. You can't see the wind, right? The wind is invisible. But at the same time, you can see the wind because of its impact on the things that are visible. You see the leaves flapping. You see the surface of a puddle ripple. You see a girl hunched inside her coat, her hair blowing into her face. You see someone try to light a cigarette and the match go out. Abstractions like Love and Death don't look, sound, or smell like anything. But they affect everything around them. And you can describe the places they've touched.

2) Make it specific. Instead of Love, for example, write about "the love between my parents." Then try making it even more specific: "the love between my parents and the silent ways it shows itself when they are eating dinner together." Try relating it to a certain person, place, event. Love, Death, Anger, Beauty -these concepts do not occur in a vacuum. They are not grown in test tubes. They are experienced by individual people, in particular situations. And our deepest understanding of these concepts is at the human level, through the ways they touch us personally and the people around us. Creating this human connection will give your poem a stronger emotional power for your reader. And it puts your idea in a form where you can observe it carefully and discover aspects of it that have never been described before.

Poetry techniques - meaning and form I've talked about different kinds of poem content. But what about form?

For very experienced poets, formal aspects of poetry can become second nature, so that they sometimes know right away what form they want to use for a poem. This is probably not your situation. My suggestion is to focus first on your subject and get all your ideas down on paper. Then, once you've written down your ideas, start experimenting with the shape. You can read about poem structure here. Try organizing your poem in different ways and see what happens. Try shorter lines and longer ones; try breaking the lines in various places and observe the effects.

The best form for your poem will depend on what it's about and the mood and feelings you want to create in the reader. The length of the line can make the reader go faster or slower, change the look of the poem on the page, focus attention on certain words. You may decide to incorporate other structural elements such as a certain number of syllables per line, a regular meter, or a rhyme scheme. All of this should work with, and contribute to, the poem's meaning.

Write different versions, then look them over and compare. How do they look on the page? Dense and heavy, or light and delicate? How well does their appearance fit your poem? What about the sound? Try reading them out loud. What is the rhythm like, for example, short and choppy, bouncy, smooth? Are there places where your eye or voice pauses? Are these the right places? Which versions are most interesting to read? Are there any places where the look or sound becomes distracting (for example, if you have one very long line that sticks out too much)?

Poetry techniques - writing and rewriting Behind most successful poems, there's a huge amount of rewriting. According to Robert Wallace in the book Writing Poems (HarperCollins, 1991), one seemingly simple poem by E.E. Cummings went through more than 175 versions.

Every poet has his or her own way of working -- there's no right or wrong method. But here's one idea for a process that you might find helpful:

1) In the first stage, as I've suggested, you might want to focus your attention on the poem's subject, considering it from different angles, developing strong ideas about it.

2) Then, you can look for the best words to bring it to life on the page, to create a mental picture for the reader that matches the ideas in your own mind. Don't start correcting yourself or editing too soon. That can stop the ideas from flowing. Give yourself time to get everything on paper. Maybe sleep on it, then write some new ideas. When you feel that you've gotten everything down, then take a look at what you've got: Are there words that don't seem quite right for what they're describing? Are there words that don't serve a purpose? If you can remove something without hurting the poem, it's usually a good idea to remove it. Is there anything there that doesn't feel genuine, that's only there because it seems "poetic," to impress the reader? Remove or replace anything that is just "showing off." Are there parts of the poem that you like better than others? Are there parts you should delete? Are there parts that don't quite fit, that should be cut out or integrated better? Is there a particularly interesting part that might suggest taking the poem in a new direction? 3) Experiment like crazy. Try different forms, different angles. Try putting the ideas in a different order. Try everything that you think might improve the poem. You've got nothing to lose -- you can always go back to a previous draft. Compare versions; see what works better and worse. You might decide to combine parts of one version with parts of another. Work to come up with the ideal version of your poem.

How to Write Poems - Poetry Techniques 3

How to write poems - poetry problems you can avoid Here are some common problems that often hurt the poetry of new writers. Of course, there is no law against doing any of these things; you can try to get away with them if you want. But you have a better chance of writing a good poem if you can avoid them.

Top poetry pitfalls:

1) Thinking beautiful things make a beautiful poem. Roses and jewels, we can agree, are beautiful. Including them in your poem does not make it more beautiful. You can write just as beautiful a poem about rotting fish or the gunk under my refrigerator (not beautiful). The beauty of a poem comes from how it's made and what it does, not from what it's about.

2) Sentimentality. Sentimentality is false or excessive emotion. Have you ever had to listen to someone repeatedly saying, "Isn't that nice?" or "Isn't that lovely?" or "Isn't this fun?" about something you didn't honestly think was all that nice, lovely, or fun? You may have noticed that the more the other person insisted, the less nice/lovely/fun whatever it was began to seem to you. In general, we don't like to have emotions rammed down our throats. We all like to decide for ourselves how we feel about things. When I was about twelve, I wote to my Turkish penpal that I felt like a prisoner because my parents didn't let me (I don't remember what, although I do remember writing the letter from my "jail cell"). This is an example of an emotional response totally out of proportion to the situation. It could have been the beginning of a very bad poem.

Sentimentality in a poem can end up feeling whiney, self-pitying, insincere, or sickeningly sweet, depending on which emotions the poet is overdoing. So how to write poems with the right amount of emotion? What's the right amount of emotion to feel about a subject? The best practice is usually to let the readers decide for themselves. Instead of telling them that something is sad, show them the aspects of it that makeyou feel sad. Chances are readers will come to the same conclusion. And whatever conclusion they come to will be genuinely felt.

3) Archaic or "poetic language". Yes, a lot of the great English poets used words like "thou," "doth," and said things like "O! Beauteous moon..." They also lived in times when this was a normal way of writing. If they had lived during the 21st century, they would have written in 21st century English, as should we.

4) Clichs. Sparkling like diamonds," "pure as snow," "fiery hot," "a warm heart," "silent as the grave," these are examples of clichs. They are phrases or ideas that have been used so many times that they have lost all freshness.

When I say that someone is "as sweet as sugar," the "as sugar" part is a waste of words. It doesn't provide any additional information about this person. And it doesn't offer a new perspective on sweetness -- you've heard it before. It waters down a poem because it takes up space without adding any power. It also gives the reader the impression that I, the poet, don't have anything original to say. This is a pity, because every poet does have something original to say. If I am writing about someone's sweetness, I

should think harder about what exactly makes this particular person sweet, and what this person's particular sweetness is like. Instead of using ready-made phrases, I should choose words that express the unique qualities of my subject.

Types of poems - how to write blank verse

Blank verse is unrhymed poetry written in a regular meter, usually iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is a rhythm that sounds like: bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH. An iamb is a rhythmic unit made of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. An iamb has the rhythm bah-BAH, as in the words "forget," or "begin." Iambic pentameter is a line of poetry that consists of five iambs. Here are examples of two sentences written in iambic pentameter: Forget the car, I'll take the train to work. At school today, he caught a nasty cold. Do you hear the rhythm? bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH. Much of Shakespeare's dramatic work is written in blank verse. Here's an example, taken from Hamlet. (You will see that Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter is not mechanical -- he varies the rhythm for effect).

Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch So nightly toils the subject of the land, And why such daily cast of brazen cannon, And foreign mart for implements of war; Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task Does not divide the Sunday from the week; What might be toward, that this sweaty haste Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day: Who is't that can inform me?

Michael Klam on Poetry Slams and Translating Poetry

We asked Michael Klam about poetry slams, poetry translation, and his advice for beginning poets. Michael Klam is Poet in Residence at Balboa Park's Museum of the Living Artist. He organizes the museum's Poetry & Art Series, including the 3 for $300 Poetry & Art Slam, and teaches for the Page to Canvas to Stage program funded by the California Arts Council. Michael's book Emma and the Buddha Frog is currently available from Puna Press.

A Conversation with Michael Klam

Q: Could you talk about what poetry slams are and how poets can find or organize poetry slams in their areas? A: Poetry slam is generally a competition where writer-performers go head to head, earning points for engaging, entertaining and moving the audience. Five judges are picked randomly from the crowd. The slam host asks them to score on a scale of zero to ten -a ten being a work of staggering genius, and a zero being the worst intellectual masturbation the judge has ever heard. This is all very subjective, of course. However, winning poets tend to be serious about their work and their messages, and their confidence (or bravado), along with their writing and performing skills, turn on both audiences and judges. The host encourages the audience to influence the judges (by applause, laughter, discord in the event of an injustice [Boo!], etc.) Often, there is a cash prize. To organize a slam, all one needs to do is invite the audience and the poets through social media and word of mouth. The slam requires a host, a scorekeeper and timekeeper, five judges, audience and poets. Check the Internet for whats happening in your area.

Q: What qualities make a poem particularly suitable for performance? How can performance add a new dimension to a written poem? A: Slam poems, by the rules, must be under three minutes and ten seconds. Spoken (or read out loud) poems are the only criteria, which means that everything is game. Poems that flow tend to score well, yet over-rhyming for three minutes can be a painful thing to launch on an audience. Subject matter is wideopen, free speech. Strong, unique metaphors work. Belabored or trite metaphors often score low. Writing a poem for performance pushes the poet to really consider audience in their use of voice, inflection,

pacing and content; to fine tune the piece, edit, yet still remain true to herself or himself. I personally think the best poems are the ones that are the most sincere.

Q: In addition to writing poetry, you have also translated poetry. Could you talk a bit about the process of translating a poem? A: The way I see it, the translators responsibility is to be true to the piece. Part of that r esponsibility includes capturing the heart and the mind, the creative force, the art behind the words. This is not always easy from one language to another. When I translated Miguel Barbosas poetry, I had the luxury (and luck) of spending months with Miguel in Lisbon. Getting to know him helped me see his playful side he would get crumbs in his beard and call it a barba scone. I also translated Alberto Blancos La raz cuadrada del cielo (The Square Root of Heaven) as part of a masters thesis, after spending time with Blanco here in San Diego. His intellectual gravitas coupled with his inner love poet helped me understand why he chose to use math and quantum theory to discuss love and relationships. However, most translators rely on the poets work alone. In it, they find meaning, structure, the creative act that all started when a real, live human being decided organize her thoughts and write them down. Readers in a second language want to engage with those acts of creation. The translator is both a messenger and a new voice, charged with the artistic responsibility of remaining true to the original source. Q: What advice can you offer to new poets just starting out? A: Read, read, read. Go watch and listen to both developing and established writers, paying attention to their work while coming into your own. Rely on your most honest peers, holding dearly to their celebrations, and listening carefully to their criticisms. Be ready to try different approaches. I hate to lay a heavy trip on you, young poets, but great poetry takes time and work.

Read more about Michael Klam and his recent book on the Puna Press website.

Karl Elder on Language Poetry and More

Poet Karl Elder spoke with us about language poetry, the "sense in nonsense," poetry's metaphysical dimension, and the nature of poetic inspiration. You can read our conversation below.

Karl Elder is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Gilgamesh at the Bellagio, Phobophobia, A Man in Pieces, The Geocryptogrammatist's Pocket Compendium of the United States, The Minimalist's How-to Handbook, and Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums. His poetry has won a Pushcart Prize and other awards and has been featured in the Best American Poetry Series.

A Conversation with Karl Elder

Creative Writing Now: In an essay published on the Wisconsin Humanities Councilwebsite, you have criticized language poetry and the "aesthetic of chance." To what do you attribute the popularity of this aesthetic? Karl Elder: Its difficult work, trying to be innovative (Ive said it elsewhere: a poem is a poem, in part, because its unlike any other poem) and anticipating the needs of an audience (even if the audience shall consist solely of the poets own ears), and I believe there are far too many public displays of attempts made with half a heart, there being so much psychic energy required. I actually had two aesthetic modes in mind when I wrote the remark to which your question refers, and I suppose I yoked them in the essay because I view both as passive, the poet like a weathervane, pointing without will, wherever the wind wants. It may be that, as Wallace Stevens said, the true subject of poetry is poetry, but it sure as shot is not simply language, nor is that noble endeavor, the poem, governed by luck. In the grand scheme of the universe, human beings choose or die; they exercise volition, assuming theyre grownups. On another scale, so do poets. Now, on the other hand, when Marcel Duchamp laid a urinal on its back and called it art, it was art. Some of what made Duchamp an important artist is that he had sense not to overdo it, except when reinforcing for a time his divinely minimalist concept of readymades. But for my mind theres no way that concept has the power of, for example, his painting called Nude Descending a Staircase, which is far from selfreferential, unlike language poetry. Language poetry, in general, is like all other language poetry; its not so much abstract as it is failure of the poet to abstract. As art, poetry is founded not upon technique rock-solid or notbut upon multi-layered platforms, such as human experience, role-playing, the number of associations and depth of emotion the chosen words in the right order have the power to evoke, etc. Theres not a whole heck of a lot of emotion induced from staring at an algebraic formula, which is flatly a symbol of a function sans values.

Your question tempted me at first to explain my aversion to both language poetry and the aesthetics of chance by using the analogy of the hiveworkers and queen. (Oh, the buzzing from one direction and the drone in another!) But that trope wont soap, that picture wont develop, except to convey that, in order to realize potential, a poet must become her own boss as well as be industrious obsessed, in fact.

Ok, so think factory: a maker (the poet) climbs from labor to management. She needs a variety of experiencejanitor, foreman, quality control inspector, forklift operator, sweeper, production accountant, sayin order to be the best she can be. If she passively accepts her station on the line, she has capitulated to chance while not having a gossamer-garbed angels chance in hell of controlling her own fate. (Uh, by the way, Im not what one might call a feminist; Im an egalitarian libertarian who cant stand among other ills the morally corrupt notion that all art is equal in stature.) And if youd care f or a contemporary example outside the realm of poetry of my kind of angel, complete with a spiritual compass (that in the case of her story wobbles, there being no true North) and of what I believe to be great art, see the film Winters Bone. Its a heros lesson in heroism, but it speaks masterfully of an intangible reality made realand Im not talking about the illusion of film or the magic of movie makingthrough tangible imagery. Reality is only the base, Stevens also said. But it is the base. Imagine playing draw poker and standing pat with each hand. Eventually youd be saying, What happened to my chips? Later, but not much later, you lose.

Creative Writing Now: In the same essay, you refer to the value of the irrational in poetry, when used correctly -- when it is "the right kind of crazy." Could you talk more about this? Could you talk about the role of play, wordplay, humor, serendipity in your poetry? Karl Elder: So that following a mid-day trip my wife and I do not have a crabby grandchild on our hands, in order to keep him, a three-year-old, awake in his car seat, I sing his favorite songs, but with a twist: Old MacDonald had a farmG.I., G.I. Joe.NOOOO, he guffaws and then giggles, meaning, of course, Thats irrational. Children seem to know intuitively that whacky language is not crazy so much as it is craziness, and should they happen to grow into contemplative adults, craziness may become, for instance, something as serious and challenging as the irrationality of The Book of Job, subject the poem is to interpretation that the divine is revealed only in questions for which there are no answers. Another thoughtparadox is a form of irrationality; nevertheless, we understand it. And once upon a long time, it

was irrational to speak of the earth as round. Yet how prompt our conversion. Human evolution has well outfitted the brain for sea change in an ocean of eons to come, we hope. Revisiting my Poetry Daily essay, The Sense in Nonsense, I see that it speaks sparingly not of the right kind of crazy in poems but the good kind. The difference in my mind is such that I have little to say about the goodit being subject to tastewhile I welcome a chance here to explore the right kind of crazy in poets themselves. Im moved (perhaps due to that psychological phenomenon known as projection) to view said behavior as compulsive, though hardly neurotic, especially when I think of strangeness as a common characteristic of the finest literature Ive encountered. Derived from my own habits, for example, is a semi-conscious refusal to break from a state of awe, drawn to the shy mask of the universe, and Im not talking about star-gazing necessarily, though, heaven knows, Ive spent a lot of time behind our two-story house, using it to block a street light, with toilet paper tubes for binoculars. The cardboard works remarkably well to impede peripheral illumination, enhancing the contrast: a studded, concave, black pincushion overhead mostly obscured by the tops of birch, basswood, ash, and a monstrous, hydra-like, 300-years-old oakthe trees leaves also of help as, gradually, my dilating pupils multiply the number of stars, magnifying the depth felt turning into velour and, eventually, velvet. Should I happen to have been revising on those nightsI hesitate to say composing because I spend so little time with initial drafts relative to the ensuing work I invariably take my cerebral toys and their backdrop of celestial afterimages to bed with me, often dead tired, a zombies insomnia self-induced. Its quite a mild state of paranoia, I suppose, in that the awe about which I speak previously is not that I feel diminished; no, its ongoing ontological wonder manifest in myriad scenarios, how it is that ones consciousness, being such a magnanimous gift, so huge relative to awareness in an owl, say, or a mouse, or a mite, is squanderedin that a life, subjectively and objectively speaking, is but a flicker in the dark, a tick in time.

While the edge of sleep may serve like a lab where the bare text of poetry is conjured, serendipity, the fortuitous melding of associations, occurs in wakefulness. One does not play well half asleep. Neither does one there willfully crack jokes, an engaging ancillary thought being that humor (and surely wit) has come to be observed by neuroscientists as stimulating attentiveness in others. No wonder the greatest theory of poetry out of the twentieth century of which Im aware, The Necessary Angel, surfaced from the watchful mind of a poet with tremendous affinity for comedy, though Stevens, even at his most jubilant

moments, is hardly what one might these days call LOL. After all, the direction he took is a path in deep shade, if not darkness, that all serious poets must enter: the future and its name, whether it be bad or good, for there is no poetry if there is nothing to push through or back against, and that includes in the most fundamental sense the blank page. Remember, I sometimes address students along with myself, poets were the original fictionists. We know all about fictionno friction, no fictionand though it may not appear to be so on the surface, a poems gestation being more mysterious, there is always tension (sometimes both obvious and latent) in the poem, precipitated by tension in the mind that makes the poem, no matter how small or how menacing or how pleasant the emotion. As an illustration of what I mean by tension, heres one of my own very early poems, a piece in celebration, a tribute, whatever surprise therein being, I must admit, the mildest bit of wit: Snowplow for W.C.W.

The blade scrapes sparks.

How unlike the snow. Now, because my work has evolved through modes progressively more formal and expansive than that of the little piece above, far be it from me to serve as a channel for reductionism in order to echo the illustration, but while I was typing Snowplow, one of my students, Ben Endres, as if the muses messenger, dropped off with two other pieces for next weeks worksh op his

One Line Poem This is not one of those Maybe Bens been in my office when I was showing-off my inscribed copy of William Matthewss An Oar in the Old Water. Looking like an elongated book of matches, it includes Premature Ejaculation Im sorry this poems already finished.

Surely at this moment even the most priggish reader of Premature Ejaculation wears, at the very least, a residual smile. If not, one would think that among this essays audience is the next thing to a robot. Still, there are degrees of appreciation in response to tension in poetry and, thus, to this poem. If a reader has a vocabulary extensive enough to perceive the double meaning in ejaculation (the word like a sterile antipun in the context of premature shifting to an ante-pun when the piece is done), he or she sees and is quickly seized by even more tautly-wound tension. Thats what wordplay can earn a poet and his or her audiencea lingering, reserved seriousness in the midst of wonder at the power of language, for which in the long run is a life become incrementally rich. Suddenly Im reminded of Dorothy Parkers response in a game to use on the spot the word horticulture, creatively, in a sentence: You can lead a horticulture, but you cant make her think. Likew ise, you, the poet, can do only so much. An editor once wrote that she was able to discern some of the wordplay in a long poem of mine only after having proofread it several times. Almost reflexively, perhaps in defense of the intense labor poured into that poem, came a hint of irritation, but with an empty can of tomato soup in my hand, I experienced her remark as a boonno bane: She understands that instead of water you prepared it with milk, Elder. Besides, a poet must take heart; I mean, while there i s no wire to trip the trigger in a readers head, one has control over infinitely more important joy to be had, and that is the quality act of dwelling at play itself.

Creative Writing Now: In an essay in the Beloit Poetry Journal Forum, you describe poems as multidimensional art objects -- although a poem exists in two dimensions on the page, you explain, it has another, metaphysical, dimension. Could you further describe this metaphysical dimension? How might it differ in poetry from prose? Karl Elder: Heres the most important portion of that to which you refer, I see: I sometimes think of poems as possessing both an ecto- and an endo- skeletonthe latter metaphysicalpoetry then seemingly a phenomenon as much like sculpture as painting. Oh, its twodimensional on paper, all right, but multi-dimensional in the formulation and in its readers apprehension of that latent energy before them. To conceive of the poem as a two dimensional art object, similar to a p ainting or photograph, as I imagine, for example, some of William Carlos Williams short work invokes in young or inexperienced readers of poetrydespite W.C.W.s famous reference to poems as machines made of wordsis to see what is possible in poetry (its power to affect in the most sublime sense) sucked through a vanishing point like a trashed screen on an iPhone. A problem I have with Williams, by the way, is his insistence upon

adherence to idiom. Its not that its impossible to make poems with common language; the trouble is that vernacular is comparatively static. Should one dwell on that frequency, hearing how stuff is said rather than testing how it may be said with verve, theres tendency to become a chronicler or recorder at the expense of innovation and, from the point of view of ones audience, of the opportunity to see in stereo. I mean, lets face it, offshoots of the mode in questionthe list poem, for instance, though it may embody refrain as a legitimate technique that serves as a superstructureare inherently inferior subgenres simply because they are relatively shy of imagination. I sense irony in all of this. Williams is universally considered left of center on the spectrum, leaning heavily toward a more democratic poem, while his nemesis, the poet whose elitist poetry he despised, T. S. Eliot, is, aesthetically speaking, retrospectively and in fact, the true progressive by way of craft.

The mind of the generator as well as the beholder of good poetry dwells at the center of concentric circles, each of 360 degrees infinitely divisible. A trope more applicable to the finest work might be that the mind operates as if it sits dead center of a sphere with an exponentially infinite number of points encompassing it. When I think of the greatest poems Ive encountered, I think of the poems themselves, impossible that it is to explain their effect for as much as a nanosecond. Attempts to identify the power of such a poem by uncovering the poets tools, thingamajigs or stratagems, are degenerative and futile, like squinting at gold to see the atoms. On the other hand, one can capture for a time what masterpoems have in common. We know that when the piece is read holistically, the effect is real but unstable and, in a sense, undulating: one moment, say, a cube in a sphere and, in the next, a sphere in a cube. Maybe a wordless poem would serve here just as well to explain what in perpetuity cant be exp lained. How about one called Metaphysical Cubism? If poetry is like chess, prose is like checkers. Now, Im not disparaging prose; never once did I defeat my maternal grandfather, the man after whom I am named, at checkers. Yet, in the act of composing this very sentence as well as in recollection of writing prose essays, short stories, and two novelsI am aware that for the sake of my own satisfaction prose is a mere anteroom to the palatial interiors, a yet-tobe uncovered cave in all its glistening passageways. Often the initial draft of a poem is cast in prose, I concede, but the poet in me wants more than the writer in me can deliver. Yes, when youve been to the mountaintop, no matter how briefly, having experienced its rarified air, poetry is like chess, prose is like checkers. Literary theorists of the early part of the last century talked of

the difference between practical language and poetic devices, both of which are integrated into the poem. Theres an obvious difference in their function, prose being subservient, a means to an end, while the devices serve as ends in themselvesarresting a reader, making progress difficult not for difficultys sake but to spawn new perception. A most memorable compliment I received as a poet came only a couple of years ago from my mentor of forty yearsLucien Stryk. Responding in a letter to my The Minimalists How-to Handbook, he wrote, Karl, you see things no one has ever seen before. Its not what Ive seen thats important to me ultimately; its the fact that Ive seen them and that the will to do so potentially serves as a model and perhaps even inspiration for others to realize their capacity for unique perception and a richer imagination. As I said in an interview a few years ago, Hearing [poetry], reading it, and creating it are all exercise for development of the imagination. Now, so are other arts and endeavors. But there are none that are either as portable or as efficient as poetry because of its inherent characteristic that requires of the forebrain to make its own pictures in order to experience it, which partially explains poetrys ubiquitousness among the species, especially with respect to education of the child and the necessity of passing the baton cultural mythsfrom generation to generation. And what is education if not an attempt to equip persons with imagination and experience for the sake of the capacity to anticipate, to solve problems of survival on one hand and, on the other, to make a life worth living? That which has arrived to make us the dominant species on earth, imagination, the ability to see into the future and thereby avert threats to our existence, comes hand in hand with the curse of the knowledge of our own demise. As for the poet, his or her role in such a scheme is therefore adaptive, ranging from the voice of an angel to the canary in the mine. The poets responsibility is the will to sing. Now, I have neither the gift, skill, nor inclination to engage in the kind of observation necessary for a direct benefit to mankind, likeallow me to be hyperbolic herecures for disease or its psychological corollary, dis-ease. But as to the idea that poets do not directly affect the world and in contrast to the great prose writer and aesthetician Walter Pater, who believes . . . art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments sake[,] and in spite of what I believe to be Paters enormous influence not only on the likes of Wilde but, subsequently, Pound, Eliot, Stevens (maybe even Williams [and certainly diminutive me]) strikes me as false, particularly when were talking about superlatively wrought poetry, which is positively dependent upon observation to then join normally disparate elements to reveal the intangible behind the veil of reality. Call me a neo-aesthete or dandy any day, but I would hope that what is clearly evident in my work is penchant for the metaphysical. Theres good reason why so many poets are struck by John Donne and his ilk. Those seventeenth century English bards, with more passion than most moderns, appropriated with a passion what the students of Aristotle hammered out as being the central quality of poetry in The Poetics (only recently did

I discover it was not Aristotle alone who produced what we refer to as his theory) metaphor or, more specifically, thanks to the inventiveness of the old masters in question, conceit. Whatever the trope, a seasoned reader intuitively understands that what transports him or her to a higher plane of consciousness is wrapped in sentience. Assuming familiarity with the language in which the art object is cast, be it that which is material or abstract but a thing experienced in space through time, and excluding incantatory effect via repetition, there needs be brevity, hyper efficiency of language, which by its nature facilitates perception. Why, then, are shorter poems not more valuable than longer ones? It is for the same reason that there is inherent in language types of tropefrom symbol or icon (barely temporal) to conceit (temporal)meaning there are facets of reality and/or experience which require more time to render and to apprehend than others. It is an understanding such as this that points to the difference between poetry and prose. Both are valuable in that they serve different temperaments and moods. Its just that the truly well-off among the world know the human spends life not in dollars and cents but in minutes and moments.

Back to the importance of sentience, however, effect, and the expansion of imagination and consciousnessit is the prose writers obligation to tell, to inform, even to instruct, but it is the poets charge to suggest. Its the difference between Ayn Rand and Howard Roark. The poet would rather work like Roark than like Rand. The poet would rather make than talk, addressing the right and left lobes of the brain rather than the left alone.

Creative Writing Now: In a discussion in the Beloit Poetry Journal Forum, you comment on the nature of poetic inspiration, saying that "even sudden insight is apparent to me to be the result of preparation." What conscious steps can poets take to prepare themselves for these moments of insight? Every burgeoning, serious poet wants to know how to write his or her best work. The method is perhaps absurdly straightforward. Make ready for your gifts. Prepare. Prepare, said TedRoethke, that is. What is not revealed by way of that brief admonition is how long and involved the lessons can be, how arduous the labor.

Allow me to invoke the mother of all fundamentals, no matter the preferred genre: the art of writing is inherently a moral endeavor. It is value laden; it is a product of a persons capacity to carenot to emote as much as to coldly pay homage to the art form in its ability, ultimately, to affect.

Granted, there are levels of caring, of this love. There is infatuation; then there is courtship. The more mature this love, the higher the quality of writing the maker is capable of. Hence, a lovely and entirely rational paradox is painstakingly born in the mind of the writer. The novice slows down, becomes familiar with the tedium of learning the mechanical and grammatical conventions of the language in order to speed up perception in anticipation of the needs of an audience. That Frost dictum, No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader, is only the bottomrung of the ladder orshould one prefer a more romantic tropebase camp for the climb.

What writers call sudden insight, though analogous to spontaneity, is only an illusion of it. Yes, the fuel, a cache of language, must be present to ignite. Experience, the oxygen, appears to be invisible in the way that the subconscious, though lurking, is cloaked. Desire is the heat, the degree of value, energy amassing through irretrievable time. Where from then comes the value and thereby the will? Its easier to first imagine how the will may be sustaineda philosophers stone, a refuge of habit and reinforcement forged by what I sometimes whimsically call a plintany: probing, praise, publication, performance, and the prodding that comes from plenty of envy. Envy? You bet, I can think of no better wordprides nemesis, that has its source having been exposed to greatness: Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Donne, Keats, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Twain, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville, Lincoln, Eliot, Frost, Stevens (by all means Stevens with his theory of poetry), to name idols who immediately come to mind. Despite that as a kid I belonged to an organization for which its motto is Be prepared, despite that the Boy Scouts of America provided me with a real-world education comparable to none (to explain might require a memoir), despite years of writing poems, for which I had only earnestly begun at the age of 21 four decades of my life had passed before I realized the formula for my own best work, which required from me patience and consciously engaging in a kind of inventory. Following answers to what subsequently seemed rather obvious questions (what do I truly have knowledge about? what is the character of that which stirs me when I read?), I fell upon this question: besides being pretty decent with words, what else can I do? As circumstance would have it, birth order played a role in my answer. Heres a little riddle: how, among five siblings, is it possible for a youth to have been the youngest, the middle child, and the oldest?

A half-brother 16 years my senior, one of three Teds ricocheting like amusement park bumper cars in my head as I write (my father also known as a Ted) returned from the Korean War to work on a masters degree in education on the G.I. Bill. He needed a subjectmy half-sister being unavailable and my other two siblings too youngin order for him to gain experience at administering two types of tests interest inventory and spatial relationships (the latter requiring the mind to manipulate two-dimensional patterns into 3-D objects).

The results of the interest inventory suggested that because of a liking for science and literature, I ought to pursue becoming a technical writer. Yet, it was the spatial relationships test that proved to be the eye opener, although I did not fully awaken to the implications for many years. No, no, my much older brother said when Id completed that second test and tried to hand it to him, you dont just guess at the answers. You have to figure out which answer is right according to the pictures. It seemed that Id completed the test in fifteen minutes, about one third of the time allotted. I didnt guess, I said, and I remember him staring into my eyes for about five seconds.

Well, there on the airy front porch of the big old rented house at 222 Elm Street in Leland, Illinois, did I watch Ted convert raw score into percentile, unimpressed was I that my performance ranked in the 99th or that I had answered nearly all items correctlynot impressed, perhaps, because the test contained neither words nor numbers and because my 6th grade teacher, whose house I could see from where I sat, only a block away, knew better than I that I was horrible at word problems. Algebra, I subsequently came to understand, is not my forte. Geometry was.

All of this is to say it is an amalgamation of luck, inclination, reading, steady work, and introspection that a map to a personal masterpiece might be drawn. Of course, I would be totally remiss not to point specifically to the piece that launched me to a higher plane of endeavor, so I beg from you your endurance, believing that it is best for the sake of answering what conscious steps are possible to summon insight to first describe the primordial soup from which the poem in question emerged. As for luck, it can be good, bad, orperhaps more importantlyboth. Take a look at what Im suggesting by considering this account of my early experience with haiku that appears in the online Verse Wisconsin article "Encyclopedia of Wisconsin Forms and Formalists" edited by Michael Kriesel.As

one who has experienced first-hand Japanese culture for twenty-some months in succession, Im not sure I or any Westerner is blessed with the perspective necessary in order to be able to write genuine haiku. In fact, following my staycourtesy of Uncle Sam I used to write rejection letters as the editor of Seems which rather arrogantly expressed my doubt. Then one day it hit me: while I might not be able to capture the true spirit of haiku, whos to say a poet on this side of the Pacific cant write poems containing 17 syllables? I suppose you might call my pitiful epiphany a turning point in my career in that Ive since composed scores of 17 syllable poems (yes, in three lines of five and seven and five syllables)almost all bearing a title, which is a no-no to a master practitioner of haiku, of course. On the other hand, I wonder if its reasonable to think that a Japanese poet could make what I make in English. My good fortune at having had over the years a couple dozen native speakers of Japanese in my poetry writing courses (Lakeland has a 2-year associate of arts degree program in Tokyo from which native speakers of Japanese often transfer to Wisconsin to complete a bachelors degree) reinforces my doubtnot that those students cant write in English (many have been remarkable); its just that the idioms that surface in their poems lend the work the indelible mark of the rising sun. Ask a Japanese student what the rooster says or what the pig says or what the cow says, for example, and, upon hearing a response, youre liable to conclude for the moment thatrather than different continentsyou were reared on different planets. When I think of how an artist is aesthetically inclined, I imagine a fusion of predisposition (meaning kinds of intelligence that dominant his or her mien [see Howard Gardner]), temperament, and metabolism, all three of which are pretty much out of the mak ers control. Still, it is self-awareness (intrapersonal intelligence?) of talentin my case spatial intelligencethat allows me, I believe, to conjure pictures from stark abstractions, a twist on Wallace Stevenss definition of poetry as making the invisible visible, and to blaze my own path through the trees to the elevation at which Im able to glimpse the top of the mountain.

Now, what is absolutely in control of the poet, a conscious step without which having taken it again and again I would have been thwarted on the climb, is the choice to attentively read, open to suggestion and influence. Among thousands of periodicals, books, and manuscripts, my jealousy at the degree of pleasure particular poems stirred in me became, if not the catalyst, the impetus for my determination whether Ive accomplished it or notto add, in whatever small measure, to the canon. I can point with some certainty to at least four experiences in my extended career of reading that spurred in me more than mere admirationthe envy of which I earlier speak, all moments alike with respect to the intensity of

my response: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, portions of Coleman Barkss Body Poems that I first encountered in Geof Hewitts Quickly Aging Here (1969), James Merrills Divine Comedies, and an image from the hand of Billy Collins. Retrospectively, it is no wonder to me that Ive made a pilgrimage to Stevens gravesite on the anniversary of his death [See Photo 1 below] as well as walked the Stevens Walk [Photo 2], the thirteen ways chiseled in granite markers on the route from his home to the Hartford Insurance building [Photo 3]; that a few years ago I sought out and now own the Barks book, The Juice (1972), containing the complete Body Poems; that I possess an inscribed first edition of Divine Comedies [Photo 4] (with Merrills inked-in corrections!); and that, according to Collins, who revealed the following fact to a pair of my students, I am the first person ever to have bought him a plane ticket, back in 1992, when he served as a featured writer at the Great Lakes Writers Festival, which I continue to coordinate [Photo 5]. What else but envy? Yet envy alone is not enough, of course. Neither is desire become manifest in the company of those whose work one esteems highly nor is bibliophilia. One values what poetry has to offer to the degree of intensity at which one is moved to work, when the stars eventually align, so to speak. Then there is that ascent toward perfection, knowing full well that, fleeting, perfection recedes by gradually smaller fractions in the process of gaining upon it. At last there arrives confirmation that being able to contribute to the canon is merely penultimate in importanceafter all, ones selection for inclusion in any hall of fame is completely in the hands the futurebut most important is that the quality of the work, achieved by having become a devoted practitioner of the art form, stands as tribute to that which is a link to its own lineage. Surely my parents would have been pleased to know that I understood this principle even before I encountered it as a graduate student in Eliots Tradition and the Individual Talent. To put it plainly, one strives to do ones best out of respect. So here come the details of how I learned to pay homage, having paid my dues through 20 years of apprenticeship and the muse, that ungrateful tart, suddenly having lost my name on her muster: I heard one winter, that winter,on a PBS program that Richard Wright, whose Native Son Id closely studied and taught, had, toward the end of his life in an artists colony, abandoned prose for poetry, which he wrote daily, his medium being haiku. Heck, I remember saying, sitting up, I can do that. And, despite a considerable bit of luck at maintaining the pace, hell it became, tired as I was after months of staring at the moon.

Still, I added to the stack, an index card per day, until it appeared that Id cornered boredom so that it was ready to bite back, and I abruptly recoiled. Shortly thereafter surfaced the three questions identified above: What do I truly have knowledge about? What is the character of that which stirs me when I read? Besides being pretty decent with words, what else can I do? Id dabbled in black and white photography in my twenties, and it occurred to me now that the most memorable images Id shot were essentially geometrical. And Id always loved billiards, the innumerable possibilities the sport affords, those spheres on a rectangular bed of felt stretched tight over slate from which it is heaven to create when a player, having practiced its fundamentals, becomes proficient enough at the game, able to control where the cue ball rests. Shape is what that is called and what I was after bent over the table. Could writing be analogous to just staring at the object ball until stuff like where to apply English on the cue ball, at what angle to hold the cue relative to the slate, and the speed of the stroke became second nature? Suddenly Im not writing a haiku a day. Id become wide-eyed at the letter A as Id scrawled it on my 3 x 5 card. I know what A is, I said to myself. I know what it is for, but what else is it? Well, its ink on paper, that which is used to write lines. Pictures are made of lines, too. Images are sometimes words strung together to make a line. And lines are sometimes titles of poems. Now, what if I had a whole bunch of minimalistic pictures with which to work, things I could approach like I once saw Collins do with the cipher 5 and that he probably had seen Merrill and/or predecessors to Merrill do with other symbols? What if I turned the pictures, as if they were Chinese ideograms or hieroglyphs, into titles? What if I could imagine from airy titles concrete images, similar to the act of assembling boxes in my head when my brother Ted gave me that spatial relationships test when I was a kid?

Time, like a mist, evaporated: the clock quit ticking; the calendar vanished. I knew what I had to do, living now in a lighthouse, searching through the wrong end of a telescope, whic h was the right end for me. I couldnt force the poem out. It became my method, my responsibility, to wait, to stick with it, the image, until I saw it afresh, the hope being that through silence I could shape a new language one that others could understand though I was the only one to speak it. There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, says Stevens. And hadnt I always thought that if I couldnt write, Id like to sculpt? At last I had arrived, ready to conjure from two-dimensional figures a third dimension, albeit metaphysical, the tools for doing so being experience and imagination, as always, but studying each object with a new and intense appreciation for its form to settle on a trope. I will approach each in its natural order, I resolved.

They will be like ekphrasis, art about art. I will translate. I will interpret. But I wont explain. One cannot explain what is up to readers to sense. I can only suggest. I can only facilitate perception. Not alone will I make the invisible visible. And I shall try to make, when imagination allows, in tandem with the readers eye, the inaudible audible: bpj.org/poems/elder_alphaimages.html. Slow down for poetry, Mark Strand admonishes in a 1991 New York Times Book Review essay (with a hilarious beginning I wont spoil here). Yes, one must become ones own flagman. In truth, often it is wise to simply pull over and park.

Jessie Carty on Writing Narrative Poems

Poet and teacher Jessie Carty is author of a collection of primarily narrative poems, Paper House, as well as two poetry chapbooks,At the A & P Meridiem and The Wait of Atom. She is also founder and editor of the online journal, Referential Magazine. We asked Jessie about her poetic influences, her experiences editing a literary journal, and her advice for beginning poets.

A Conversation with Jessie Carty

Q: How has your poetry evolved over time? What have been your most important influences? A: I have been writing poetry, in one form or another, even before I learned to write because I liked to make up songs for myself. I hope my writing has changed a lot since those early attempts at rhyme! As a high school and undergrad writer, I hated revision but Ive grown to l ove the process of peeling away at a poem until the real poetry appears. What I find interesting about my writing is how it has always tended toward the story, the narrative no matter how much I play with free verse over form or surrealism over the everyday.

Early on, I was actually influenced more by fiction. I LOVED to read and my mother would let my siblings and I stay up passed our bedtime if we were reading. The first poetry I remember reading, outside of Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss, was Robert Louis Stevenson. I still love his work. As a student, I loved poets such as Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, lots of the classical stand bys especially Yeats and

Blake but as I started reading outside of the classroom and then into the graduate classroom, I fell in love with contemporary poets although I still have a soft spot for Elizabeth Bishop.

Q: Could you tell us something about your new collection, Paper House? A: Paper House is my first full length poetry collection. It was released in March of 2010 by Folded Word Press. I was thrilled to be their first full length poetry book as well. They had previously published my 2nd chapbook in 2009. Paper House is a collection of 64, mostly narrative poems that recount a young girl as she progresses from a childhood in a shaky home to young adult hood in a home of her own. A better home? Have to read to decide!

Q: In addition to writing poetry, you are editor of an online literary magazine, Referential. Has reviewing poetry submissions caused you approach your own poetry differently in any way? Are there certain common types of flaws that cause you to reject poems submitted to the magazine? What kinds of submissions would you like to see more often? A: If you are a writer and you have a chance to work as an editor: DO IT! Sometimes it is hard for us, as writers, to see the errors and/or clichs in our own writing, but we readily notice them in the work of others. What is that old saying: You hate most in others what you hate about yourself? The biggest issues I see with poems I reject is that they fail to say something new. I dont mean you cant speak about common topics like love, death or taxes but you need to do so with a voice that is unique, with words I would never have thought to put together. Since our magazine has a theme, of sorts (the whole referral hook), Id really like to see more submissions that actually appear to have read the guidelines...

Q: Could you offer some advice for new poets about publishing their work? A: Before you start submitting your work, find someone you trust to be a reader. They dont have to be overly cruel but you definitely dont want them to just say they love everything!

Q: What is a piece of advice that you wish you'd received when you'd started writing poetry? A: Develop a community. Get out there and read other poets. Meet other poets. Poetry is a tradition: join it.