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

[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.