HELPFUL HINTS
Notes on Writing Poetry
JON ANDERSON
Notes on Writing Poetry
JON ANDERSON
First published by BLUE MOON PRESS, Tucson, Arizona
INTRODUCTION
In 1968, when I first started teaching the writing of poetry, attendant with all the fervor of passing on whatever I'd discovered in my own writing as a young poet, I set about jotting down some of the things I'd learned, discovered, or surmised. These had no order of importance, were largely subjective (the "you" I addressed was, most often, myself), and often seemed antithetical to each other.
Over the years I've offered them to undergraduate writing classes, with the single caution that everything here was certainly not applicable to everyone's writing; that, in fact, their opposites might be useful. If these have worth, it may be because, in total, they accept the act of writing as both artificial & mysterious.
I've also found that further explanation of them tends toward recipe, added confusion, or banality. When I was a teenager I loved imagining certain scenarios?: one, that with the psychopath's luger pressed daintily between my eyes, there was always one sentence, phrase, word said rightly that would reduce him to tears (or at least a moment's deliberation)—unlike my touching speech to the United Nations that would bring world-wide lasting peace this depended on brevity and quick escape.
1. When you do something that seems entirely new, get the opinion of people whose taste you respect; don't trust yourself at its inception. Cultivate a friendship with a contemporary whom you respect as a poet and like as a person.
2. Explore different emotional attitudes: resignation, self-anger, social anger, irony, largeness....
3. Remember the world of ghosts & small gestures.
4. Love the mysterious; don't try to explain it away.
5. Read Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Letters to a Young Poet; also Randall Jarrell's essays on Robert Frost in Poetry and the Age.
6. Surround yourself with poets, in friendships and books; don't compete with your contemporaries, you learn little from it. Do compete with professional poets you admire, they'll demand more of you.
7. A quiet, steady voice may be most enduring.
8. Follow through—develop constantly—if you have
trouble developing a poem, write in rhyme &. narrative.
9. "I" "we" "you" usually give a poem location &. implied reality.
10. When you feel yourself getting "carried away" with emotion, undercut it.
11. Steal from your own poems; keep all your poems, even failures, incompletions.
12. Experiment with form—rhyme, syllablics, prosy writing.
13. Good poems tend to happen in streaks; if you write a good one, don't gloat, write another.
14. Make each poem a reaction to the last one you wrote.
15. Never imitate your successes. It's repetition.
16. Things usually fall into place (understandings about your writing, new techniques, new subject matter, point of view) suddenly & unexpectedly. Expect to do some backsliding during the dry times (like falling into old, safe rhetorics). Write without expectation.
17. Good poems tend to happen infrequently, maybe 2 or 3 a year. The trick is to write a lot of decent ones while waiting for the light. All the failed or mediocre poems you spent hours on pay off by giving you language & technique when the good ones come.
18. Read: whole books, not just anthologies. Give a poet's voice a chance to accumulate, blend with your own.
19. Imitate the voice of anyone you admire.
20 . Extend sentences or clip them—a change in sentence-measure or line length can alter the tone (& eventually the subject matter) of your poems.
21. Write too much, then cut.
22. Try revising a poem as you write; when you falter, retype & rewrite what you've already done while waiting for the next, less expected move.
23. Say the toughest thing.
24. Follow the path a poem takes, not your preconception.
25. Set up conflicts of intelligence & emotion ("Justice outweighs human life," for example).
26. Don't stick to the truth.
27. In images, & especially metaphor, say the best & strongest thing, then keep the poem going.
28. Prose poems can change your rhythms & subject matter, relieve compulsive personal esthetics.
29. Write often, keep your sense of language alive.
30. If you find a word you love, use it, base a poem on its use.
31. Put something of interest in every line or sentence.
32. Don't try to order your life for your poetry.
33. Spend some time alone every day.
34. Make sure the poem progresses in content; say another thing.
35. Cultivate that part of yourself that is most unsure, tentative, delicate, self-dangerous (& expect to pay the price).
36. "A terrible gift, perception" (Stafford)—cultivate it accurately & with human decency.
37. Every once in a while, simplify your language, speak openly.
38. Revise old poems (only if they retain some interest) or at least look at them occasionally; you may learn from what went wrong or remained undeveloped. They may also give you good phrases, turns, for future work.
39. On good days, just let the poem speak itself; make no decisions about it, trust it.
40. Creativity seems to be largely a matter of letting go, of release, of luck—so cultivate craft.
41. Don't be afraid of writing cold, detached poems; they sometimes lead to new perceptions.
42. Generosity of spirit probably produces the best poems, or at least the most forgiveable.
43. Don't protect your personal life in your poems, and certainly don't justify it.
44. Don't be coy.
45. When you can't write, lie on the floor awhile.
46. Put successful parts of failed poems together. Try absolutely arbitrary, good-sounding titles.
47. There are absolutely no rules to what makes a good poem—but you will probably discover "rules" that apply to your writing; that is, your limitations & strengths. When you're not writing well, or just dissatisfied, break those rules.
48. When you're with a poet-friend, read professional poems you like to each other,- talk about them. One of the small joys of being a poet is trading opinions & gossip, trading loves, playing the children's game of serious, intricate discussion & shared recognition.
49. Read poems before you write; but not your favorites, which you can hardly hope to measure up to—instead read new work.
50. Make a list of your top 20 professional poems; narrow it to 10 or 5. Does it tell you anything about what you most love & respect in poetry?
51. Think of a poem as something else: an essay, New journalism, formal sound or pattern, letter.
52. The sentence, not the line, determines the form & values of free verse. Think of phrases, clauses, line-endings as a counterpoint to the sentence.
53. The first sentence of a poem will determine an enormous degree of the rhetoric, seriousness, measure, etc. of a poem. Write one that you'll have to live up to in the remainder of the poem.
