On Writing Poetry, Part 1

Here’s a reply to an occasional question sent my way: what are your secrets for writing poetry? This always amuses me, for I believe poets are born poets and should not need teaching about writing poetry. But for those who struggle and possibly turn out something praiseworthy, and for those who don’t struggle but think they turn out something just as good, I’ll mention a few ideas that don’t usually appear in all books on writing poetry.

Poets probably wrote their first gems as rhymes. If rhyme came easy for you when you were little, are you still using the run-fun-sun-gun and perhaps even a Hun in your poems as an adult? It was time to move on years ago. I’ll give an example: one line of mine ended with the word bacon and needed a rhyme in the very next line. What a thrill it was when that line ended with to awake on. In an otherwise artless piece, this rhyme was the only worthwhile and clever thing. But that little bit didn’t make the whole a poem. You’re welcomed to use it yourself, but know that it is printed herein on this date, and you won’t get by with it. I’ll likely never use it elsewhere, but it’s still all mine. I don’t mean I created it, for I didn’t. It just came to me out of the blue.

There you have what poetry is: clever, original, and often beautiful or dark phrasing that comes to you out of the blue with no better way of saying it.

To produce your best, choose to write either poetry or prose, but not both during the same period of your life. If you think you can write both equally well, just try naming a few famous writers who excelled at both. There’s Robert Louis Stevenson, but did he write children’s poetry in the same period of his life in which he wrote the adult crime story “Markheim”? I doubt it. Hemingway failed at writing poetry. Robert Frost would likely have failed at writing a novel. C. S. Lewis failed at poetry, though some was published after his death, but he gave us the Narnia stories and one of the best books I’ve ever read, Out of the Silent Planet, volume one of a trilogy of science fiction fantasy.

If you don’t have a fathomless or skyrocketing but controlled imagination, don’t try writing either poetry or fiction, though you may get a Pulitzer with your nonfiction.

A bit more about rhyme. Some words are not poetic except with the pens of real geniuses, Ogden Nash, to name one. Don’t let the second word in your rhyme sound forced. Robert Frost once said, when he was given a poem to critique, the first thing he did was to look in the rhyme column. If the second part of the rhyme was forced, he rejected the poem.

In a poetry contest I once judged, a poem rolled along okay for a beginner’s attempt [she was past 65 years of age], till I came to the last word: galore. It did not complement what went before, so noticeably forced. Here is a way to get around that, if you are one of those who struggle with writing poetry, aiming at something praiseworthy. Since you are not waiting for a line or word to strike you from out of the blue, choose the second word of the rhyme first. That’s no sillier than choosing the first one first with no idea in mind.

As the name suggests, light verse is not so serious as lyric, dramatic, or narrative poetry. But it should, above all other concerns, be clever, surprisingly clever. Of course, it can be funny, but not funny without being clever. That would be corn.

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