The Beginning Poets Quickstart Guide 4 Lyrical Principles for Writing Poetry

poetry can be an intimidating thing to get into so let's get you started with four basic principles to get you on your way to writing better poems as you might know poetry has long history so there have been lot of people voicing lot of opinions about poetry for very long time which really means that there's lot of stuff out there that could distract you from what's most important when you're writing poem you know not everything you can do with poem is something that you must or should do with the poem some elements of poetry are more essential than others focus on those and your poetry will be so much the better for it so as we get started let's check in on an aspiring poet look here they are now hear you have some poems to share with us so whenever you're ready take it away I'm sorry sorry that was so unfair of me here we are talking about how to write poems and then put you on the spot without telling you anything about what we are and aren't looking for and friend this isn't your fault lot of us have common early experien with poetry that set us up with the wrong expectations which means we end up doing some unfortunate things when we first set out to be poetic so before we get to the basic things you probably should prioritize in your poetry let's talk about some common things that aren't going to help you of course we love your Black Beret but that's not necessary for writing poetry wear it if you want to but don't do it just because you feel like you have to and it could probably go without saying that nobody's going to take you seriously if you're talking to skull excuse me if anything talking to you we can SP for all right then but more importantly our first experiences with poetry usually happen in school and they usually involve poems that are hundreds of years removed from anyone in the class when we read Shakespeare or Keats or Wordsworth we might get the idea that poetry should sound old-fashioned but it's worth remembering that their poetry didn't sound oldfashioned to them it was now fashioned back then so just write in the language that you know you and your readers live in the 21st century so your poetry should probably live there too also in school you might feel like you have hard time understanding poetry or at least hard time understanding poems in the same way that your teacher expects you to so you might have the idea that poetry is complicated way of saying anything but what you mean to say or that poet's job is to keep secrets in order to make themsel look smart and to make their readers feel inadequate while select few who get it can show off their interpretive genius but think flattering your intellect or someone else's is rather poor motive for writing poetry so let go of the pressure to be obscure mysterious and intellectual it's those obscure mysterious and intellectual poets who have ruined the fun for the rest of us anyway so there's no need to follow them down that dark path and of course your poetry doesn't have to rhyme lots of poems don't it doesn't have to have set meter lots of poems don't besides I've seen meter CA cuse lot of avoidable issues for newer poets do it if it speaks to you but don't worry about it if you're just starting out and don't feel like your poem has to be Center aligned either left alignment is far more common and generally lot easier to read okay so now that we've got some of our poetic cultural baggage out of the way we know what we don't have to worry about but that doesn't get us any closer to what we should be focusing on so what should your poem do well I'm glad you asked the overwhelming major it of poems written in the last 100 years at least are what we would call lyrical poems they don't really exist to tell stories or process ideas in intellectual ways instead lyricism comes from experiencing situation feeling overpowering emotion recognizing deeply affecting human complexity in response and then writing to try to awaken those feelings in the minds and hearts of reader when we write poems our goal is to communicate an experienc through words more than it is to tell story or transmit an idea and where lyricism is the goal there are four things we can do that will help us to get there and the first of those priorities is novelty took few poetry classes in college and can still hear my professor commenting on our working class sometimes he called our phrases or ideas familiar and that familiarity should point out was never really treated as good thing in the years since I've taught my fair share of beginning poets and I've come to have the same feeling poem that says things I've heard before about things I've seen before just isn't that interesting think at few more things that AR that interesting well instead we can build stronger foundation for our poems when we build them with novelty in mind and that might sound daunting at first but take courage in knowing that you already have big advantage on that front by virtue of being unique human being with unique experiences and perspectives think the trouble is that lot of new poets in an effort to write poems that are relatable end up writing poems that are bland generic and overly familiar they're the kind of poems that anyone could have written and that don't really offer us any kind of unique or interesting Insight life can be awfully dull and monotonous at times and good poem serves to wake us up and Shake us out of the routine you might hear people praise poems for their freshness or for defamiliarizing their subjects whatever they call it readers of poetry are generally looking for the gift of seeing some aspect of the world in new way so you could look for totally new things to write about but it's probably much more manageable to find new ways to write about common things anyone can write winter poem about softly falling snow or love poem about roses or nostalgic poem about your grandmother's cookies but what if you wrote winter poem about walking through rainy Park far from home and missing the snow or love poem about painting called insect comedy that you saw on first date to an art museum or nostalgic poem about sneaking an extra piece of pie before dinner with your grandfather's help because those poems are about unique specific experiences that only you could write about they're already fresher and more novel they offer reader something that the reader hasn't already seen hundred times before but even if you're writing about something familiar your own perspective can still create something new the first time read Aram San's poem Paradise had never thought about how nuts look like wood but taste good but now think about it every time see an almond peanut or cashew so lean into your unique experiences and your unique perspective on common experiences and you'll be way ahead on the lyricism game William Carlos Williams famously said that there should be no ideas but in things and archal mcle wrote that poem should offer for all the history of grief an empty doorway and maple leaf in both cases we get the poetic priority of imagery poem should be built not out of ideas and Concepts but out of sensory experiences commonly known as images you can't imagine discouragement that's just an idea but you can imagine someone waiting to cross the street in rainstorm the wind throwing water in their face while they wonder what's taking so long and when you imagine someone in that situation you can get better handle on what discouragement must feel like and that's the power of image people like to give poets grief for not just saying what they mean just get to the point and move on what's all this extra stuff for they say well if you're writing memo to the CEO brief abstract summaries probably serve their purpose but remember poets are in the business of communicating experiences and getting readers to feel what the poet felt in the moment so tell me why in Ted Ker's poem after years do we have to watch gla fall into the Sea Watch an oak fall in the Cumberlands and witness son 35 times the size of our own son explode and vanish if all he wanted to tell us was that he saw someone he used to love and it really shook him up just say what you mean get to the point of course that's because getting to the point and just saying saw that person and it shook me up would be to miss the point if we read that we might say sorry to hear it buddy but instead when we read that seeing an old love from distance felt like whole Glacier falling into the sea an ancient Oak collapsing in the woods and gigantic star exploding only to be witnessed by little astronomer who has nobody to tell well then we don't just hear about Ted Ker's experience we get chance to feel what it was like too images are things that connect to our senses sight sound smell taste touch and they give us chance to experience poem instead of just hear about it lot of beginning poets can get stuck on the ideas the concepts you know love grief embarrassment and they end up writing poems that raise some interesting ideas but don't really offer any interesting experiences the result is that in the end reader might say that's interesting but they don't get chance to fully feel what it was like so as second priority focus on imagery on setting the scene engaging the senses and letting readers experience the poem rather than just hear about it by doing that you'll actually amplify the emotional effect of your poem and speaking of the emotional effect of your poem it's also common to see new poets write poems that offer lots of interesting images about unique or novel subjects but that also don't really seem to have anything at all to say they're kind of nice and pretty but they aren't much more than that I've got and PR cover if only you could figure out how to say something interesting about now I've said before that think the question what does this poem mean is the wrong question poems aren't riddles and the goal of reading poem isn't to crack the code and find the answer much better question to ask is what makes this poem meaningful why does it matter see nobody has to write poem lots of people never write poems and live perfectly acceptable lives but you did write poem you wrote this poem so of all the poems in the whole wide world that you could have written why did did you write this one what was it about this experience you had or this observation you made that was so meaningful that you wanted to put it in poem and share it with someone else I've worked with lot of poets who for whatever reason feel the need to keep themselves and their feelings out of the poems they write so instead of seeing how the poet looked at dried seeds still clinging to tree branches in early spring and then felt like their own life was disappointing failure to fly out into the world and grow into powerful tree we just see some seeds and they're lovely seeds but we don't really know why they matter what makes those seeds so meaningful to the poet and what could make them meaningful for us at this point we're talking about including sense of investment in the poem maybe something like what the poet Richard Hugo calls stance as you write the poem you do so with stance or orientation toward your subject you feel some way about it otherwise you wouldn't be writing about it so make it clear to the reader how you feel because remember when we read and write poems we're reminding each other that there are other people out there living life and dealing with all the same stuff we deal with by and large people aren't reading your poem because they're fascinated by Frozen dandelions or oily spaghetti or blackberry bushes they're reading your poem because they want to connect with the human being on the other end with you and those dandelion spaghetti and blackberries just serves an excuse or means of connection meaningfulness comes through the speaker her stance toward the details not the details themselves if you'll indulge me in little rhetorical Theory you didn't come on think about your retention no this one's good it'll be fine anyway Lloyd biter once wrote that the experiential World presents to us many weighted or personal facts which are what they are because our participation gives them status and invests them with value they would not otherwise enjoy in other words the details of your poem don't mean much by themselves the details of your poem become meaningful though when we get to see evidence of your attitude towards them make it clear why the things you're writing about are meaningful to you and it will be much easier for your reader to find what makes them meaningful for them and finally we get to fourth fundamental priority of poetry and maybe of these four the one that you should worry least about at least at the start this is something to practice and work towards but if you focus too much on it at the start you may run the risk of getting yourself stuck and that's compression poet's prize conveying as much as they can in the fewest most precise words possible Ted ker has said that the difference between mere anecdote and poem is that the writer puts more pressure on poem and compression is key way of applying some pressure so after you've written draft of poem your next task is to go through and see where you can make it shorter where can you express the same idea in fewer words poetry is meant to be highly concentrated language every word should be putting in some real work and anything that isn't needs to go for example you could write something lofty and poetic like the great big fiery orb of our close neighboring star arcs upward into the open blue sky but check this out we have some impressive and interesting language here but how many of these words are actually doing any heavy lifting great and big cover really similar ground so why would we need both besides that these words describe star and stars are famously big fiery and round so do we really need to point out those qualities not only that but neighbors are typically close and wouldn't you know it there's pretty simple word for the star closest to us not to be that guy but why not just use perfectly good word that has all these meanings baked into it already similarly the sky is pretty well known for being open and blue and there's not really anywhere for the sun to Arc upward into and once again Arc upward is two words where Rises is one so why not just say the sun rises that first sentence is the kind of thing that happens think when we're trying to be poetic and it's also why people give poets hard time for being pretentious and talking around their point why say all of that and what you mean is that the sun rose just say that and that's fair point and the point of compression don't multiply words just because you can focus on conveying your meaning in as few words as possible of course this is an exaggerated example the first sentence is not only overly wordy but it's not terribly interesting in terms of novelty it's fairly redundant in terms of imagery and it's not all that interesting in terms of stance either but something like that Amber disc sags behind the rocky shadowy jaw however is lot more wordy than the sun set but it's also doing more to make the scene strange and new to be evocative and specific and to set the tone with little bit of the speaker's sense of forboding it's line with more words but these are words that are putting in lot more work than the words in the first sentence which mostly just reduplicated the meaning that was already contained in their neighbors and this last example also illustrates an important final point to make about your journey into the world of poetry you'll always be making choices and the priorities and principles of writing good poems are always in ttention with each other put all your effort into novelty and you'll have to neglect Clarity of emotion and legibility of language move toward one priority and you'll be moving away from another different poets will find balance in different places but for the most part you'll find Poets of all kinds endorsing these key principles novelty imagery stance and compression as much as you can have lyrical poems without rhyming or daffodils or old-fashioned words take any of these four pieces out of your poem and it just won't work the way readers expect poetry to work and it could go without saying too that there's lot more to poetry again you can't have an art form practiced around the world for thousands of years and also say everything there is to say about it in short video but these four principles are among the most foundational and essential to the identity of modern lyrical poetry put your focus on them as you practice your craft and you'll see your poetry improve in Leaps and Bounds know I've seen them make big difference in my writing and in the work of countless beginning poets over the years so if you have to start somewhere start here you've got whole lifetime of writing to fill in the rest and of course this show is all about filling in the rest so we hope to see you again next time for some more writing fun until then have great week and go write some great poems