Word by Word?

Kevin, you may be on the bottom rung, but your ladder is on the roof.

I'm impressed by your drive and dedication. Just a thought: maybe the poets who take great pains to work in form and detail are a lot more likely to document their approach, or to have it documented. Those wild genii like you, well, how much could be written about their technique?

Maybe your sample is naturally biased.

Let me ask you this, though: do you have any filter? Do you have any 'feel' for how your work comes out, or do you just put it down willy-nilly?

My point would be that, if you're writing by feel, that feel can always get better with practice.

Furthermore, whenever you write - or read - or experience something, it's going to change you, however subtly. I'd think you're growing as a poet just by, well, being a poet.

Me, I'm still in the shop, trying on everything to see how it fits. The tailor is laughing his head off.

Mate, that's exactly how I feel about my career. It's uncanny. This forethought thing is alien to me. For the last twenty years, I've had no idea where I wanted to be in five years.

Near as I can figure, some people are rules-based, and some are intuition-based. I was that way - intuitive - in math and languages as well; don't ask me the names of the theorems or make me recite the grammar rules, but I knew how to work the problems or conjugate the verbs.

I look forward to seeing what the rest of our august number have to say.

Actually, we are all on a ladder at the very bottom rung compared to almost anyone you are reading a biography about.

I guess, to some extent, this all comes back to a definition of poetry and how it should be written. No two poets will agree on a definition, but it seems like today the most common thought among most amatuer poets is a partial quote from Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Unfortunately, they miss, or don't know about the completion of those thoughts later in the preface, where Wordsworth talks about long and deep thought in relationship to all good poems.

Something has to separate poetry from prose. Each poet has to figure out for himself/herself what it is, and, once figuring that out, learn what it takes to write it. I guess I balk at the concept that it does not take study to write good poetry. It takes study to write good prose; why should we think poetry should take less? In fact, it should take more! I have heard fiction defined as "life with the boring parts removed." If so, then I think poetry is prose with the boring parts removed. Poetry is dense writing, based on images, metaphor, and language devices of different types. To write the best poetry, we need to study and master all of these things.

For instance, you mention how these poets you are reading about manipulated lines, and you imply they put great effort into it. Well, isn't the line the fundamental element of poetry? One of the things that separates poetry from prose is the line break. If this is so, then the last word of the line becomes critically important to the effectiveness of the poem. Actually the last word of each line. A study of line breaks, how they work well--or not, how they enhance a poem, how they create tension and anticipation, is an important part of a poet's development. I've followed week long discussions about this at one site.

I prefer to write in forms than in free verse. I have trouble hearing the poetry in free verse. And meter came easy for me, opening up the way to rhyme. Metaphor, sonic devices (other than rhyme), and imagery have proved much more difficult. I have to study and practice them, and am still doing so. I began writing poetry in August 2001, in the summer of my 50th year of life. Quickly seeing how much there was to it, I began to study the craft. I decided to give myself a decade of intense study and practice and see where that left me. I'm halfway through it now, although I have sort of taken the last year off, so maybe I'm not halfway through. Or maybe that year of reflection and rest is part of the ten years of intense development. I don't yet know. But I know that I'm still working on poems from five years ago. In fact, I posted this week in the Critique Forum, "Juan, The Concrete Man", (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?)t=51331) which was originally written in January 2002. I've never been satisfied with it, worked on it off and on until mid-2004, then put it aside. Not writing anything new at present, but wanting to participate in the forums, I decided to post it for critique. Hopefully I will be able to take it to completion now, with the help of a few critters here and at another site where I'm workshopping it.

So what's the answer? I think the fact that you are reading about these poets in books, that their work has been selected for anthologies, that someone cares enough about them to write their biography, indicates that these are the best and brightest. The judgment of time has selected them from the poets of their day for special treatment. Who better to study? Who better to emulate? In assessing "Am I doing it right?" and considering a change in course of how I do poetry, I want to see how the poets I believe to be the best did it, and see if some part of their methods will work for me.

One last thing about form and creativity and I'll quit. I believe my creativity is turned loose when working within a restricted form. If I'm writing a sonnet, and I have only five iambs to use in a line, and if that last syllable has to rhyme with another, somewhere else in the poem, and if the feet have to be consistent with each other, mostly matching but sometimes relieving, and if I have to build up to a volta at a certain place and come to a logical conclusion at fourteen lines that gives take-away value for a reader, how much creativity it takes to achieve all that! Words have to be carefully selected, tried and tossed aside in favor of something that works better. Quite likely something spills out onto the page that comes close to fitting the form, but without revision--at least as much and probably more than I would do in a prose piece--the poem will not reach its optimum. I think that takes a lot of creativity.

To roughly paraphrase Thomas Carlyle, this post is too long, but I haven't time to make it shorter. And it's something I like to talk about.

Best Regards,
NDG

Kevin, I don't believe you can emulate the process of another poet. How those thoughts work through a person's brain and land on the page will vary as much as each person does. I found that I was a worse poet when I tried to hard. I had to let go and let it come out freely - I was suffocating myself in attempts to have it fit some "magic template". I can give enough forethought to something to determine a metaphor that fits a person for my AW collection, that's as far as it goes. I am astounded by those that give so much thought to their words as well.
And I agree with Rob, you might be on the bottom rung of a ladder but the ladder really is on the roof (and I'll add to that analogy that you jump from it every day and climb back up.)
Don't force yourself to be a poet that you are not. Your work is brilliant in its flow, voice, and vision. Be what you are and let yourself naturally progress. I think you have gotten ahead of yourself. Don't make yourself try to jump to the top rung - it's not that easy to do. Let your own natural talent and ability progress toward those goals at a natural learning pace...learning through practice and more writing.
I have no doubt that you can do what ever you set your mind to in writing. Now its time for you to not have a doubt and go forward with words - whether purged in an instant "vomit" or meticulously chosen. Just write it - small steps toward the goal...before long you'll be jumping off the top rung of the ladder on the roof and flying high, brother.

methods are irrelevant in any comparative way.

results are all that matter.

My last poetry instructor refused to teach meter or poetic forms. She said it did more to hinder early poets than help.

The most important parts of poetry are the imagery, the emotional connection with the words, how they manipulate the reader. Once you have that, and have mastered it, then worry about how it looks. Experiment with form -- and how form can help function.

For me, I pay great attention to my word choices. I also pay attention to the form of the poem, but for me it's a more instinctual, vicsceral choice. I want the length of my lines to sequentially flow with their own rhythm, lengthening or shortening them depending on how I want to regulate the speed of the reading.

My stanza lengths are rhythmic as well.

And yet at the same time, I try not to be predictable or consistent in my forms. I want to be free-versed (maybe not as free-versed as cumming) but my form is dependent on the poem's needs, and not the other way around.

Kevin,

If you wanted to be a race car driver, would you jump in a lamborgini (sp?) and win? I don't think so. But, if you had the chance to go a few laps in a relatively nice starter car, would you pass up the thrill? I don't think so. So, the flag has dropped, the engine is begging and it's all yours!

I've heard it said several places in AW(?) that to write you need to nix your internal critic and just write. Work with what you've written after you've written what it is that you want to write.