Thinking About Poetry

For those of you who are using the daily prompts to develop your craft and generate work as poets, I wanted to share some ideas and things to consider when working on poetry.

1. Check out Some Recent History
It can be an interesting experiment to find five people you encounter during an average day, and ask each of them to name 5 poets. My guess is that of the 25 names you collect, many of them will be the same, and most will be the names of writers who died 100 years ago.
Unless we were lucky and went to some truly extraordinary schools, we probably didn’t study a whole lot of poetry when we were young. And even if we were lucky enough to be exposed to poetry in school, it may have only been exposure to those poets and poems in the traditional “cannon”, like Shakespeare, Dickinson, Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams or Gertrude Stein. With all due respect to these forefathers and foremothers of poetry, there is a lot of more recent history to explore. Not many folks today have heard of language poetry, the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, The New Formalists, The San Francisco Renaissance, Outlaw Poetry, The Beat Movement, Performance Poetry, Hybrid texts, Experimental Poetry, Multicultural Poetry, Eco-Poetics, and the some of the other important movements and events that continue to shaped our contemporary poetry scene in the 21st century. Check out some of these terms by typing them into Google, and see what you find. Look for the names of poets you have never heard of, and check out their work on-line.

2. Read Widely
One of the most useful, fundamental practices for any working writer in any genre is the commitment to reading widely. This means that we become invested in exploring unfamiliar writers, genres and styles. It means that we suspend our likes and dislikes long enough to truly engage our curiosity, it means we pay attention to wholly unfamiliar work, to see what it might teach us as writers. When you head out to your local big chain bookstore, you might not find much modern poetry on the shelves. Sometimes independent bookstores, college bookstores and smaller bookstores may have a bigger selection. Check out on-line bookstores and on-line book distributors as well. For example, you can check out some great contemporary poets at the website for Small Press Distribution, a very reputable source for small press poetry books and anthologies.
(go to: http://www.spdbooks.org/GENpoetrybestsellers.asp) If you find a book you want to read, go to your local library and look for a copy. If they don’t have it and they don’t want to order one for their stacks, you can always request a copy of it through the Interlibrary Loan program. This program allows one library to access the books or materials in another library on behalf of one of its patrons, YOU!

3. Experiment with Forms
As you know, poetry can take any form you choose. If you have never seen or experimented with poetic “forms” (like sestinas, haiku, acrostics, chants, sonnets, tankas, prose poems, etc.) you can check these out in Teacher’s & Writer’s Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by Ron Padgett. Or you can check some of them out on sites like:
http://pages.prodigy.net/sol.magazine/pl01form.htm#alterQ
These “forms” do not make a poem any more important that writing in free verse, but they have long and interesting histories and they can be fun ways to keep your poetry practice vibrant and interesting.

4. Make Poet Friends
When you step in and start telling folks that you are interested in Poetry, you may be surprised how many folks who say “Me too!” Poetry can sometimes be a “closeted” practice, all kinds of folks read and write it, but they usually don’t share the work with one another unless they are invited. Check out local poetry groups or classes, usually bulletin boards at your local independent bookstore of library will have some good leads, or you can always look on the internet. Making one or two friends who also have an active interest in reading and writing poems can be a great way to try new things and keep going. We all write differently when we write to be read by others. There are also lots of writing and poetry conferences and festivals that are available, especially in the summer months. You can find a fairly comprehensive listing on-line at:
http://writing.shawguides.com/

5. Make it Do-able
Writing poetry need not be a taxing, intensive experience. One of the best thing about a poem is how unconstrained it is, you can write a “poem” in 3 short lines, or 300 long ones. You can write funny poems, portrait poems, political poems, narrative poems, list poems, poems with long lines, poems with one-word titles, love poems, nonsense poems, poems about the everyday, and any other kind of poems you can imagine. Poetry as a creative art has absolutely no conventional, established “rules”, so bring the full range of your curiosity and creativity to bear and see what happens. Look at the time and attention you have to devote to your life as a poet and find ways to make your practice fun and consistent. Read one new poem by another poet everyday. Write one new poem everyday, even if it’s just 4 lines about what you saw or heard today. There is no “wrong” way to write a poem, and as soon as you write one, you step into a long and vibrant lineage of poets.

Poetry is one of the most fun and versatile forms of literature, so jump in, start a poetry-notebook and start writing!
All the best,
Max