A Poetry Handbook

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.

I cherish two sentences and keep them close to my desk. The first is by Flaubert. I came upon it among Van Gough's letters. It says, simply, 'Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

Invention hovers always a little above the rules.

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air.

But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.

Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents

Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language.

The subjects that stir the heart are not so many, after all, and they do not change.

One learns by thinking about writing, and by talking about writing-but primarily through writing.

This I have always known - that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come someday to bitter and mortal regret.

But very little of it can do more than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve.

Among the things I learned in those years were two of special interest to poets. First, that one can rise early in the morning and have time to write (or, even, to take a walk and then write) before the world's work schedule begins. Also, that one can live simply and honorably on just about enough money to keep a chicken alive. And do so cheerfully.

These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

You would learn very little in this world if you were not allowed to imitate. And to repeat your imitations until some solid grounding in the skill was achieved and the slight but wonderful difference-that made you you and no one else-could assert itself. Every child is encouraged to imitate. But in the world of writing it is originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of sins. Too bad. I think if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned partially and haphazardly. Before we can be poets, we must practice; imitation is a very good way of investigating the real thing.

Various ambitions to complete the poem, to see it in print, to enjoy the gratification of someone's comment about it—serve in some measure as incentives to the writer's work. Though each of these is reasonable, each is a threat to the other ambition of the poet, which is to write as well as Keats, Yeats, or Williams—or whoever it was who scribbled onto a page a few lines whose force the reader once felt and has never forgotten. Every poet's ambition should be to write as well. Anything else is only a flirtation.

A poem requires a design--a sense of orderliness. Part of our pleasure in the poem is that it is a well-made thing. . . .

A poem on the page speaks to the listening mind.

If it is...not just one's own accomplishment that carries one from this green and mortal world--that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise--then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.

One learns thinking about writing, and by talking about writing—but primarily through writing.

These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering—I mean remembering in words—what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives. The poet used the actual, known event or experience to elucidate the inner, invisible experience—or, in other words, the poet used figurative language, relying for those figures on the natural world.

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of the poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies--in holiness and mirth.

from Emerson's journals. In the context, it is written in the past tense; changing the verb to present tense it reads: The poem is a confession of faith. Which is to say, the poem is not an exercise. It is not 'wordplay.' Whatever skill or beauty it has, in contains something beyond language devices, and has a purpose other than itself.

Especially when writers are just starting out, the emphasis should be not only upon what they write, but equally upon the process of writing. A successful class is a class where no one feels that 'writer's block' is a high-priority subject.

Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself-- soon it begins to arrive when you do.

But the music of your talk Never shall the chemistry Of the secret earth restore. All your lovely words are spoken. Once the ivory box is broken, Beats the golden bird no more. (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Memorial to D.C. V Elegy)

ALLITERATION, strictly speaking, is the repetition of the initial sound of words in a line or lines of verse.