On Writing Poetry

It is said that poetry is supposed to be an outpouring of the soul, a release for an overabundance of emotion; that the words should spill forth from the heart of the writer onto the page. I’m not sure if this is true, although my writing style frequently follows in this manner. Sadly, though this often leaves me with mixed results, and there is definitely something to be said for editing.

My average poem is a mix of parts I like and parts I needed to finish my idea. Usually somewhere around 50% of the poem feels wonderful, while the rest drags it down. I don’t know if this is because I make myself write every evening, not giving the ideas a chance to ruminate into a more complete idea or if it is simply due to my lack of practice (and current dearth of reading poetic works). Occasionally I will get an entire poem I like, although I still seem to struggle with editing to make everything fit and usually the meter is slightly off.

My dependence on this ‘overflow of the soul’ also leaves my topic selection rather restricted. As I can’t claim to have a abundance of experience from which to write, there is most definitely not an abundance of subjects on which I have the emotional audacity (and yes, I feel that the emotion required to write good poetry often borders on audacious) to write poems. In reading other poets, I do find it true that they frequently tie back to similar emotions, although many of the greatest ones still manage variety of subject matter, even if confined to a relatively small emotional set (e.g. Shakespearean sonnets, Emily Dickens and death, Poe and despair, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Milton’s paradise lost and other poems generally religious, etc.).

On the flip side of things, I have never written a poem I liked in an entirely analytical manner, and I’m honestly not sure that I could. Which seems odd, as that is the way in which all poetry is analyzed. Therefore I am left with the sense that good poetry must be to some degree instinctual and unforced. This is part of why I try to write regularly, in hopes that at some point my writing will become more instinctual and less forced, that the meter will naturally work itself out in my head and the rhymes will come more readily. The downside to this is that I only have a finite number of rhyming couplets that I naturally tend to. This is where I need to read more. Reading more poetry should do three things, the first of which is increasing my vocabulary. The second thing reading more poetry should aid in is increasing the number of rhyming couplets naturally at hand, allowing me to write more smoothly, as I won’t have to stop each time I get to the second line of a rhymed couplet. The third is giving me a better feel for the flow of the language.

To expound upon the third part, I feel that this is something that is actually made quite difficult by our language. The biggest advantage of English is its vast vocabulary (something that is sadly squandered by the modern man as he gradually restricts himself to fewer and fewer words, less for today’s elite than Shakespeare’s peasants used). The disadvantage of this, though, is that in assimilating words from so many languages, English doesn’t hold as strong a rhythm to its speech. This is predominantly true with American English. In speaking a foreign language, it is easy to tell that there is a rhythm to the speech that should be followed; in fact if one is learning an accent, this is a crucial part in sounding authentic. This rhythm is easily seen in people for whom English is a secondary language, frequently they still speak with the rhythm of their native tongue. British English, and English spoken basically anywhere not North America still has some of this, although it is nowhere near the prominence of the rhythm of the Romance languages. But I digress.

In concluding, I feel it is appropriate to say that there are some poems that I have written in the past few months that I genuinely like the whole of, although there are many more that I feel would be best cannibalized for their good parts. I do not know what to do with the latter category of poems, as reusing them would be difficult (it is hard to be spontaneous with something you wrote a month ago). Hopefully I will figure something out as I get more experience.