Poetry

The Snowy Stuff of Poetry

April 14, 2016 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

National Poetry Month doesn’t get much play in the media these days. There are no big action events—poetry jams, a “Stars of Poetry” TV special, interviews with great poets in action as a feature on the evening news. Maybe if CBS’s Charles Kuralt was still around there might be something on his Sunday morning show.

Alas, poetry has never captured much media attention and to do so today would probably require some sort of sports-based poetry confrontation controversy—say a claim that you had come into possession of pornographic poetry written by Whistler’s mother. Argh!

Something in “confrontational poetry” might work, but then, would you really want to make something so historically associated with peaceful contemplation turned into something crass and low rent, controversial and sleazy? Don’t answer that. Too often the answer is “hell yeah.”

An example:

The phone rings,
The clock dings,
I scream, scream, and scream:

I can’t grasp what is real
I can’t inhale the lives you steal
This game is like murder in the first degree,
I can barely feel the words you’re expressing.
Your hand, holding on to mine as if it was the last
I crawl I hide behind these moonstone walls
There it stood and stole my Womanhood
Pink is the ointment rubbed inside my diary.

Imagine Little Johnny memorizing that little ditty for a second grade assembly? That’s partly why writing about poetry is a challenge. It has expanded so much. Yes, back in the day, there was Beat poetry and there have been experimentalists along the way. The poetry tent has always been fairly large. But in recent years it has added new nooks and crannies under its tent. Much of what I label the “new stuff” I simply can’t understand, and if I presented it to a classroom of lit students, any effort to find any meaning and otherwise interpret it might be a search into fruitlessness. Of course, if you write meaningless stuff you can enjoy those who cluster around and try to find the “hidden” meaning. So you can still be misinterpreted by the fact someone is trying to interpret your efforts. It starts to get circular about now! So much gets lost in the noise that you suspect the noise is the meaning. Perhaps that is the logic of modern poetry after all. The labels become important, as opposed to the actual quality of the content.

Yeah, I know. That sounds like some old coot lamenting the loss of the “good old days” and a commitment to iambic pentameter. I’ll just refer to myself as a traditionalist. But when I do want to read some poetry, I have to look in the older books in my library. I don’t buy the new stuff. I find it rambling, senseless, cacophonous even.

That’s also why I will not address how to write poetry. (At least in this entry.) Everything is pretty much up for grabs. It’s not so much what is right but what you prefer, and preferences are not required to be “educated” ones. My suggestion is to read a broad sampling and find what you like and then try your hand at writing something in a similar vein. What you want to do is prime your poetry pump and see what sorts of word combinations you come up with. Once you get your “poetry legs,” your output will expand in accordance with your interests and growing facility. You grow into your own poet.

If you want, you can read a chapter on poetry in an English textbook or get your hands on the “Write Source 2000 – A Guide to Writing Thinking, and Learning” by Patrick Sebranek, Dave Kemper, and Verne Meyer (You can order it online from Amazon and through other booksellers.). In the chapters on the fundamentals of poetry, the authors supply insights into poetry in a delightfully straightforward and clear way. As you explore penning your own poetry, those insights will steer you clear from producing the hackneyed and sophomoric stuff that too often permeates initial efforts of writing poetry.

Even with this in mind, you might start by playing around with limericks—a humorous verse form in five lines, the first, second, and fifth verses of which rhyme and the third and fourth verses rhyme.

An example:

There once was a panda name Lu,
Who always ate crunchy bamboo.
He ate all day long,
Till he looked like King Kong.
Now the zoo doesn’t know what to do.

Limericks have their own patterns of poetry (AABBA). Here are some others you can play with:

Stick with the AABBA pattern and you’re in limerick business. Shakespeare on the other hand was famous for his sonnets, which too have a rather strict set of rules, the first of which is to contain fourteen lines and express—usually deeply—personal feelings about a topic.

Shakespeare arguably is the king of sonnets and undoubtedly spent a great deal of time crafting something that worked poetically and still complied with the formal structural requirements. His Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?   Thou art more lovely and more temperate:  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:   Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,  And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;   And every fair from fair sometime declines,  By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;  But thy eternal summer shall not fade  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;  Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

That’s the sort of stuff that can scare off a newbie from reading, let alone writing poetry. But it shouldn’t. Look for the pattern Shakespeare used and how he fit together the rhythm and rhyme, and you could become the new Shakespeare. (You’ll be rich I tell ya, rich!) Don’t forget, Shakespeare hailed from the 16th Century so his style comes across a bit stuffy yet it’s surprisingly modern at the same time.

Some poets—Shakespeare is one of them—explore the emotions, especially love; others focus on more mundane subjects. Take for example Robert Frost’s efforts to capture the experience of stopping his horse while heading home on what appears to be Christmas-time night, to look into the woods as it gently snowed. Read it, and then find someone to read it to you while you close your eyes. You’ll find yourself there with Robert Frost, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”

The letters in the parentheses at the end of each line, are to help you see the rhyming pattern Frost used—simple but powerful. Note that his word choices are simple and clear and he employs no flowery or hackneyed words or phrasing, a common weakness that can creep into a newbie poet’s initial efforts. As a result, he paints an image for the reader to enjoy, and that is the ultimate goal of a poet—to write with a painter’s brush.

On the website’s poetry page, I also explore the form called Haiku, which enjoys a long history, is simple, and can be both challenging and fun to write. In my “Illustrated Haiku,” I reversed the process. Instead of creating images to match the poetry, I wrote poetry that I felt fit the images I discovered on one of my favorite walks not far from the Stanford University campus.

My purpose here is not to present any specific lessons on how to write poetry, or convert you into becoming a poet, but to encourage you to explore writing some for a very simple reason—it exposes you to thinking about your individual choices of the words you use and thus acquire an appreciation for the intellectual process of searching for and finding the right word AND phrasing. The value of that in application is apparent by re-reading the first line of Frost above: “Whose woods these are I think I know.”

Poetry lets you dip your toe into the water without having to become a long-distance swimmer. Find a style of poetry, and by that, a poet’s whose stuff you like, and try yours hand at writing in the same style. Like writing prose, you will soon find yourself exploring different rhythms and techniques and find something you like that reflects your interest and style. Soon enough that poetry becomes your poetry and your relationship with words will become intimate and fruitful and spill over into writing your other prose.

Yes, you can study the forms, iambic pentameter for example, and various rhyming patterns—AABB, ABAB, and so on. You can pick a pattern that is pleasant to you and then come up with your own poem that fits its structure, or you might have the beginning of a poem—a verse that has wandered into your head—and take it from there. Or, you could stick to “free verse”—poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter. (You might want to read about that before you explore the form on your own.)

Rhyme in modern times has pretty much been relegated to advertising jingles, but rhyme has been historically at the heart of human literary activity since man first rubbed two words together. It is a natural application of language. That’s why children new to language love poetry. It is an invitation to play with words and feel them form and cross your lips.

The day after words were invented poetry was invented. Poetry, however, is funny stuff. Not funny ha, ha, but funny in a strange, unexplained way. Announce it as the next literature topic you’re going to explore to a lit class of seventh graders and the room fills with testosterone-laced negative reaction as the boys vociferously complain. But two weeks later they’re writing verses and standing up in class delivering them without embarrassment. Poetry is like the common cold—contagious, but, fortunately, won’t give you a stuffy nose. And once you write a little poetry, you’ll start finding rhyme hiding everywhere, and you might keep your own notebook of your efforts.

I suspect that poetry was the first word game. It led to lyrics and song that has marched us into and guided us out of love and war and virtually every other human endeavor. The natural affinity that rhyme and music have for each other meant that much early poetry was by balladeers. It’s easy to understand why. Poetry reflects emotion. It prompted a British pilot to invite us on his “High Flight” and reach out and touch the face of God, as well as the silly stuff penned by Ogden Nash: “Celery raw / Develops the jaw / But celery, stewed, / Is more quietly chewed.” After reading that, you won’t eat celery in quite the same way again.

We use a litany of rhymes to help us remember everything from historical facts to mathematical formulas. For example, circumference and area:

Fiddle de dum, Fiddle de dee
A ring round the moon is pi times d;
But if a hole you want repaired,
You use the formula Pi r squared.

And any boy who won’t admit that he’s at least tried to write a rhyme for some girl to actually share with her or to secret away in the back pages of a notebook in her honor is probably being less than completely truthful. There is something about rhyme that appeals to youth. There is something about rhyme that appeals to us all. Play with it. It will make you a better writer.

The Value of Writing Poetry

February 2, 2016 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

My onboard dictionary lists two basic definitions of a “poet.” One is simple: a person who writes poems. The other, more to my liking, is more expansive: a person possessing special powers of imagination or expression. Of course, if you wade into definitions from sources more literary in nature, the definitions become a bit more esoteric and define poetry by contrasting it to prose. But the key element of poetry remains—its rhythmical (metrical) structure.

Most of us itinerant poets enjoy the interplay of words and the tension between the objective and emotional facets of words. In poetry, words become more than vowels, consonants, and syllables; they take on a flavor and can be electrically charged. As has been said, the difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug.

But in poetry, the word with the proper glimmer may be exactly what you are looking for. Rather than some bright or explosive flash, all that might be called for is a bit of a glow. Poetry is the language of subtleties and as such provides the perfect playground for the writer. Poetry nearly always is multifaceted in its word usage, as described in the Bedford glossary:

“While poetry can be approached intellectually, it is equally an emotional experience; one might even say that poetry is meant to be experienced rather than simply read. Poetry is rich with a suggestiveness born from the interplay of words and sounds.”

You can easily get mired down in the definitions and classifications of poetry. Spend too much time labeling butterflies and you miss the mysterious beauty of their flight. As a teacher, I taught my students how to diagram sentences, not as an end but a tool to understand the role and interplay of words in a sentence. If you want to understand how something works, take it apart. As a child, I was good at the taking things apart part but putting it back together without having parts left over was a bit more challenging. In writing, however, you want “things” left over. They are the words you don’t need, are redundant, or obscure clarity.

Even though I write poetry, I do not classify myself as a poet and certainly not as being gifted with any “special powers.” That’s because poetry is not the core of my writing. It resides a bit on my literary periphery—a place I occasionally visit, and, as such, always need to perform some warm-up exercises to get back into the poetry groove. Although not otherworldly, writing poetry takes a writer, at least this writer, into a different place where words have greater depth, intensity, and emotionality—visually descriptive or figuratively so—and produce imagery that rises above and goes beyond the page on which they otherwise would merely reside.

Admittedly, my definition of poetry is a bit old fashioned as represented in the poetry I write. To me, poetry represents a very wide range of words formatted and used in out-of-the-ordinary ways in some pattern of rhyme and rhythm to tell a story that generates emotion and imagery, or, perhaps more accurately, creates motion through the imagery of words.

I do not sit down with pen and paper and say, “Okay, let’s write a poem.” A true poet can do that I suppose—see, hear, feel, maybe even taste, the poetry in everything around him or her. Something has to forcibly nudge the poet in me—an image, something said, even a piece of news that contains some element of poetry lurking in its image or word structure and hints at or projects an emotion. Yes, a true poet may say the same thing about the sources of his or her “inspiration,” but for me the volume has to be turned up a little higher before I see or hear it. A true poet is perhaps more nuanced in his or her sensitivities. Perhaps it’s a matter of practice! I see poetry as less akin to writing words on paper and more akin to chipping into a slab of marble.

Where a “normal” person might see a dirty window, a poet perceives one covered in the dust of life. It’s the imagery through which poets view the world that make them poets rather than journalists. My limitations come from the fact that I was trained as a journalist. I have to back up and unplug lots of objective connections and predilections toward objectivity to find my poetic—emotional–perspective. But I don’t think you have to be a trained journalist to acquire this, let’s call it, a limitation of sensibilities. It comes naturally from exposure to an objective world.

A person who writes poetry also has to have a fondness for the flow of rhyme (some sort of rhythmic structure) in order to express emotion or tell story, and might have some difficulty, if asked, to explain how his or her internal creative engine that produces poetry is initiated and operates. But because I do not consider myself a writer first and a poet somewhere beyond second, I know that once in the poetic mood, everything tends to become, well, poetic and take on some form of rhythm or rhyme. Play in the sandbox of poetry and you start to find rhyme everywhere; like the sand, it clings to everything and that which doesn’t naturally occur you find yourself making up. Wouldn’t it be funny if the reason for that was that, in more ancient times, humans spoke in rhyme? It might be fun to try to communicate that way for a day. I suggest that you first read a lot of Shakespeare! Still, it would be a great way to force yourself into a greater sensitivity for words and their sounds and meanings.

This is the value to a writer to occasionally sit down and write poetry. It connects a writer more intimately to words. You quickly discover that beyond definition, words consist of textures and rhythms and special affinities to and preferences to be connected to the “right” word. You understand the hesitation in another’s conversation as “they search for the right word.” And you will find that you spend more time finding the just right word not just for your poetry but your prose, and that will make you a better writer.

Poetry and the Right Word

December 4, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

There once was a writer of prose
Who at poetry stuck up his nose.
A stick with a pen wiped off his grin,
Now the importance of poetry he knows.

Robert Frost might smile at this limerick, but more likely suggest a trip back to the drawing board, or that the writer—me—keep his day job or confine himself to something other than limericks. But writing poetry has a secret power if you’re a prose writer; it slows down the contemplative process and makes you think about individual words and finding just the right one. Finding the right word is a powerful tool for the writer to develop into a habit. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.” The search is worth the effort, always.

Poetry is the search for the right word—not the nearly right word, but the one that fits perfectly into the opening left for it. When writing poetry, you must also consider the nuances of rhyme, meaning, and usage of a word. As a result you become more intimate with each word you use. In prose, you tend to think in sentences and paragraphs. In poetry, you think in terms of individual words. First you have to search for the right one—it may be hidden in some dark corner of the dictionary or thesaurus—then you have to study its definition and usage to see if it fits into the space you’ve left open for it and whether it gets along well with its neighbors. You learn how sensitive a word can be to slight differences in definition and usage and location. One day “gay” refers to a happy person; the next to a homosexual one. You sometimes have to be careful in your word choice.

A word sometimes hints at another that might be a better choice, and that one might hint at still another. Just when you think you have lassoed the right word, a better one gallops up and lands, clinging desperately to the tip of your tongue just slightly out of mental reach, only to pop up a day later and with a teasing smile to say, “Am I what you’ve been looking for?”

Unless you’re into writing odes and other longer forms of rhyme, your poetry will likely be reasonably short and frequently drop into your lap while you’re working on some other piece of writing, or inexplicably pop up as a flash of inspiration. You don’t have to emulate Robert Frost—although reading him is well worth the effort—but do a sort of mental word calisthenics that writing poetry offers in its most basic form. A mental warm up in rhyme loosens up that part of your brain from which your prose flows.

An arduous search for the just right word frequently produces a wave of self-satisfaction, but just as likely, your mind will circle around and find another, better alternative. Don’t become frustrated. Each word is worth careful examination, not just in terms of its definition and usage, but how well it fits into a line and interacts with the rest of your verse or prose. You find yourself operating in the world of nuanced differences. A single word can add just the right amount of spice to your poetic recipe. Finding it can be like tasting cake batter!

My first exposure to poetry came at age ten or so when my cousins and I were exploring an informal landfill, i.e., dumping site, not far from my house down a side street that faded into a dirt access road that descended into some bottomland acreage near the river. I remember being amazed to discover that some farmer had planted peanuts in the flat, sandy, 10-acre patch at the bottom of the road that bifurcated a large pond that would fill up in response to an appropriately heavy rain and provide endless hours of Huck Finn adventures.

The sandy soil appeared to be ideal for peanuts and it was obvious that the dirt access lane received no traffic other than the farmer’s occasional visit and our neighborhood gang tromping about in search of an adventure. The circumstances made it a good place—out of sight—for someone disinclined to drive to the county landfill to dump the remnants of some recently deceased relative’s bounty or an overabundant attic or garage. When you’re ten, other people’s junk becomes your treasure. One of the treasures I discovered was an old battered suitcase, inside of which was an equally battered volume of Shakespeare. I wondered what the long-ago poet would have thought were he to see where his words had ended up.

Our gang’s hideout was the garage attic of one the members on the corner of our block, near the railroad tracks. It was where we kept our treasures, hid out from our parents, and relaxed on lazy summer days with some icy Kool-Aid. Shakespeare’s book was added to the other treasures there. At ten, one is barely ready for the old bard and had I checked the book out of the public library I likely would have been laughed, or drummed, out of the “club.” But, as a found treasure it had an enhanced pedigree and status under the Boy Code of Coolness and I spent time reading pieces of it.

I regret to say that somewhere along way it again became lost but left its impact. A volume in much better shape has since replaced it. But that original tome had an impact on me. When other boys groaned at the thought of reading poetry, I found Shakespeare’s sonnets intriguing, and by the time eighth grade rolled around I had become fond of poetry, although secretly so to guard against ejection from my gang of associates. This Shakespearean exposure also assured my subsequently developed preference to traditional poetic forms and rejection of “modern” formats.

No, I didn’t start spouting Shakespeare on the playground—that would have invited some taunting if not physical abuse—but the book left a substantive impact not just on poetry but thinking. It opened my mind to a world beyond the small one where I resided and the silly poems of Ogden Nash on mimeographed sheets. I had stuck my nose into poetry not up at it.

In my own classroom many years later, I discovered that students had a natural inclination to rhyme and that allowed me to open doors to poetry not just by reading it but by writing it and exploring in greater depth the efforts of others, and the power of individual words to create mental images.

I never studied poetry or the poetic form formally, but to enjoy it and to write it doesn’t require formal training. Once exposed to it, you might decide to explore it more formally. But for the writer, the effort extended to play with poetry is a sort of sensitivity training to how words work in prose that moves with grace. Writing poetry is a great warm up exercise not unlike a musician or singer running a few octaves in various keys. To dip your toes in the water, visit my poetry page at lowellforte.com. There you can read Molly Wrights’ “sawdust memories” and discover how each of us can connect to poetry through our personal experiences or interests.

One of the poetic forms a writer might find of value to play with is Haiku, a Sixteenth Century Japanese form with its own unique structure and rules. With its traditional three lines, the “cut,” and seasonal reference, it offers a great way to explore the power of the poetic form. Click on the tab connected to the book cover “Bittersweet Clusters” image on the left side of my homepage and read an explanation and examples of my own illustrated Haikus. Writing Haikus will flex your literary mind in the same way doing crosswords enhances your facility with vocabulary.

Rarely is time wasted exploring and expanding your writing experience through poetry. You might start with sampling a little Shakespeare.

Good Enough as Not Good Enough

October 2, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

When I was in journalism school, the new administration decided journalism could be taught as a lab project rather than through the classroom and practicums, one of which included writing for the university daily of which I was editor at the time. The dispute between these two educational philosophies was dubbed the Green Eyeshades vs. the Chi Squares. The products created by these new-age journalism lab rats reminded me of the mimeographed “Junior Journal” from my junior high days. They were odiferous—literally and figuratively. The experiment in this new pedagogy cost the school its Big Ten accreditation, which took years for it to win back. Fortunately, I got my B.A. and M.A. before that happened.

That old consternation generated by the abandonment of dedication to quality was recently reignited when I discovered the “new school” of poetry—that what you initially put on paper is that which is truest to the poet’s intended emotions and thus should be considered indelibly written. The philosophy at least offered an explanation for stuff I was reading and finding wholly lacking in quality, content, and clarity. I’ve always thought that any bad aftertaste from reading something should come from the subject matter and not the quality of the writing itself.

I have searched the world for an example of where this theory, that first is best, has been successfully applied to other human endeavors, in addition to literary ones, and have found none. The success of humans on this planet—and off-planet for that matter—is in part a product of our species’ innate drive to make incremental improvements to everything we do. I’m not saying that we’re always successful or that some of our choices have not been unwise or self-destructive even, but those are downside attributes of being sentient. Overall, however, we have improved our literary condition from those days when our creative medium was the charred end of sticks pulled from the cave fire. However, much of the poetry that is the product of this new thinking might better serve as the fuel for fires that char the sticks.

The “old days” were marked by the power and authority of gatekeepers who denied access to the undeserved, but unfortunately also unfairly blocked access to many who were deserving. Technology has helped break down those gates and level the playing field and now offers a soapbox to anyone who wants one. That can be seen as either a democratization of literary access or opening the gates to anarchy. Or, as one old boy told me in my formative years, life can be a bit like a cesspool; it’s not always the cream that rises to the top.

As a result, our new, technologically enhanced literary world offers great opportunity to the talented and the not so talented. What we need to keep in mind, however, is what differentiates the two and develop the skills to differentiate them as they float by on the literary surface. The distinction between the two is particularly important to those of us who seek to create literary content. My position is simple: rather than rationalize mediocrity, we must still demand the highest level of performance by keeping our own expectations and efforts high. The market place is very good at making and determining credibility—and thus the survivability of creative effort.

Not everyone will be Robert Frost; nor should they want to. The ideal is to be talented in your own special way, not talented at copying the style of others, unless parody is your wont. Along the way you will borrow elements from various sources and in time blend them and modify the results to become your own style. That is the process that has been going on since Bubba scratched the first stick-figured hunters and prey on those cave walls. But no one in the creative arts should ever consider just good enough as good enough. First thoughts and first drafts are usually rough thoughts and drafts, and, like diamonds, require additional effort to be shaped into glittering facets.

This blog entry is an offshoot of the introductory essay of the soon-to-be launched poetry page on my lowellforte.com website. In that essay, I explore the distinctions between prose and poetry and won’t repeat them here; the essay is but a click away at www.lowellforte.com. In my efforts to write that essay, however, I discovered the important distinctions between poetry and prose and the values that exploring them offer the prose writer.

Prose and poetry are two distinctly different genres for obvious reasons. But as I tried to describe their differences, I struggled to distill several thousand words of effort into the essence of what constituted the distinctions. That experience is a perfect of example of writing to learn. It is also an example of first never being best. The first draft made little sense, but gave rise to insights needed for the next draft, and the next, and so on. In the end, I found the distinctions between prose and poetry involve the level of intimacy between the writer and reader and the writer and her words.

A prose writer, armed with a thesaurus and Webster’s Third, can do great things. But a poet must dive below the surface of definitions and usage and immerse herself in the syllabic texture and rhythm and flow of individual words. It’s the difference between the person seeing the ocean from deck of the boat, and swimming the coral reefs with the fishes along on the sandy bottom. In poetry, it’s not always the search for the right word, but for the perfect word.

Asked what prompted him to rewrite the last page of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, Hemingway responded: “Getting the words right.”

The multiple thousands of words that can be expended in trying to describe the differences between poetry and prose is mostly an academic exercise. To truly understand the distinctions, a writer needs hands-on experience. As part of this learning-by-doing invitation, I reiterate my dislike of what is called modern poetry, especially any claim that the words that first hit the page should be impervious to the eraser’s ire. But I’m not going to climb up on my soapbox and demand a return to some past dedication to iambic pentameter or the writing of Shakespearian-styled sonnets, although efforts at each would likely enhance your respect for the forms and the contemplative processes that fuel them. But so would writing a few limericks, clean or obscene. It’s all about the effort to find just the right word to fit just right in the just right place for just the right purpose.

Set aside some time to explore poetry. Read some—old and new—and try to analyze why you liked this but not that. Poetry is an endless shelf of spices—some bitter, some sweet, and with an infinite variety of flavors in between. Besides limericks, you might delve into the structure and discipline of Haiku. (Check the poetry page for the “illustrated Haiku” I’ve put together, and for the rules on writing Haiku.) Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Try writing one. Or compare the works of some of the U.S. Poet Laureates. You’ll discover the differences between these genres as did I—prose deals with sentences and paragraphs and chapters and plot; poetry involves self and emotions—matters of the heart.

As for the level of effort to invest, do your best. Aim high. You will learn a lot just from the climb and it will bring you that much closer to the thinner-aired nest from which writers take flight.