The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Writing poetry
211
draft-poem continuously for about two hours or until you have written at least lines. Place this draft-poem in a drawer for three weeks, then read it through, cutting it to five lines only. Discard the rest. There maybe little connection between these lines but, by giving it a clear title, a resonant connection will become clear.
A
I MA powerful short poem, even if elliptical (as in Exile above, is worth a hundred diluted long poems. Many beginning poets do not like to revise their work in the belief that the first thought is the best thought. This drastic exercise in deletion and discrimination will teach you to distance yourself from your draft-poems, and regard them as potential, rather than final. Play this game every week in order to generate material and ideas for short poems.
Poetry’s reasons
In the history of literature, prose is a teenager and fiction a child. Poetry
(like drama) is ancient, but just as sprightly. As you have seen, it is also primal. That does not make the genre anymore virtuous, but it does not make it any less trivial, either. Poetry is as pervasive as it is marginal. Poetry was, and is, apart of speech. This offers the genre a unique sense of literary currency, and a quite different set of technical demands, especially in terms of the sounds and rhythms of language, and its rich and various formal possibilities.
If you possess avocation, then you follow that calling but, if you do not,
there are other significant incentives for writing poems. First, we live in a world obsessed with the visual and, as we discussed in Chapter
Two
, language can be mistreated and misappropriated. Poetry will help you listen for language’s music, and reintroduce you to the pleasure of taking pains with it. Second,
you might choose poetry as the first of your literary apprenticeships. It hones skill with language – especially precision, phrasing and image – and develops your mind so you find it easier to shift sideways into less condensed genres. As
Charles Baudelaire said, Always be a poet, even in prose You will eventually grow accustomed to feeling fraught with language, and this quality makes poets a very adaptable species of writer – many good novelists were, or are, practising poets. Third, and significantly, poetry’s pennilessness allows it to float free of the book-buying marketplace. This creates open spaces for latitude, playfulness and for acts of fabulously invisible integrity.
A place for the genuine
Let us hold the light over that final reason. Most poets need not write with one eye on a fickle audience and the other on the publisher’s balance sheet. You can

212
Creative writing
take longer to achieve the poems you need to write. Poetry is relatively clean in that sense. You do not have to fake it in writing, even if you write from behind a mask or take on a dozen voices. Indeed, it is probably impossible to fake the real thing. As Marianne Moore wrote in Poetry (NP I, too, dislike it there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.
Richard Hugo (in the epigraph to this chapter) is onto something in implying that, in poetry, some important part of the self is revealed. Elizabeth Jennings pushed this further, claiming that if lack of compassion, meanness of spirit,
envy or cowardice are present in the poet’s nature they will be evident in his verse. You cannot fake anything if you are trying to write serious poetry (Curtis 16). I am less certain about this, since poetry is also, as Wallace Stevens would have it, a kind of supreme fiction. Yet, if this quality of creative conduct attracts you as a reader, then poetry may possibly suit you as a writer simply because it will suit your character. However, do not get the impression that the pursuit of poems is purely a solemn or stern concern.
You can have a lot of serious fun trying out poems, and it costs nothing but reading, practice and experiment. You are given permission to fail again and fail better without imperiling the livelihoods of others (obviously most poets do something else than write poems to get by. However, as I wrote in Chapter
One
, vocation is important to many professions, and the impulse to write and the desire to be a writer are not the same thing. Given poetry’s nature, that calling becomes magnified. You really must be driven about poetry to stick with it, so long as you feel that making good poems is its own reward.
Even performance and slam poets serve long apprenticeships theirs is a hard industry, and only small minorities of poets visibly succeed. We now turn to the worlds of writing as performance.

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