Five Easy Pieces Exercise the Practice of Poetry
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Also, most of the authors qualify their prompts as ways of making discoveries, not keys to creating perfect poems on the spot. Plus, the last
Part of me wants to hate on writing-by-formula, but I like this book a lot and was interested in a lot of the exercises. It's a good read on its own, even if you don't intend to use any of the prompts. After each prompt, the author explains why s/he finds these particular constraints valuable. I liked Agha Shahid Ali's reflections on the ghazal especially.Also, most of the authors qualify their prompts as ways of making discoveries, not keys to creating perfect poems on the spot. Plus, the last section on revision sort of grounds all the creative hullabaloo of the previous chapters. Lynn Emanuel's essay is especially sobering and good.
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This is a fantastic bo
Well, never say never! I'm moving this book to my to-read, read-again-later shelves. It's still on my real desktop, but I feel an increasing lack of closure seeing it on my currently-reading shelf every time I open my virtual desktop. I do read it off and on but not all the time! There's no shelf that exactly fits this book's category. Yet it's still a 5-Star winner, but more a reference than a read-start-to-finish book.------------------------------------------------------
This is a fantastic book of writing prompts. A virtual friend of mine (a real poet) from a writing course I took last year recommended it on her blog: http://mollyspencer.wordpress.com/. Not only are Molly's book recommendations wonderful so are her blog and poetry.
But I digress. What I started to write was I'll probably never move this book to my "read" shelf. With a resource like this, the point is not to finish, but to incorporate the authors' suggestions into my own writing and to work randomly through the different exercises. I may even repeat some of them. So I guess The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach will remain on my "currently-reading" shelf for a long time.
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I have also consumed books on the meaning of poetry, the place of poetry in t
Much of my reading this period has been that of actual poetry. From this beginning introduction to the reach and range of voice in poems I have entered a boundary-less and fantastical world. A world of structure, no structure, metaphor, rhythm, sometimes rhyme, line lengths, space, beginnings, and endings. Reading the work of other poets has been an education for me in the unlimited possibilities in the use of language.I have also consumed books on the meaning of poetry, the place of poetry in time and culture, the evolution of styles, poetry as a digital entity, and various views on what is and is not a poem. These often set foot into the realm of theory, of strict definition, of world views as technical or humanist. I found C.P. Snow's premise of there being two basic cultures, one technical/rational, the other humanist/emotional, fascinating. His placement of poetry in the technical/rational camp was a surprise to me (more on this later in the semester). I have read about what poetry 'should' consist of and about the eternal vitality and power of words.
What made The Making of a Poem stand out for me was its insistent assertion that poetry itself, requires formal practice. The authors hold firm their assertion that while talent is a basic requirement for a poet, "curiosity, determination, and the willingness to learn from others" (p. xi) must also be cultivated. They present a book which offers exercise after exercise for the poet to develop both a practice and a voice for their work.
Behn and Twitchell divided their book into seven sections. Each section delineated a specific theme and within the sections are exercises and reflections on meaning. The authors state that "Poetry, like any art, required practice." They go on to say that:
Good exercises are provocative, challenging, and often entertaining. A good exercise will engage you on at least several levels, and should necessitate the breaking of new ground. (p. xiii)
I initially approached their premise with moderate skepticism, reading into the title a "Poetry for Dummies" approach to the art. I was dubious of the value of a trial and error, cookbook approach to writing a poem. My exalted view of poetry excluded any interest in considering banal exercises as a necessary component of being a poet. Yet this book consists of exercise after exercise created by a range of respected poets who have used variants of these in their teaching of poetry. As Behn and Twichell clearly state in their introduction:
The aspiring poet must apprentice him or herself, must master the elements of language, the complexities of form and its relation to subject, the feel of the line, the image, the play of sound, that makes it possible to respond in a voice with subtlety and range where he hears music in his inner ear, or she sees in the world that image that's the spark of a poem (p. xi).
The sections of the book are grouped based on the area of inquiry, as opposed to level of poetic expertise. This approach enables poets at any level of experience to pick and choose their own level of interest and/or difficulty. I found Part 1 "Ladders to the Dark" to be very useful in its approaches and prompts to just getting ink to page. Other sections consisted of attention to objects, aspects of voice, making use of the intuitive and the non-rational mind, structural possibilities, experimentation with rhyme, lineation, and rhythm, and finally, Part 7 "Major and Minor Surgery."
Entering into the spirit of the book, I began to leaf through its many exercises and try them out for myself. The remainder of this paper will focus on some examples I worked on and my assessment of the 'practice' of poetry writing.
Part 1 "Ladders to the Dark," focuses on the importance of mining the unconscious for material. Rita Dove offers "the ten-minute spill" where the writer creates a 10-line poem which must include a proverb or adage, and use 5 of the 8 words she supplies for the student (cliff, needle, voice, whir, blackberry, cloud, mother, lick).
To know one
It takes one
Mother
Hanging on a cliff
The needle whir of cloud voices
Urgent
Compelling me
To be one
To hide one
To find one
In Part 2, "The Things of the World," attention is focused on the object itself. How to approach the object, personify (or not) it, how to make it concrete or illusive, strange or familiar. One exercise here was to write a poem that is merely a list of things:
One quail in a bevy of quails
One swan in a lamentation of swans
One kangaroo in a troop of kangaroos
One strumpet in a fanfare of strumpets
One patient in a virtue of patients
A bloat of hippotami
A fluther of jellyfish
An exhaltation of larks
Out of these, the world is born.
Another exercise was to remember a person you know well and describe the person's hands. Here the object was to explore unique ways to view a common thing or experience which gives a sense of character to that thing.
Utile and strong
Digits not yet frozen by arthritis
Skin not yet spotted by age
Veins, pronounced
Knuckles, tidy
Hands like breathing tokens of kindness and milk
While these exercises may seem elementary, they are not easy. Whether the poem is to tell a story, contain a feeling, or describe a mundane object, I realized that thought, syntax, adjectives, and nouns required care and then more care. To have the poem breathe, the words need to resonate and sentences/lines must convey and aspect or feeling of a life. These exercises prompt the exploration of language and sound, thinking about metaphor and repetition. The exercises further create food for thought and for writing especially on days when creativity is skulking on one of Dante's grim paths.
Other exercises in this book included trying out different 'types' of poems. Part 6, "Laws of the Wild," emphasized structure, shape, and organization of the poem. I tried writing a villanelle which was a complicated and frustrating task. I found it very difficult to fit words to line numbers, rhyme pattern, and repetition. I wonder why Dylan Thomas chose this form.
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I would have liked to see some of the poetry of the contributors to see if I wanted to investigate them further. There is plenty of empty space where that could be done.
As this book was published in 1992, the comment by contributor Agha Shahid Ali that ghazals are an unfamiliar form in American poetry is no longer true, as Robert Bly used them in his books "The Night Abraham Called To The Stars" and "My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy." Many of the poems referenced are now available on the internet, so the references as to where to obtain the poems mentioned in the book, and the poems of the contributors, are dated. It would be great if there was a new edition of this book.
But the exercises are time-independent, and if you do them, your poetry will most likely improve.
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But anyone wanting to get serious about poetry as a craft rather than solely a means of self-expression is quickly going to discover that writing a poem can require as much thought, effort, and concentration as solving a complex math problem. Learning about th
For a lot of people, poetry is something you write as therapy, or as a form of confession, to unburden oneself and to heal. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, as it beats the more widely held perception of poetry as a waste of time.But anyone wanting to get serious about poetry as a craft rather than solely a means of self-expression is quickly going to discover that writing a poem can require as much thought, effort, and concentration as solving a complex math problem. Learning about the various forms in detail-the villanelle, the sonnet, the sestina-starts to give one a greater appreciation for the masters of the form.
"The Practice of Poetry" contains an embarrassment of helpful exercises, anecdotes, and excerpts of poems from some of the most knowledgeable practitioners and teachers of the craft. Consumed slowly and earnestly over a long period of time (I tried one exercise per day over the course of several months) it functions as it's own sort of mini-workshop. In addition to the exercises, there are fascinating detours along the way. There are some explanations of the various schools of poetry and the squabbles among them, like the adherents of formalism versus those who write in blank verse (think Robert Frost v. Charles Bukowski), as well as examination of concepts to help the neophyte writer avoid various clichés and pitfalls that show up occasionally in the poems of even the most practiced experts.
It's as near-ideal as you could get, unless you have twenty grand and feel like spending a few months barefoot at a retreat in Colorado or California. And who wants to do that, jockeying for the attention of some poet laureate with ten or twenty other MFA students, plotting during meditative retreat on how you're going to elbow everyone else out of the way and get that big grant money for yourself? ...Or maybe the world of the manqué poet trying to bloom into the genuine article isn't so cutthroat.
Highest recommendation in any case, for everyone from high-school students just starting out to those who want to devote their life to (the attempt at) crafting the perfect poem.
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As a practicing or novice poet there are a lot of good ideas to stretch your writing muscles. Many different ways of looking. A slight criticism, the poem examples are mostly from based in the US.
A good book with some helpful exercises you could try out. I appreciate the clarity of the instructions and it's not too ambitious.
A helpful bookA good book with some helpful exercises you could try out. I appreciate the clarity of the instructions and it's not too ambitious.
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