Writing Poetry

Creative and Critical Approaches

Chad Davidson, Gregory Fraser

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781350309968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Writing Poetry combines an accessible introduction to the essential elements of the craft, with a critical awareness of its underpinnings. The authors argue that separating the making of poems from critical thinking about them is a false divide and encourage students to become accomplished critics and active readers of poetic texts.

Part 1

Foundations

1 Establishing Practice

Poesy, prosy, and poetry

In our opening chapter, we introduced you to a couple of published poems by former students. We begin this section with another student example. The following poem, by Nick McRae, appeared in the journal DIAGRAM:

The Body: A Concise History of Burial

I

When I see a fresh grave torn into the ground,

I consider everything that has made it possible:

immigrant workers,

the flashings of anonymous shovels, the shovelmakers,

the industry of writing checks

and the paper and ink that feed it.

Least of all some unfortunate family.

Though, at Giza, there exists a graveyard

for those who fell atop the Pyramid,

who, ropes across their chests,

were crushed under the colossal weight of the sun.

Even slavemasters bury their dead.

Five thousand men died

constructing the Great Pyramid.

An entire nation sweated to bury one man.

Some would call this tragedy.

II

My assumption is this:

that somewhere a dog plods through the woods,

comes upon a body sprawled under brambles,

takes his mouthful, noticing the sky through the branches.

I wish, now, to see those leaves,

the way the body’s open wounds cling to them,

as though to take them into the flesh.

There are three essential differences

between the buried and the unburied.

First, that a dandelion might grow.

Second, that a dog should go hungry.

The third is that they are the same.

III

Irish mobsters in New York hung their dead on meat hooks to cure,

or tossed them piece by piece into the Hudson in trash bags.

In doing so, it is important to tear out the lungs.

Otherwise, the torso will not sink.

One man lamented into the camera,

I forgot to tear out the fucking lungs.

IV

In all of this, one thing remains –

that to die is to be torn from the body,

to be sprawled in deep shade,

or to be planted carefully in the glorious,

nearly impossible sun.

How wonderful, to shoot up

from the earth as a carrot flower.

Always remember this.

That the body is a question

one must come to oneself,

one that begs to be held up to the light

like a carrot,

turned in your hand

and tasted.

You could spend more than a lifetime

hovering over the vegetable bin.¹

‘The Body: A Concise History of Burial’ succeeds for several reasons, not the least of which is Nick’s studious avoidance of two potential pitfalls: poesy and the prosy. What are these common hazards, and why do they often prevent poets from reaching their full promise in the craft?

Drawing distinctions between poesy, prosy, and poetry can help you sharpen your awareness of the differences between language adopted in everyday verbal communication and language found in poetry. Under poesy falls the expected ‘poetic’ clichés, the stuff of sentimental greeting cards. Words and concepts such as soul, spirit, embrace, rose, kiss, broken heart, love, and rapture, for example, come easily to mind when many people imagine what is ‘poetic’. In addition to conventional and time-worn poetic vocabulary, we may also add anachronisms such as thou and methinks, along with huge abstractions such as hope, desire, and eternity. The idea of poetry as mere self-expression might also belong here, as it fails to acknowledge any difficulty or deliberate craft. After all, we express ourselves whether we choose to or not. Even the clothing we wear expresses something about us, and we do little more than purchase the clothes we like and put them on.

Although poets employ the same words used every day to buy bread, to communicate with a postal worker, to order a pizza over the phone, the uses to which poets put language, the tests to which they subject their words, are radically different. In his essay ‘The Poet in an Age of Distraction’, Sven Birkerts notes that ‘it’s the poet’s job to make sure there is bullion behind the currency we use each day’.² For Birkerts, poets reinvigorate the common currency of language, combining words in unexpected ways. We apply the term prosy to creative writing that fails to test language’s elasticity or challenge words to take surprising leaps. With this term, we do not intend to derogate prose, but to interrogate easy, unselfconscious adoptions of ordinary word usage. Because of the sheer amounts of prose we all digest daily (street signs, news broadcasts, internet chat rooms, biology texts), training our minds to be responsive to the poetic can take time. To begin, try to notice when language seems to take risks and not merely lie down in the orderly prose of commerce. Look, for example, at the following excerpts – the first from established poet Bruce Bond (whose half dozen books include Blind Rain, Cinder, and Radiography), the second from student Jesse Bishop (whose first published poem, ‘The Postman Will Not Do for Mother’, appeared in Pebble Lake Review):

… the whole scene resolves to a sizzle

of flies, that and the careless twitch you see

in sleeping things, as if the kudu were still breathing in their minds³

… She shudders

at licking stamps but seals the fate of a flower

as she marries it to an envelope, that nine-by-five

room with its cellophane window⁴

Bond and Bishop know that language must be tested, stretched, made to perform. In fact, ‘language in performance’ seems an apt description of poetry. Such a definition may not be as gorgeously visceral as Emily Dickinson’s (‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry’⁵) or as terse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (‘the best words in the best order’⁶), but the idea of ‘language in performance’ does signal the energetic, non-prosaic nature of the writing process. This definition also allows for helpful comparisons to other art forms. Just as musicians and singers may talk of cadence, rhythm, and volume, we may speak of a poem’s musical qualities. Just as visual artists, painters, and photographers may talk of composition – the spatial placement of the shapes in a work – so, too, may we discuss the poem’s appearance on the page. We might also consider, as sculptors and architects would, a poem’s form and structure. And, of course, in thinking about ‘performance’ and craft, we can compare writing to acting, which involves physical movements and verbal expressions on a stage (or, in the case of poetry, a ‘page’).

Downplaying the vertical

Along with poesy and the prosy, poets sometimes face a third roadblock: approaching the composition process from a ‘vertical’ perspective. By that, we mean a tendency to confuse the movement and shape of the reading process (which runs vertically down the page in chronological sequence, one line after the next) with the movement and shape of writing. While reading is predominantly a vertical and linear act, the process of making poems tends to be non- or extra-linear, where poets let in random material and embrace the recursive, haphazard quests for anything potentially poetic – especially in the early stages of production. In reading, one starts at the beginning of a text and follows its logic to the conclusion, but in writing, poets do not typically proceed from start to finish with clear-cut beginnings, middles, and ends. Some poems, of course, are born this way, but these tend to be exceptions. More frequently, strong poems are pieced together from disparate parts.

We hardly intend, however, to undermine the value of reading, since practising poets must become voracious readers – particularly but not exclusively of contemporary verse. Sustained reading is absolutely necessary for the internalization of complex tones, structures, and movements of poems. Yet, while there is no substitute for deep and eclectic reading, it is crucial to see differences between the finished products that are poems and the kinds of extra-linear uses of language involved in their making. The vertical approach typically forces the process to occur too quickly, in an overly sequential and predictable manner. It dangerously encourages the poet to ‘write down the page’ towards a finished product. Part of a practising poet’s job involves learning not to be duped by the readable finished products of published poems. In a way, poems are con artists, magicians that keep their processes secret. One look at any veteran poet’s notebook reveals the unruly histories of individual poems. Observe what renowned American poet B. H. Fairchild confides in an interview conducted by student Melissa Stubbs and published in our campus literary journal, the Eclectic:

I have worked on and off on the same poem, in some cases, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Foundations
• Part II Speculations
• Notes
• Selected Further Reading
• Index