|
Twelve Tips for Beginning Poets
1
Open with a sense of the occasion:
well, here we are, and isn’t it an eye-
opening happening place to be!
2
Look sharp: see to visuals; I eye,
you eye, we all eye (apologies to
the sight-impaired, who may see what I mean).
3
Looking back? perspectives make themselves felt,
are experiences in themselves. Down
the vista of years and back we zoom: sight-lines
are time-lines are flight-lines are life-lines.
4
Insinuate a sense of place—
position position position!—
and also reposition.
5
Angle your vision: there are
three sorts: obtuse, acute, and right.
6
There’s the shimmer of presence,
the fading ember of after-glow,
the glimpsed-beyond-time under-glimmer.
There’s also the slow fade, not to be
confused with loss of focus: dog and I
watched the flowing river, the streaming sky;
then it was ‘river: your dog your me your sky’,
then riverdogmsky,
then rrddmmss.
7
Sniff out synaesthesia: images
on the nose…rainbow-music—
unless you’re colour-deaf.
8
Lean hard—bodily—on pulsing
syllables: kinesthesia.
9
Sensory deprivation can be avoided;
soul-malnutrition is harder to fix—
see below.
10
Outer and inner correspond:
and when they don’t can maybe
make creative mismatch;
you work as go-between. Feel
the weather in your bones—
or the feel of not to feel.
11
Uplift seldom achieves lift-off: though
feeling is all, feelings may drag you down.
12
Eye-contact is in the contract;
not the glittering eye, the glimmering:
downcast eyes break hearts. Whisper it from
the rooftops: reticence rules!
Directness, yes; but indirectness also.
The poem implies; the reader infers.
13
Gratify expectations; defy expectations.
14
Be brief: less than one page, in short. You young
generation baulk at page two, but if
you have as much to tell as I, keep on—
at this rate we’ll need a second semester:
15
please sign up at the office. Not that it can
be taught: you learn by doing—as I did,
as I still do. There have been rules—best if
you know what it is you’re ignoring. Stay,
pay, and make your mistakes in front of me.
16
Adjectival indulgence is indescribably
sickening. Less is more.
17
Minimise the syllables—cut cackle,
he cackled; well, just do as I say.
18
Maximise the working words: at best
they’ll have both grunt and grace.
19
Minimise those initial capitals—
short of illiteracy, you upper-case I.
20
Don’t become phonetically frenetic,
super-concerned with sibilant consonants,
frigging fricatives and cussed percussives;
do hear the sounds of the various vowels,
the curt and the mellow, the flipflop diphthong;
the mouth-filling and the mealy-mouthed.
21
Excess alliteration, inadvertent
or otherwise, is enjoyed by the
innocent, avoided by us others.
22
Deny the decadence of the decasyllable
(oops, that was thirteen). Ezra Pound’s ‘first heave’
was ‘breaking the pentameter’—ours, our
second—is restoring it. As of old we
pace the pentameter by placing pauses—
varied caesurae fight monotony.
23
The run-on line over-
flows; the end-stopped line gives pause.
24
The shorter the line
the slower
the plod;
the longer the line the quicker the gallop.
25
More unstressed syllables and the line will bolt.
26
Be prepared to repeat yourself, repeat yourself;
a modest word that way becomes a key,
a key. Today it is insinuate.
27
Don’t be a wimpy haiku-weakling—take
Max’s course, build mighty stanza-muscles!
28
But wait! before you do any of this,
become:
28a
a well-nourished soul; my house-mate/soul-mate
doubts I’d write this way if I had one. How
acquire one? A question of soul-wearying
dispute; most say it takes a heap of pain,
that of others shared, your own in solitude;
28b
musical – hearken wherever music
(language beyond language) penetrates,
mindful of words as we need them for living;
28c
well-read (reading list on application);
28d
topped-up by listening to whatever thrives
in what’s spoken round you—both
the vivid vulgar violent vernacular,
and the music of others’ murmurings. Then
29
join the struggle against stifling cluttering cliché,
whether it lurks within you or around you.
30
Be a born observer, one on whom nothing is lost:
some of us (though not me) began that way.
31
Borrow, steal, sometimes acknowledge:
way back, that ‘vista of years’—Lawrence;
‘nothing is lost’ I found in James;
‘under-glimmer’—Basho;
‘the feel of not to feel’—Keats.
As for unconscious theft—don’t have
a bad unconscience about that.
32
Shun the numbering of sections—affectation!
Modest asterisks make best dividers;
worst are Roman numerals:
X marks the bossy-boots.
33
Surrender to your vision utterly;
then treat it with utmost suspicion—
revision revision revision.
34
It won’t be perfectible—nurse it, love it,
lick it into shape, get rid of it.
35
From life’s flux, flurry, loves and losses—
lest you forget; in case you can share—
your words must make living order.
36
Fix it as moments in time, unfolding time,
time that gives, in which we live. Strange! it also
steals, conceals, buries, ferries to a dark
terminus, obscurest transfer station;
observe: memory’s deadly enemy,
memory’s necessary element.
37
Figures of speech are (figuratively speaking)
flowers of fresh discovery, best if
stemming from a deep taproot:
similes are like linking with merely
base metal, nudge-nudging on;
metaphors electrify, leap great gaps,
sparks that shock, that galvanize,
moments made momentous.
38
In the beginning is the ending—
so many poems are up themselves
(the odious composure of closure)—
how on earth, on paper, on the voice,
can yours not be?
39
This won’t take much longer: fifteenthly,
don’t let it just trail away untidily
on a rising inflection…
|
