On Writing Poetry, Part 3

Turning out a poetic phrase is merely no more than placing one perfect word after the other, resulting from having a copious vocabulary and imagination. And both of these usually come from wide reading over a long period of time. I’m not talking about skimming five novels a week, but about reading every word on the page of great writing and paying attention to detail. For example, read the prose work Local Wonders (title shortened) by Ted Kooser, once the Poet Laureate of the United States. Notice that he writes of simple themes but in poetic detail.

One suggestion about detail: break down description to its tightest possibility. The progression may go from plant to flower to rose to tea rose to the tea rose called the Lady Hillingdon. Be specific: the Lady Hillingdon tea roses bursting into bloom three days before the wedding. Use your computer to discover such ideas. I just did.

I want to suggest an assignment for you to do, and I am dead serious about it. Go to a well-stocked public library and locate a book by Emlyn Williams called George, an Early Autobiography, published in 1961. If your library doesn’t have it, ask the librarian if she will borrow it from another library for you. That is often done. You don’t need a library card to inquire. You can sit in the library and fulfill the assignment in five minutes or less: read the first five paragraphs. It depends on how the publisher arranged the first page, but those five paragraphs may go to the second page. When I read this prose the first time, I got this far and said, “This is poetry.” Eventually I typed it up to look like a poem, one long stanza with long lines of his exact wording, showed it to others, and they thought it was poetry. But Emlyn Williams was a playwright. He probably wasn’t aware of being a poet. The page is loaded with ordinary words such as dog, bird, straw, free, gate, heat, frog, dew, grass, sun, well, floor, rag, but also sprinkled with words such as knickerbockers, conscient, quavering, tawny, incantation, tremulous, and the Titanic. This first page alone might have sold the book to the editor. I’d like to copy this passage here for you, but I don’t have permission to do so.

These two examples, of Williams and Kooser, are among the best you can find to illustrate “the turn of the phrase.” Remember that you are not seeking a long word as you write, but the right word, which may be only three or four letters long. Free verse poets need especially to read these selections. Many so-called must think anything goes, that free verse has no bounds. But it does. What you write needs to sound like poetry. When it doesn’t, it probably lacks the turn of the phrase.

The other point I want to stress is that serious lyric poetry must be about two things: the wording on the page and its other meaning. The surface expressions are only to support what you really want to say, hidden between the lines. You may start out by showing the reader luscious black grapes from Tuscany. But that is not enough. What thoughts did you have that inspired you to pick up your pen? If you thought the appearance of the huge grapes alone was enough to write about, then study further. They need to mean something.

The little haiku, so tiny, should be a tower of strength through its turn of the phrase and its two meanings, one hidden between the lines. Remember, haiku gets no adverbs and seldom a descriptive adjective, and is not a complete sentence, though you see published “haiku” that breaks all these rules.

I’ll end this perhaps somber blog with a joke. To write good poetry, choose your ancestors carefully. But then, maybe that isn’t a joke. Who knows? Let me know if this has been of value to you poets.

♥