The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

208
Creative writing
When you have assembled at least 200 poems of these types, make copies of them, and begin looking at them all with the view of creating your own anthology. What unites them Are they mostly inform or free verse What is the gender and background of the authors Is there a theme or themes In multiple permutations, try ordering these poems so that they speak to one another in sequence and ensure the final order has inner logic from a reader’s point of view.
A
I M This is excellent practice for examining poems from many angles, and for developing discrimination. You will find it helpful for when you order your own poems into a portfolio, poetic sequence or first collection. Later, should you become a poetry editor (as many poets are, however briefly, this practice will be of use in creating a poetry magazine or a published anthology of poems.
Playing with language
You can write poems inform and poems in free verse, and many variants between. You can write poems that are confessional and poems that are cold- eyed. You can write poems that tell stories, and poems that lock onto one object and express it to its very atoms. Your task is to find the poems you want to write;
the ones you are capable of writing well and, if you want to become a poet rather than a writer of poems, to find poems which nobody else could compose.
Volcano and diamonds
To do this, you practise several modes of writing poetry, until you reach away of writing where subject and form click together, as Robert Frost put it. This destination cannot be reached without your reading a great deal of poetry.
There are billions of poems in this world, and thousands being written everyday. Most of these are bad poems that contain cliches of feeling and imagery;
clich´ed or archaic writing prosaic, dishonest or forced expression inelastic or inappropriate form, however free or just common-or-garden dullness.
A volcano explodes tonnes of ash and waste onto its flanks, but the process might yield diamonds among this scree. You read a lot of poetry to develop your discrimination. Voracity shapes – it does not narrow – taste. If you possess received ideas about poetry, try unlearning them by reading more poems, and also reading poems in translation. There are many species of poem. Christmas carols nursery rhymes some forms of prayer lieder prose poetry the blues;
and concrete verse – all these are different and highly colourful species of poetry. As you will see in Chapter
Nine
, there are even poems that look like paintings some poems are sculptures in gardens and others which exist solely in electronic form.

Writing poetry
209
Reading, reading aloud and memorising poetry will help you discriminate between poems that work and those that do not, and you can then exercise that discrimination on your own work. The best advice, as the poet Denise Levertov might have said, is to read until you waken. You may then feel compelled to reproduce your first excitements about poetry within your own work, since it appears a wholly natural progression that readers who are wakened in this way by poetry wish to try writing it. Therefore, make a habit of reading at least five poems everyday, and make time for them (and I do not mean five haiku. As you begin to get comfortable, begin reading whole collections atone sitting,
and then try to read the entire output of one poet over a week.
Many contemporary poets limit their literary awareness by only reading other contemporary poets: a circling and encircling strategy offering low possibilities.
Read backwards in time, and across languages. When seeking models for style and diction, try to be broader in your reading than poetry. As I pointed out in Chapter
Five
, some fiction writers read poems in order to gain a sense of the compressed sonic mathematics possible in language. You can even find
‘found poetry in some very peculiar prose, such as museum labels or office memos. Good fictional prose can also present you with ideas and language for poems – the best prose can be read as another type of poetry. As the poet Robert
Lowell commented, I felt that the best style of poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert’
(Herbert and Hollis 108). Qualities you can borrow will include a sense for narrative and character, but you can also learn to relax – and to pace – some of the tension in your lines by seeing how a paragraph of good prose might work as lines of a poem.

Download 2.89 Mb.

Share with your friends: