Writing poetry203
show. Yet it is not what you write
about that matters most it is how you write it. And because poetry
takes many drafts to get right, it is how you
rewrite it.
A poem about, say,
tomatoes, written with verbal panache, will deliver greater energy than a high-minded but clumsily written poem about angst. You could argue that too
few poets make their cause poetry because too many are chasing hearses and ambulances, or using a poem as a kind of mirror on which they breathe their own feelings.
The problem is that some new writers have been taught to view poetry through over-serious and personal spectacles and they have also been taught that poetry has an association with conveying truth, the whole truth and nothing but. This association is partly a result of its strong relationship with the spoken word partly through the persuasiveness of certain poets, critics and teachers and partly because poets in some cultures were indeed regarded as the community’s shaman. Good poems, of course,
capture elementary truths,
or allow these qualities to refract through certain tropes of language. Precise and playful images, for example, are prisms emitting the light of observation over and over again during reading, even if all the images are doing is celebrating something as mundane as the
tomatoness of tomatoes, as in Pablo Neruda’s famous ode on that very subject.
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