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

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.