Tag: Promote Your Poetry

Great poetry does something mysterious and wonderful for the heart. I'd love to be able to write great poetry but feel I have a very long way to go. Sometimes the idea of the journey in front of me fills me with excitement, other times it fills me with dread.

But I keep on going because there is something about expressing ideas and emotions in verse that has wormed its way under my skin and into my blood.

Waffle Irongirl calls it a curse. I think she may be right.

I find it easy to write conversational poetry that describes a strong opinion or an incident. Sometimes I have what Australian poet, Mark Tredinnick, calls the philosophical whoosh. Most of the time, however, I leave a lot to the reader to infer. Or if I do have some kind of a-ha moment it's too subtle for anyone but myself to get!

I'm not sure where my reluctance to spell things out comes from. Perhaps it's because I feel uncomfortable about telling other people how to live their lives? I'm not too sure.

It's an extreme example of showing and not telling. I do so much showing that the reader has no idea of what I am trying to say because I am not telling them anything. So perhaps the old adage of showing and not telling isn't entirely true. If you have a message, then you need to allude to it in some way so that your reader picks up on it.

I think the biggest problem is that most of the time I don't actually have a message. Just a little story or a scene from my life to share. There's no hidden agenda or big life affirming message. Just a peep into my life.

I am thinking of calling my poetry zen poetry. The kind of poetry that has no meaning except the meaning that you, the reader, brings to it. What do you think? Would you read it?

It wasn't until week five of my poetry class with Mark Tredinnick that I felt like I was hitting my stride. The first few weeks saw me floundering with form and trying to squeeze my words into weird new cages. Mark calls it 'dancing down the cage'. Rhythm, especially iambic pentameter with its tricky feet and beats is beginning to make sense but I struggle to use it consistently in my poems. I didn't even go near rhyme as my rhymes tend to be naff.

Hearing all the other poems each week helped as did Mark's comments everyone's work. Each week Mark would go through our poems in class. It was such a good insight into what makes good poetry and how it can be edited to make it stronger.

One of the poems I wrote for week four was a success and well received so that took off some of the pressure. Having only one more class left also helped – there's the wonderful feeling of relief as the end of the journey comes into view and you know you can take a well earned rest.

But mostly I think it was finally figuring out my process for writing poems for these new forms. Now I know I need to sit down at my computer and research the new form. Find instructions and some good examples of the form. Mark always gave us examples in our reader for the week but I like discovering poetic gems – there's a delicious thrill that goes with stumbling upon a beautiful piece of poetry.

I'm so glad I signed up for this class and grateful to Mark for so generously sharing his wisdom and expertise.

Apparently American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, took 17 drafts too write a sonnet. Don't quote me on this, or ask me which one (does she even have more than one sonnet?) – I haven't actually backed up this stat or fact with research cos I was feeling lazy. Which is kind of ironic really because the lesson here is, if you want to be a great poet, you need to work hard at your craft. Write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.

And I think that's my biggest hurdle to overcome at the moment. I'm currently writing a certain standard of poetry and hoping it will get magically better. I write a poem, tinker with it a little until I get a feeling of satisfaction and then I stop because I think that feeling means my poem is done.

However, what I need to do is get to that feeling of satisfaction and then push myself through it to the other side. Because what that little feeling is telling me is that I have just written a poem to the standard of Indrani Perera but what I want to be doing is writing a poem to the standard of Elizabeth Bishop. I realise I may never be that good, but that's not the point. The point is to keep striving and improving my craft.

So now I'm not going to stop when I sense that little feeling of satisfaction, I'm going to keep going until I feel the poem is better than I thought it could be.

I’m grappling with my abilities and my ambition at the moment. I know the kind of poetry I want to write but don’t know how to actually write it!

I can write a chatty poem that tells a story about an incident. I feel really comfortable with this style but it feels stale. I want to push my limits and see what else I can do. 

So I’m trying to teach myself how to use descriptive language and imagery in my poems. The dream is to eventually be able to create incredible metaphors that strike a chord and leave the reader gasping or nodding their head. 

I’ve been playing with words and the way they sound. Using alliteration to build up images. It’s been lots of fun. But the poems end up being what Melbourne poet, Jennifer Compton calls a still life. There’s a heart beat missing from the poem. They’re not relatable, just a pretty picture like a still life painting. Wallpaper for the soul if you like.

My challenge now is to somehow combine the chatty style poems with the imagery poems and create something new. But I’m not entirely sure how to go about it. At the moment my brain seems to have two separate poetry modes – descriptive and story – and I don’t know how to smoosh them together.

Hmmm, perhaps I could write a chatty poem. The rewrite it as a descriptive poem. Then take lines from one poem and add then to the other poem, edit heavily and see what happens. That sounds like a plan. Off to try it now.