I write a lot of poems. Only about one in ten is worth a darn. I wish I knew a way to make this ratio higher. What's worse is, there's no pattern to creative inspiration. One day you might write two good poems in a row. At other times, it might be a week or two before you write anything decent. It's the same for most poets. Even great poets like T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson wrote more duds than masterpieces. Both Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman wrote more bad lines than good over their careers. I won't name any living, working poets by name -- but I'll say, I haven't seen many, if any, 21st century exceptions to this rule. And that's only seeing poets' published or posted works. My explanation for it is that we write poems for many different reasons, only some of which are connected to creating a poem for sharing or for publication. The only other answer I can think of is that writing good poems is just really tough and it takes a bit of luck like fishing or golf. Another possibility is it's just darned hard to do it all alone. Poetry is one of the only arts (like painting) where the artist is truly alone. Novelists have editors, musicians have producers, actors and actresses have directors and makeup people, and costume people, and people to blink for them, etc... Even dancers have a dance partner or a few musicians around. If you're a poet, it's all you. You think alone, write alone, and for the most part are the only "gatekeeper" of your works. It's a big job, and most poets resist being edited anyway. What do you think? Have you experienced poetic ratio? Are there other reasons forit? Found any hacks to get around it? Let me know! Tally Poems Written: 310 Submissions: 51 Rejections: 20 (13 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Star Pools" Categories All
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Here's a quick tip to help you overcome procrastination. It really works if you give it a chance, but there's a catch. You have to write in a notebook, or keep a continuous doc or series of docs somewhere. If you're a poet who likes to really write on the fly, like without any schedule, tools, or method, this may not work so well. For me, getting started is always the toughest part of writing. Whether I'm writing a poetry or prose, it's writing the first line or sentence that holds me up. There are various well-known tricks to get around this, such as starting off your work day by editing rather than writing, "free writing" in a journal or some other platform, and -- everyone's favorite -- guzzling gallons of strong coffee. But I've found, for poetry, what works best is just leaving a "hanging title." This means, when I finish a poem in my journal, I sometimes jot down a title for the next poem. I just dream up a cool title, note it down, then start my next writing session by filling in the blank part. That is -- the poem! Even if you only wind up with a few lines for a particular "hanging" title, this little trick will get you writing quickly each day. A couple caveats: 1) It's not usually best to jot down multiple titles. If you do that, you'll overwhelm yourself even if you don't think you're doing so and kill the spirit of the whole thing. That said, sometimes, you get a lot of ideas for titles, so what are you going to do? 2) If the poem starts coming right there as you're jotting down the title -- if you hear a first line or something -- go for it. If not, refrain from jotting down too many notes etc. Just get the title down and let the Muses work on the poem when you're not looking. 3) Don't write down a title unless you feel a spark. If you start writing "Cat Poem 55," "Cat Poem 56," etc., the tip probably won't work as well. That's about it. As always, your mileage is sure to vary. If you're the kind of poet who comes up with titles last, you may not like this technique. I don't use it every day, but I've found it really works to get me going in some cases, and it's resulted in a quite a few good poems. Tally Poems Written: 309 Submissions: 51 Rejections: 20 (13 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Talk Candle" Categories All I talk a lot about emotion in these blog-posts and the reason is because all good art, particularly poetry, is made of emotion. If you aren't willing to express emotion intensely, there's really not much point in trying to be a poet. The same is true if you just want to express one emotion over and over. If your poems are always happy or always sad, people will get bored with your work fast. The best thing you can do is to use a lot of different emotions, even in a single poem. I could cite hundreds of examples here, but let's just focus on two really famous poems. The first is "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe and the second is "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath. Sure, "The Raven" is famous for being synonymous for mourning, and rightly so, but if you look at the poem carefully you'll see it actually runs a gamut of emotions from boredom, to hope, to anger, and terror. Unrelenting grief is only one emotion, and it's profound, centuries strong sadness would not ring as fully as it does without a compliment of contrasting colors. Plath's poem is even more dynamic. It starts with submissive emotions of fear and self-loathing and rises to emotions that are best described as "godly." Along the way, Plath uses sarcasm, honesty, pity, anger, joy, and nostalgia to fuel her transformation from victim to avenging Goddess. That's what you want to do with emotion in a poem. You want to use it as both color and tempo simultaneously and you want to color with more than one crayon and keep time on more than a single drum. Tally Poems Written: 308 Submissions: 51 Rejections: 20 (13 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Sisters" Categories All Should you ever just give up on a poem? Some poems come out almost fully formed, just perfect straight out of the fire, like a gift from from the gods. Others have to be wrangled, sawed, sanded, polished and, in some cases, given a full body-transplant. What makes it worse is, a poem can be this close to brilliance and then it takes months and sometimes years to actually get it right. So you have a decision to make as a poet. Luckily, you get the chance to make the decision over and over. Basically, what you have to decide with each poem is: how much can revision help? Usually the answer is: a lot. Even if you only make small changes or a small change to a given poem, the results can be dramatic. There are times, though, when you just have to let go. Some poems just fail. Unfortunately, there's no rule when it comes to making this judgment call. And it's liable to be different, in any case, for each poem. Given, these vagaries, here's a few points that I've found helpful over the years:
I also have a thought on not revising or refusing to revise your poems: that's why your poems aren't working for anyone else but you. So do your poems a favor and shine them as best you can. If you hate revising and polishing, consider two options (best used together!): 1) Have me do it for you! Click the "Poem Polisher" button below. I've helped lots of poets. 2) Use my 7 Secrets of Poetry pdf as a guide for revision. Tally Poems Written: 307 Submissions: 51 Rejections: 20 (13 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Street Steel" Categories All As a poet, it's sometimes good to not know how you feel. "Nameless" emotions are often where great poems begin. Famous poems like "Kubla Khan," "The Chariot," or "The Road Not Taken" continue to defy emotional straightjacketing and -- without sacrificing meaning -- continue to lead readers to fresh emotional experiences for which there are no simple quantitative terms, but rather libraries full of analysis.
One of my favorite poets, Hart Crane, wrote a powerful essay on the theory of poetry called "General Aims and Theories." Crane was only in his twenties when he wrote the essay and it was in response to criticisms by Harriet Monroe. Basically, what Crane said was: a great poem can create a new word. Or, more specifically, it is as if a (successful) poem created a new word. A "word" that only that poem can capture, because it represents an emotional state for which we have no literal word. Two things I'd like you to take away from this. The first is that some poems, not all, are best off in creating a new "words", while others are best off celebrating existing "words." The second is that, yes, human beings have that many emotions. More than there are grains of sand in the world, or stars in the sky. We may fixate on the 6-8 basic colors, but we have an entire crayon box (the size of the universe) to color with. If you want to read a great series of poems that deal square-on with he search for a new poetic word, try reading Plath's "Bee Sequence" (click her picture above). What you'll see here is a poet using everything she has to try to understand who she is as an artist. Because Plath was a mystic, it was extremely difficult to find words, or even imagery to convey what she was going through. Like Nina, in Black Swan, she is transforming; she is becoming the Bee Queen. Poetry can lead you to the deepest parts of yourself and the deepest emotions that can be experienced. You have to be careful with intense emotions, but you can't write truly remarkable poetry without going into emotional places past existing "words." Tally Poems Written: 295 Submission Tally: 47 Rejections: 17 (10 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Plain Poem" The picture above is of Sylvia Plath, along with her daughter, Frieda, and her son, Nicholas. When the picture was taken, Plath and her husband, poet Ted Hughes, had just acquired a country house. The flowers in the picture are daffodils that grew by the thousands on their newly acquired land. To me, this is one of the saddest pictures in the world because I know quite well how the Plath story goes, as I'm sure most of you do, as well. If you don't know, suffice to say that both Plath and her son succumbed to mental illness and perished, decades apart, as suicides. Hughes has a wonderful poem about this picture called "Daffodils." Read it by clicking the picture. The closing image of the poem leaves no doubt that this is a poem of deep, almost unyielding, grief. Yet, if you look over the poem carefully, you'll see color, life, tactile sensations of joy and love. These are colors that contrast deeply with he poem's hard hitting theme. If the poem had been written less inventively it might have been all about tossing flowers on a grave with wolves howling in the background. And that Gothic flair is even something Hughes excels at -- but in this case he constructs a lexicon for his grief out of the beauty of life: Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers In the draughty wings of the year. On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering They return to forget you stooping there Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April, Snipping their stems. Go and do the same because, if you just use your black crayon for all your color, no-one will be excited to see what you do next. If you'd like some feedback or polishing for your poems, click one of the buttons below. AND don't forget to check out my 7 Secrets of Poetry guide, available now. Click the button below. Categories All At least half, if not more, of all of the poems ever written could probably be considered "sad." Elegiacism, melancholy, ennui, mourning, loss, nostalgia, unrequited love, blocked ambitions, political disillusionment, dishonor, and death are some of the subjects commonly associated with sadness in poetry, but the list is comet-tail long.
Some poets, like Plath, or Poe, or Baudelaire are so well known for grappling with sadness that they are most often conceptualized wearing black, looking crestfallen, and writing by candlelight in a cobwebby room. The question is: is the pallor that punctuates poetry as obvious and complete as it seems, or is there room for new shades of sadness? The fragility and melancholic music of Tennyson's "Tears Idle Tears" may be the correct match for our autumnal empire, but our phone-locked minds no longer respond to such delicacies. The brooding, unrelenting mourning of "The Raven" may have been our cultural heart beat all along, but most of us are inured to such Gothic brooding and would feel quite cozy under Pallas's raven-topped bust. We may be living in the "the worst of times" or "the best of times" but it seems to me that our age invites new colors of sadness and mourning. We've all colored with the black crayon so much it's just a stub now. Maybe it's time to find new colors of sadness by mixing new pigments. And I'll start talking about how I think we can do that in the next post! Until then, if you'd like some feedback or polishing for your poems, click one of the buttons below. AND don't forget to check out my 7 Secrets of Poetry guide, available now. Click the button below. Characters can make or break a poem. Just like a novelist or short story writer, the poet needs characters. The poet need not have character personally, as is often the case, but the poem itself demands living personages.
And just as in prose, it's often the minor characters that do all the heavy lifting. You can't have Hamlet without Ophelia. You can't even have Hamlet without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And most importantly, you need Horatio. He is the frame for the whole play, right down to Hamlet's demise. For those of you who don't know your Shakespeare -- you can't have Frodo without Sam. That said, what are some good ways to use minor characters in your poems? Poe has a great one in "The Raven" and it's not even the bird. It's Lenore. She's as mysterious Mona Lisa's smile. Plath has an entire cast of wonderful minor characters in "Lady Lazarus" -- ranging from adoring fans to probing psychiatrists. Robert Pinksy's poem, "The Questions," is full of mini-portraits and they give the poem life and blood and fever. In fact, so many poets, from Sappho to Bukowski, rely on the presence of passing faces and personalities to give their poems depth and life, that portraiture and the principles of dramatic stage-movement should be learned by every aspiring poet. They key is to let people move through your poems, as organically as possible. Try not to fixate on your subjective response to them, but capture their essence as it relates to the poem in question. Don't give us too much information, but paint colorful personalities and bodies with a few well-placed brushstrokes. Here's something you can do just for fun that will really show you what I mean. Write a poem with no people in it. Focus on the setting. Now write a poem with he same setting, but add at least two people. If your second poem is shorter than the first, there's a slight chance you may be staying in too much. It's perfectly fine to write a poem without people in it, but doing so makes a statement in itself and doing so a lot will make your poems seem abstract whether you want them to or not. Using Big Famous people in your poems is like using big shiny words. If you drop a Big Name, there should be a good reason. Drop it and move on -- or just go ahead and write the poem about the famous person. Last little hint: the more you use people in your poems, the more dimension you give yourself as an observer. This will make your vertical pronouns pop! @BlackstonDan If you want to read more tips on how to write good poetry, check out my 7 Secrets of Poetry guide by clicking the button below. OR if you'd like some direct feedback, polishing, or editing for your poems, click one of the buttons below or email me at pitchblackpoet@yahoo.com One of the best things about being a poet is that every poem gives you a chance to get things right. If you don't like what you did in the last poem, or the last 20 poems, this poem is your chance to get everything in place. Whatever mistakes you may have made in the past are only pointers to use to get better. There's just basically something inherently hopeful in writing a poem. Even if the poem itself is a poem of grim and unrelenting doom. The very fact that you're writing a poem means you still believe in a few basic things such as human communication, artistic expression, and the capacity of language to conform to your emotions and thoughts. So when you face a blank screen or blank piece of paper or simply sitting alone with your creative thoughts, consider every moment and Act of Hope. Every poem you write ( up to a point) helps you write the next poem better. But what happens when that's no longer the case? Is it possible to reach your Peak as a poet? If you do, will you know? Can anybody tell you? You probably will reach a peak as a poet, but you probably won't know when it happens, and neither will anyone else. If you happen to write a very popular poem, or a very popular book of poems you may still write better poems even if they don't gain as much instant popularity. So I guess I'm trying to tell you to look at every poem you write (or try to write) with the belief that you're still getting better. Don't let doubt or fear stop you; don't let the past or social media stop you. the worst thing you can do as a poet is to stop growing. As long as you're writing your growing so just keep writing! If you'd like a bit of secret friendly help for your poems contact me through the Poem Polisher button below, or email me at pitchblackpoet@yahoo.com Categories All My Seven Secrets of Poetry pdf dropped today and, like anyone who finishes up a project, I thought of something I should have added to it! Well, on second thought, I guess I'm rather glad that I left it out! It's an important, if often bitter, aspect of art and poetry. Yes, I'm talking about envy. Jealousy. And competition. And the reason I'm glad that I left this topic out of the Seven Secrets of Poetry pdf is because, even though it's a super important topic, it's not something that you can easily deal with or edit away, even figuratively speaking. There's no secret for beating it on either side. Most of us will face some form of envy or jealousy on a regular basis throughout our careers as poets. The envy can be a feeling we have for others or it can be a feeling others have for us. In either case, there some general points to keep in mind, that seem to hold true regardless of particulars:
If people envy you, make them feel like kings and queens in your presence and truly be an inspiration. But, you know, watch your back. When you envy others, try to use it as a light to your own potential. Fight to be the best poet you can be. Yes, poets seems to trigger a lot of envy, among themselves and among non-poets. it's a truly strange phenomenon. If you have any thoughts about it, drop me a line... Meanwhile, check out my Seven Secrets of Poetry pdf!!! Consider helping me out at Patreon -- and follow me at Twitter @BlackstonDan Categories All |