I Know Nothing of Writing Poetry
except, what it is, to try. And you?
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Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: I don’t teach poetry.
I am not trained or fully educated in the semantics and skills of writing verse, and I don't claim to be literary ingenue. Sometimes, I feel I know nothing of writing poetry, except what it is to try, and I’ve long committed to learning that which interests me.1
Which is where I find myself, at present, discovering and recovering both the mystery and “thoughtful machinery of the poem”2
Earlier this month, I put out a poll on reading poetry, which is still open for entry, should that be of interest to you (these polls are completely anonymous meaning neither I nor anyone reading can see your responses!)
When asked “How often do you read poetry, right now?”: 37% said maybe once a month, 26% said daily, no question, 21% said about weekly, and 16% said almost never.
When asked “Where do you read your poetry?”: 58% said books, 32% said some combination of the above of — social media (5%), online (5%), and no one polled reads poetry in magazines.
When asked “What keeps you from reading poetry?”: 40% said too busy, 27% said some combination of the above of — not interested (13%), not understanding (13%), and not knowing how (7%).
These results aren’t meant for me (or you) to draw any groundbreaking conclusions, only to see that everyone is coming from different places when it comes to poetry. So no matter where it’s read, what keeps you from reading it, or how often you read it — if at all — you’re not alone!3
If you happened to read a poem on purpose in the last couple of weeks, I’d love to hear about it!4
Because my curiosity can never quite be sated, I’ve another round of a few simple polls, this time on the subject of (you guessed it):
WRITING POETRY —
A couple of years ago, answering these questions would’ve made me wildly sad, knowing how far away I felt from where I wanted to be. If that’s you, you don’t have to stay there; there is a way back!
Now, if you’d love to start (trying) to write poetry again:
here are a few steps that might help you on your way.
Read some poetry. A thousand things can be said about this, even more than I’ve already written, but getting verse in your head, through your eyeballs, is one of the quickest ways to step into that stream of creativity, making it more likely that it can too, flow out of you.
Copy down a poem by hand. There’s a lot to be said about copy work, not the least of which is how it allows us to acquaint ourselves and our bodies with language. It’s more immersive than simply reading or speaking, and at the precipice of recovering (or starting) a poetry practice, it’s an easy place to begin.
Start paying attention. What you have to notice, is up to you. But the work of noticing is exclusively yours. Try to set down, more often, whatever keeps you from it (hint hint, that glossy palm-sized rectangle...) and give attention to your life and the world around you. The sun shining on your child’s face. The world upside down in a raindrop. The texture of bark on a tree, your shirtsleeve, or the table you’re sitting at. The world is full of material; you simply have to see it.
Once you’re noticing, write these things down. Keep a list. Across the top of the page, write THINGS I’M SEEING/SENSING and start jotting them down. This can be done on your phone, if it must, but I’d challenge you to go analog with this is as much as possible, at first. Consider keeping small, flimsy notebooks, like cahiers, and a pen or pencil tucked into the easiest to reach pocket of your purse, backpack, or back pocket.
Make time to marinate. I personally do my best marinating on walks, driving alone, and these days, as Tolstoyian as this sounds, staring at the sky. You may start to see trends in your noticing list, memories or connections you’re making between them and moments right here in the present. Those connections are important, like the vast web a spider weaves to catch its unsuspecting prey, which is, for you, a poem.
Now, write. Grab a sheet of paper, write the date at the top, and take the very language you have in your head (I promise there’s more than you think there is) and those webs you’ve been spinning between what you notice and what it pulls from inside of you — and start. Where you start may not be where you end up, but the ultimate joy is in the weaving and getting it out. If rhyming is what comes natural to you, do that. If it doesn’t, then write freely, knowing the gift of poetry is that you hold the meaning that makes it, but in the end, were it read, the reader may never know what it was that set it spinning in the first place.
Sit back and take a breath. You wrote a poem. It might be three lines and it might be thirty. Either way, you did it. It may not be, in your opinion, very good at all, but the goodness lies in the immeasurable gift that you did it in the first place.
Another way to go about writing more poetry, whether you’re just getting started or want to break out of the box, is to find them.
“Poetry is everywhere, and it hides in plain view. Everyday writing like catalogs and tax forms can contain the ingredients for a ‘found poem.’ Writers of found poetry pull words and phrases from various sources, including news articles, shopping lists, graffiti, historic documents, and even other works of literature. The original language is reformatted to create the found poem.”5
Some ways you might find poetry:
Get yourself a Magnetic Poetry set! I remember seeing these for the first time as a freshman in high school, my fingers itching to scramble words on my friends’ refrigerators. I could never resist the urge to play whenever I came upon a set, but why it never dawned on me to get a set for my own fridge, I’ll never know. Finally, with
’s inspiration, I got around to it. These have the added bonus, if you’ve got roommates or a partner or children living with you, of influencing others’ poetic sides, as well. Work on your own or work together, and if something strikes you as particularly wonderful, write it down! (I love the Original and the Poet sets!)Try your hand at blackout poetry! Blackout poems are a form of erasure poetry that have been around awhile, but were brought to wider public knowledge by artist and writer
whose newsletter is one of my favorites. These poems can be made with newspapers, magazines, printed emails or articles — or even digitally, if you so choose. Watch Austin create a blackout poem from newspaper here:
Breakout the glue sticks and make a collage poem. There are fancier names for this (cut-up, remix, and découpé) and various ways to go about it, but one really fun and easy way works like making a vision board. Grab a magazine (or a stack of them) and flip through until you find a word or a phrase that lands with you. Keep flipping through until you’ve got a sizable collection of words and piece them together onto a blank sheet of paper. You may be surprised what comes together in this practice.
And finally, a word on prompts:
This month, I’ve been participating in National (Global) Poetry Writing Month, which works similarly to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), except that instead of writing 50,000 words towards a novel in 30 days, you write one prompted poem every day for 30 days.
Some prompts have been easier than others, but all are just the right amount of challenging (even a little out there), stretching me to write about things I likely never may have, such as:
Someone else saying “Hey, why don’t you try writing a poem about [BLANK]” every day has had me scratching my head a little and then setting to work. They’re not groundbreaking, by any means, but I’m always surprised by what comes up and out.
There are, of course, a multitude of books and websites from which you can glean prompts for poems, should the mood strike you, and they’re a great way to get unstuck and going.
For any professional poets who perhaps stumble upon this post, by no means do I suggest that your work is as simple as this. But I think many of us laypeople out here feel, or have felt, a long way off from the the poeticism we once had or found ourselves longing for.
Thankfully, most of the poets I’ve come across are not gatekeepers to the gift and instead, impart the beauty not just of their work but of the making of it, too, like
, , and , and I’m grateful for their “going before” and holding out helping hands along the way.
I think of each poem I write, no matter how small or simple, as a little self-contained house for a memory or a moment to live. My vision is, that over time, it becomes a village, maybe even a whole development, of a fully creative life where risk and play are lived in equal measure and my whole life is the better for it.
So how about a little of both, for you today, in the form of a poem?
Until next time,
And if there’s anything that educating our children at home has taught me, it’s that sometimes the persons charged (or compelled) with sharing knowledge are those with an openness and desire to always be learning.
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 4.
…unless you read it in magazines; you appear to be alone in that, but more power to you!
I treasure learning more about you as a reader, so thank you for your participation in polls and for sharing your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
Craven, Jackie. “Introduction to Found Poetry.” ThoughtCo, July 19, 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/found-poetry-4157546
I've always thought that it would be amazing to be able to write poems as easily as it seems to come to you and as it used to come to dad. It's an amazing skill that I've never felt like I knew where to start exactly.
Been thinking recently about how all we can do is try, with starting something new :).