With poetry, finding your voice and getting it down on paper can seem an impossible task. You may be working with the medium in order to express yourself, to explore hidden facets of your personality. All well and good. But if you can’t learn to shape this torrential subject matter it’ll probably end up as nonsense, not verse. I bet you want to leap right in and write something that outshines The Waste Land, but take your time, breathe deeply and learn to play a little before you start to get serious.
Chances are that when you start writing poetry you stick to your own rhythm. Expressing yourself can be hard enough without having to do so to the beat of somebody else’s drum. There’s nothing wrong with this: if you know the rhythm of your voice, then you can write powerful poetry with a structure all of your own. But there’s a fine line between a poem and a ramble, and if you don’t pay attention to your poem’s structure, it’s in danger of becoming like one of my mum’s cakes: so loose it falls apart. It may appear easier to express yourself without the limitations of a traditional structure, but this attitude can be deceiving. Left to ponder shape, how can you pin down exactly what it is you’re feeling, precisely which elements of your turbulent inner voice to capture on paper? Writing to a traditional form may seem restrictive, but it can actually free your mind by creating a structure for you. When you don’t have to worry about structure, you can devote more of your creative energy to playing with content.
Too many people try to write a beautifully crafted epic poem on their first go. It’s like waking up one morning and deciding you’re going to win Olympic gold in judo, although the only tussle you’ve ever had is trying to wrestle open your Pop Tarts. As a poet, you need to become more aware of the fascinating and surprising powers of language to awaken long-lost ideas and memories, and the best way to do this is to start small.
Look at the fragments of ideas and phrases in your notebook and play with them. Don’t try and craft a masterpiece just yet, simply start scribbling, write without thinking and see where it leads. Automatic writing, as it’s often called, doesn’t have to make sense – in fact, the more arbitrary your subject the better the results. The idea is to open up your unconscious mind, which is such an important part of writing poetry, and to practise using this vast resource of feeling and emotion. By starting small, by tuning your mental antennae for unexpected resonances, moods and memories, poems will begin to shape themselves in no time.
If you’re having trouble finding inspiration for your poems, or can’t seem to knock them into shape, the answer may lie in imitation. Think of it as a kind of flattery. Philip Larkin, for example, claimed that when he started out he always had a copy of Yeats on his kitchen table next to his open notebook. Try imitating a poet you’ve always admired. Don’t blatantly transplant lines from famous poems into your work, but do take a close look at a poem that really moves you and try working out why.
Next, try writing one of your own that has a similar structure, rhythm or theme. Using models is an excellent way to practise probing into the depths of your creativity and to gain a comprehensive feel for language and form. Just remember that imitation alone won’t make you a great poet. Think of it as riding on the shoulders of a mentor: they can only carry you so far, then you have to make your own way. If you carry on using other poems as models, you’ll never be able to get your own unique voice on the page.
Thursday, 20 October 2011
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Feeling the rhythm
Life is full of natural rhythms – just try walking to an irregular beat and you’ll be falling over yourself in no time. You don’t have to write sonnets to get rhythm into your poetry, just keep your ears open to nature’s pulse.
If you’re like the vast majority of poets out there, you probably started writing without thinking too hard about metre. You may have vague recollections of ‘iambic pentameter’ from school but you may not quite recall what counting syllables has to do with self-expression. You certainly don’t need to write trochees or spondees in order to craft good poetry, but finding your own rhythm is a vital step to making your work your own, and stopping it resembling your dad on the dance floor.
Knowing how to use rhythm in poetry doesn’t require a degree. In fact, all you have to do is look at everyday speech. Take the heading above, for instance: ‘a section that describes pentameter’. It’s made up of ten alternating strong and weak syllables. This is actually an iambic pentameter: one of the most commonly used metrical systems in poetry, adopted by such luminaries as Milton and Wordsworth. You don’t have to speak like Shakespeare in order to write in iambic pentameter – your language can be modern and natural and still be set to that pace – but the rhythm helps order the words, working to make them more fluent, and give them more impact, than those without structure. Some academics make metre sound like a science, but nobody actually reads poetry in this fractured, halting way. In fact, it’s best, for now, to forget about metre (as something a poet imposes on their words) and start thinking about rhythm – the musical movement and flow of speech.
If the word rhythm makes you think of steel drums and samba, great! It’s all about movement, music, freedom; what Robert Frost calls the ‘abstract vitality of our speech’. Try to listen to the way people talk without actually hearing what they’re saying. Don’t focus on the words, tune in to the stresses, the intonation (the rise and fall of pitch) and the voice quality.
Make that your task for this week: go out and listen to the music and rhythm of language. Listen to people on the bus, in the pub, on television, listen to yourself. But hear the noise, not the words – tune the meaning out (a great technique to learn for next time you have an argument with a loved one). We’re lucky in that English is a language in which strong and weak stresses alternate in a fairly evenly distributed way. Next time you’re writing, try and convey these patterns onto the page as honestly as possible: you’ll probably find a rhythm emerging. The most important thing is to always go with your instincts: if your heart breaks rhythm you see a doctor, if your footsteps fall out of sync you fall over, if a line doesn’t feel like it’s got a natural rhythm, you change it.
In short, it doesn’t matter if you go traditional and strike up an iambic pose, or break out and listen to the natural rhythms of everyday speech – you have to have an underlying beat of some sort. Even free verse, with no discernible metre, has rhythm. Writing poetry without rhythm, says Frost, is like ‘playing tennis with the net down’. Experiment with different kinds of metre, but don’t just rebel against it because you feel it might be restrictive: remember, one of the primary principles of poetry is organisation. Keep playing until you find your own balance between the underlying order of metre and the natural rhythm of spoken language. Once you’ve found this rhythm, your lines will always have energy and life.
If you’re like the vast majority of poets out there, you probably started writing without thinking too hard about metre. You may have vague recollections of ‘iambic pentameter’ from school but you may not quite recall what counting syllables has to do with self-expression. You certainly don’t need to write trochees or spondees in order to craft good poetry, but finding your own rhythm is a vital step to making your work your own, and stopping it resembling your dad on the dance floor.
Knowing how to use rhythm in poetry doesn’t require a degree. In fact, all you have to do is look at everyday speech. Take the heading above, for instance: ‘a section that describes pentameter’. It’s made up of ten alternating strong and weak syllables. This is actually an iambic pentameter: one of the most commonly used metrical systems in poetry, adopted by such luminaries as Milton and Wordsworth. You don’t have to speak like Shakespeare in order to write in iambic pentameter – your language can be modern and natural and still be set to that pace – but the rhythm helps order the words, working to make them more fluent, and give them more impact, than those without structure. Some academics make metre sound like a science, but nobody actually reads poetry in this fractured, halting way. In fact, it’s best, for now, to forget about metre (as something a poet imposes on their words) and start thinking about rhythm – the musical movement and flow of speech.
If the word rhythm makes you think of steel drums and samba, great! It’s all about movement, music, freedom; what Robert Frost calls the ‘abstract vitality of our speech’. Try to listen to the way people talk without actually hearing what they’re saying. Don’t focus on the words, tune in to the stresses, the intonation (the rise and fall of pitch) and the voice quality.
Make that your task for this week: go out and listen to the music and rhythm of language. Listen to people on the bus, in the pub, on television, listen to yourself. But hear the noise, not the words – tune the meaning out (a great technique to learn for next time you have an argument with a loved one). We’re lucky in that English is a language in which strong and weak stresses alternate in a fairly evenly distributed way. Next time you’re writing, try and convey these patterns onto the page as honestly as possible: you’ll probably find a rhythm emerging. The most important thing is to always go with your instincts: if your heart breaks rhythm you see a doctor, if your footsteps fall out of sync you fall over, if a line doesn’t feel like it’s got a natural rhythm, you change it.
In short, it doesn’t matter if you go traditional and strike up an iambic pose, or break out and listen to the natural rhythms of everyday speech – you have to have an underlying beat of some sort. Even free verse, with no discernible metre, has rhythm. Writing poetry without rhythm, says Frost, is like ‘playing tennis with the net down’. Experiment with different kinds of metre, but don’t just rebel against it because you feel it might be restrictive: remember, one of the primary principles of poetry is organisation. Keep playing until you find your own balance between the underlying order of metre and the natural rhythm of spoken language. Once you’ve found this rhythm, your lines will always have energy and life.
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