How do you stop the big things from having little meaning and the little things from getting too big and messy? Confused? Me too. There was a time when literary convention dictated that only certain subjects were fit for poetry. You could write about love, death and beauty, but if you wanted to tackle any other issues you pretty much had to ditch the verse and write a report. Today, thankfully, things have changed. I’ve reviewed poems on every conceivable subject, from woodlice to iPods, medieval warfare to cypress trees, and while not every piece worked (or even made sense, for that matter), it proves there’s no excuse for a lack of topics to write about.
How do you know if an idea is suitable for a poem? Any idea, however faint, that gets you excited, that touches a nerve, or evokes an emotional response can be the spark of inspiration. The trick now is to fan that spark with enough strength to create a fire without flapping so much you blow it out. The biggest pitfall is going for the big topics such as love, death, time, nature and god without sufficient preparation. All poets tackle some of these subjects at some point – it’s why poetry exists, and it would be unusual if you didn’t want to at least try and explain through verse the issues that mystify you. But in order to capture the essence of these abstract phrases you need to know how to keep it personal.
When you embark on a poem that deals with love, or any other abstract term, you’re always in danger of obscurity and repetition. The word love isn’t tied to anything specific, it’s different for each and every person, and nobody can pin down exactly what it feels like. Moreover, when writing (or reading) about love you suddenly find yourself bombarded with each and every love poem you’ve ever heard, which further loosens your grasp on the term. So when you use the word love in your poetry the image it tends to create is a shadowy, muffled one. The more abstract and high-flown the phrase, the less precise and evocative it will be. Try to avoid abstract terms altogether in your writing – it’s difficult to empathise with a vague impression.
So how can you convey an abstraction without referring to it directly? With subtle, personal hints rather than a slap in the face. Instead of using a poem to tell a reader about a terrifying experience, show them. In other words, don’t use the word terrified (a reader’s eyes will brush over it, it means nothing to them in the context of your poem), but try and convey the experience of being terrified – how you felt, what you were thinking. Everybody has been terrified at some point in their life, and if you evoke the way you were affected by the experience you can attract a reader’s empathy.
Say what now? Yes, it’s a tricky phrase to get your lips round, but then it was one of T. S. Eliot’s. What he was referring to was the need to transfer an abstract emotion onto a real, solid object. It’s no use just bandying words like love and death around. You need to tie them down to a concrete ‘thing’ so that they acquire a physical presence: they become real emotions experienced by real people. I’m not necessarily talking about metaphors here: to write a poem about an old man visiting a cemetery might involve a headstone as a metaphor for the inevitability of death. This is a fairly obvious symbolic link. Instead, the same old man may be looking through his dead wife’s wardrobe for things he can donate to charity and come across a tatty pair of shoes she wore forty years ago. The shoes aren’t a direct metaphor, but they embody the sadness he feels at her passing. Through the object you can evoke a powerful, terrifying feeling of loss; the painful flood of returning memories; the distant abstract made flesh and soul. This is how powerful writing is born.
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