Notes to a Poetry Writer
An internet friend asked me for some feedback and I went off in a long and wordy diatribe about poetry. I’ve decided to cut out the stuff directly relating to her work and to post it here for my own reference. Maybe you’ll find it interesting as well. This is the second response I’ve given her and should give you an idea of the kind of feedback I give for each stage of a draft.
I think you need to become a more rigorous editor of your own work. There is a hint of a low, swinging blues rhythm in here. But it is not yet a good poem. A good poem has all of the excess burned away, until what’s left is like an argument made of images- a condensed truth about the world that builds and twists the knife with each new line.
In other words, i think you need to do some cutting.
Try working with line breaks- I really find this helps. Save this poem under a new name and then start making line breaks and cutting anything that might come out of the blue for a reader, anything that breaks the rhythm, anything that repeats unnecessarily.
This should also force you to look hard at the order you are telling us things in and to test the logic. Some sentences right now do not logically follow from each other.
There is a problem with how you are using the word “but,” and in one case “but yet.” The word ‘but’ always tells the reader that what comes after it will contradict what came before it. I’m going to put all the ones in bold that you’ve used incorrectly, ok? These are the spots where your thoughts fall apart and we lose the sense of what you’re saying. You tell us with the ‘but’ that you are going to add a contradiction or a complication, but then you actually expand on the first idea, or even just say the same thing in different words. Most of these ‘buts’ could be places where you begin new sentences.
Aside from cutting some stuff away and working with the line breaks to find a more logical-feeling progression of your ideas, I suggest you think about adding personal detail about this woman’s(- i think) world. Things like, what she sees when she looks around, where she is, where she’s come from, what he was like, where he’s gone- these are the small, unexpected features of another individual’s life that suddenly make them real to a reader, even if the reader has never been anywhere remotely like what’s being described. The smallest thing can break you heart and make a piece of unforgettable poetry.
One of my favorite poems makes this point better then I could. It’s called The Red Wheelbarrow and its by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
I don’t think you should cut yours down quite this much, but do you kind of get what I mean?
I think you are going to need between 5 and 10 drafts of this depending on how rigorous you are, and I think this one counts as 1.5. I also think you are up for the challenge of great poetry. You have the determination and the fire, and the potential, therefore, to meet the hardest test in writing life (and in daily interaction, i think), which is to keep looking right in the face of all the things you don’t know and all your mistakes to learn from them and keep writing.
Maybe I’ve gotten a little too dramatic. I hope you’ll forgive me. I don’t think I’m a writing guru or anything, I am a beginner in lots of my own ways. But I’m passionate about this stuff, and I believe that almost anyone can do it, and that the thing that keeps us writing bad poetry is only our own unwillingness (or maybe fear) to be better. And also maybe an inability to access truthful critique. Which often translates into a defensive belief that we’re already there. That’s why I need to do so many drafts- bc after each one part of my brain is like “ahh, that’s lovely, you’re great, you can stop now.” But when I come back to it after my ego’s had a while to calm down I can see all the cheezy, awkward, irritating bits- almost as though someone else had written them.
Anyway, blahblah blah. keep at it, and keep showing me how it goes, if you want to. I feel very invested and curious now.
Now that i’ve made this the longest thing ever, I’m going to edit it up a bit and post it on my blog. I’d like to start compiling my writing advice so i can poke myself with it later. I’ll cut out your poem from it so it just reads more generally.
Keep well babe
Risa
8. August, 2005 at 16:29
Obviously, haven’t read the work in question. Still, maybe your advice on the use of “but” could be loosened a bit: it always helps to have clear logic in a poem, yet I can also see how an ambiguous, contradictory use of ‘but’ can be effective; that is, it could be interesting to use it for purposes other than rhetorical contradiction or complication in order convey fuzzy logic itself (”But Mom!…”) or a state of denial.
In general though, the attention to line breaks is interesting and seems like good advice. One of the most well-argued essays on line breaks is probably Christopher Ricks on Wordsworth, “‘A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines’” in _The Force of Poetry_: “In prose, line-endings are ordinarily the work of the compositor and not of the artist; they are compositorial, not compositional. …The white space at the end of the line in poetry constitutes some kind of pause; but there need not be any pause of formal punctuation, and so there may be only equivocally a pause at all. A non-temporal pause? … The white space may constitute an invisable boundary; an absence or a space which yet has significance; what in another context might be called a pregnant silence.”
Like WCW in The Red Wheelbarrow, another poet who works brilliantly with line breaks might be Tennyson. Apart from being a personal favorite set of lines, Tennyson (below) has to write within his difficult “In Memoriam” stanza structure while describing a visit to his dead friend’s house. A line break is employed wonderfully here for the elegy’s recurring image of hands clasped and unclasped, and in general for this gloomy and surprisingly unconventional (for english elegy) scene:
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp’d no more –
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
8. August, 2005 at 20:05
mmm.. i love how the rhythm falls apart in that last stanza. and everything feels wrong like you’re never going to see your best friend again.
the last line is too long and seems to hang meaninglessly out in the rain. but the line bothers you until you realize that even with all those b’s it is a perfect, lilting pleasure to say. thanks for sharing librarian1!
and you’re right about ‘but’ of course. in poetry, or even fiction, rules are often most interesting when bent or broken. still, an understanding of what a ‘but’ will probably mean to your reader is necessary before you can begin to play with those expectations. I haven’t heard back from that particular poet in a while though, so maybe I was too stony. ahh well.