Intro Post: Making a Practice of Poetry

[jjhunter]

"Before we can be poets, we must practice"

—Mary Oliver, 'A Poetry Handbook'

J.J. here, returning to host this week on poetry as craft, one that can be cultivated and refined through practice. A little about myself, for those who don't know me from the previous times I've hosted: I'm a pupal neuroscientist and poet, neither fully accredited* (yet) or just starting out in either field. As such, I'm drawn to experimentation when it comes to poetry, and to metacognition — thinking about how I think — about writing poetry.

So. What makes a person a poet? Or perhaps I should say — what makes a person a memorable poet in a good way? (lnhammer might argue writing very bad poetry is both memorable and skilled, but those depths are not ones most of us aspire to!) Going by most dictionaries, anyone who creates poems is a poet. Would you agree? Myself, I go one step further: I think anyone who makes a practice of creating poems is a poet. To make a practice of poetry is, as I see it, to regularly realize what would otherwise be theoretical ('I'd like to write poetry more' etc.), and also to practice poetry: to exercise one's ear for the rhythm and sound of language, to sharpen the precision of one's diction, to experiment with form and syntax and the turning of lines, and most of all to integrate time & occasion to read, write, discuss, ferment poetry and poetic play into one's everyday life.

This week, I'll share with you some ways I've tried engineering "time & occasion" for poetry into my own life, and offer a sampling of resulting poems. In the meantime, I open the floor to you: do you make a practice of poetry yourself? Why or why not? Are there exercises along the lines of melannen's Some Exercises in the Craft of Writing that you think would be especially appropriate to writing poetry?


* The question of whether one needs or even ought to seek degree accreditation as a poet is one I'll leave for another time, but I think it's worth noting quantity & quality of poetry publication credits (or lack thereof) are often used informally to distinguish between 'professional' and 'amateur' poets.

Comments

[cadenzamuse]

muccamukk is hosting an informal writing workshop using Ursula K. LeGuin's Steering the Craft here. I think those exercises are well-suited for poetry--they're really about exploring writing basics:

The topics covered are:

The sound of language

punctuation, syntax, the narrative sentence and paragraph

rhythm and repetition

adjectives and adverbs

tense and person of the verb

voice and point of view

implicit narration: imparting information

crowding, leaping, focus, and control

which I think are useful things to return to and practice equally for poets and prose writers.

[kaberett]

HAH. I have in fact just been reading some volumes of Mary Oliver - I just joined the local poetry library, which because I am in London is the National Arts Council dedicated poetry library (which, incidentally, contains a book entitled The Poet's Way) - and also struggling with one poem in particular that wasn't quite sure how to happen, and hence have been thinking a lot about how I am beginning to trust, gradually, that it's okay for me to try to write a poem and have it not work out. (I talked a little about this in my own journal, and want to talk about it more.)

There's a thread I keep coming back to in songs I adore - Ani DiFranco's urgent napkin poems, Frank Turner's guitars & drums & desperate poetry: the idea that poetry is other, that it pours through one; I have the nagging sense that the poetry I write this way is better than the poetry I work at.

So I'm going to keep working at it. As I said, I'm beginning to trust that it's okay to try something and find that it doesn't quite taste the way I want it to; and I'm intending to take this into praxis.

[cirque]

As someone who has done a formal degree in creative writing (with equal distribution between prose and poetry), I can honestly say it was a terrible waste of time. (And money, but I like to forget about that).

I know formal poetry classes really work for some people, but IMO there's no substitute for actually writing to your own rhythm, learning to love poetry as both an art and a science, sifting through inspiration and finding your own way. In my experience that's where some of my better poetry comes from. While I was studying poetry, my poems were forced and static and geared towards what my tutor wanted, not what came naturally - which meant that my grades were good but I have never before or since been so unhappy about things I've written.

[okrablossom]

Funny that I had a similar reaction—that in my creative writing degree I had to write to expectations from my workshops which were unlike my own expectations for poetry—but that I felt it wasn't a waste of time because it taught me that I needed to write the way I write irregardless of what 12 people said each semester.

Writing with music (anaphora, refrain, alliteration) makes me happy and I learned it wasn't worth writing without them just to please workshop and other people critiquing my work. That is my voice, even if no one else delights in it.

[primeideal]

Your digression about bad poetry reminds me: I was reading an anthology of some Martin Gardner essays, and he mentions the difference between "poetry" and "verse"--the latter incorporating a lot of authors who are known for one particular work, that enjoys a lot of cultural popularity (and is enjoyed by lots of people) even when supposed high art is not--but still separate from bad poetry in a way. Interesting distinctions to draw!

[calissa]

Oh! I am looking forward to this series. I'm one of those people who have been saying "I'd like to write poetry more" but haven't yet carved out the time to do so. Now that the anthology is (mostly) over, perhaps I shall be able to do so--especially with such a series to inspire me!

[macey]

[hi! I found my way here via kabarett's mentions of the comm, hope that's okay]

For myself, I don't tend to make a practice of poetry, at least not in a deliberate fashion. I've done so in the past, and I find that it decreases my median quality to make myself write poems regularly - I find poetry to be much more inspiration-based than prose, which I can make time to sit & do like any other craft.

I do, though, find that my mind turns towards the ritual twist of words formed into poetry when I'm particularly distressed. This inevitably pulls me back to writing poetry, even with a year or more since last I've done so. Sometimes, I just can't not. But for me, poetry is something I can only create in complete privacy (I'm not sure why), and since I share a one-bedroom apartment, that's a little tricky to get hold of.

[alee_grrl]

Welcome to poetree, macey.

One of the things I love about poetry communities is finding out what other people's habits, tendencies, and preferences are when it comes to writing. I myself have had long periods where I wasn't writing much of anything, and then hit inspiration and fell back into writing.

I can see where privacy would be needed or preferred to write poetry as it can be a very intimate writing process. I myself often use poetry as a way to process more tangled emotions or difficult things. I definitely prefer to have a quieter space when I'm working on poems of that nature.

Okay...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> What makes a person a poet? <<

Writing poems. You might be good or bad, high or low productivity; but if you write poems, then you're a poet. It might be an occasional thing, or quite a habit.

The earliest one of mine we have is in my parents handwriting, from before I could write things down.

Somewhere in junior high I decided that I wanted to practice poetry. So I wrote a poem every weekday. One of them was a hundred-page epic that I brought in page by page, because I was showing them to acquaintances. I kept this up for several years. After that it stopped being quite so clockwork; I might write several poems at once, then nothing for a few days. But I kept writing them.

Now I do a lot of my poetic writing in the fishbowls, which means one or two dozen in a day, and several hundred in a year.

One of the things I've learned is that whacking out massive quantities of anything will make you better at it, even if the individual works are not all that impressive.

Also ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Forgot to include, these are some poetry exercises I've written:

http://penultimateproductions.weebly.com/worksheets-cm.html

http://penultimateproductions.weebly.com/worksheets-nh.html

http://penultimateproductions.weebly.com/worksheets-p.html

[calissa]

Just returning to say that I am still chewing over these posts. A big thank you for the link to melannen's post. I actually found myself picking up an old book of crosswords after reading it and have been having great fun.