NOTE: I chose Making of a Poem and Rhyme's Reason as texts because they are simple and straightforward and will serve you for years and years as you try your hand at different strategies of poem-making. It is clear to me that several of you don't have (or are not looking at) these texts before you try your own poems. STOP THAT. The selections I have given are short--and if you read them they will serve you better than any lecture I could give, thus leaving time for workshopping. To write a poem well... you must be in the habit of reading poems... also an art.
Read: MoP (136-155). RR (17-25). And below.
The first poems many of you ever wrote were haiku—a verse form borrowed from the Japanese in which each line has a prescribed number of syllables: 5,7,5 (this, regardless of the number of stresses). Japanese, as well as other languages which tend to emphasize stressed syllables less (Finnish, modern French) have several forms that organize their poetry by counting syllables rather than stress (in English—the most common type of verse form is that organized along an accentual-syllabic [stress-counting] meter, as in iambic pentameter [Shakespeare and sonnets], iambic trimester and tetrameter [ballads], and the more galloping anapestic and dactylic feet—see Rhyme’s Reason). However, many poets in English have fallen in love with the more subtle number-pleasure that syllabics offer and have organized their poems accordingly in one of two ways.
1. By having all lines of a certain length of syllables:
1. By having all lines of a certain length of syllables:
(7) In My Craft or Sullen Art BY DYLAN THOMAS
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
(10) Lions Are Interesting BY JOEL BROUWER
Each morning in the little white cabin
by the river they woke to a raccoon
clawing under the floorboards or banging
in the wood stove. They did not discuss this.
Instead they said it was a perfect day
to pick blueberries on the hill, or that
a hike to the old glassworks sounded good.
They were beginning to speak not in meat
but in the brown paper the butcher wraps
around it. Brown paper around dirty
magazines. Like dirty magazines, they
only traced the contour of substance: silk
over skin, skin over muscle, muscle over
bone. What’s under bone? Marrow? Their forks so
small and dull. As if for dolls. You can tell
dolls from animals because the latter
are made of meat. Many eat it, also.
Lions are interesting. Lions don’t eat
the flesh of their kills right away, but first
lap up the blood, until the meat is blanched
nearly white. White as the little cabin
by the river they stayed in that summer.
White as the raccoon covered in ashes,
his black eyes bottomless and bright with hate.
2. Or by creating stanzas or different syllabic line lengths that then repeat (Marianne Moore [1887-1972] was the high-priestess of this form):
No Swan So Fine BY MARIANNE MOORE
“No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers — at ease and tall. The king is dead.
Poetry BY MARIANNE MOORE
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Five Haikus BY RICHARD WRIGHT
1.
I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.
2.
I give permission
For this slow spring rain to soak
The violet beds.
3.
With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.
4.
Burning autumn leaves,
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.
5.
A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.
NOW YOU
Your assignment is to create a syllabic form for yourself (all lines 13-syllables long, or a repeating stanza of 2-7-11-5 or 1-1-2-3-5-8, or 9-5-3.) Only caveat: the poem must be a minimum of 12 lines long. Experiment with line length to see what the effects are. If you are having trouble—write 5 or 6 lines that are 10-12 syllables (a common thought/phrase unit in English) and then start dividing them in a way that heightens your meaning and draws attention to ideas and units that increase the power of the work. Good luck.
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