I'm a Poem, Get me Out of Here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Hello again, Everyone,

I will be working on a new poem over the weekend and hope to publish it here soon. I am struggling a bit at the moment with a bad foot that hates any cold and damp weather at any time of year and can be relied upon to play me up accordingly. A continuing ear infection is quite stressful to, as I can only wear one hearing aid. As for the prostate cancer, that has a mind of its own. The poetry and your company help me get by ok, though, so no worries... even if the housework doesn't always get done as it should. 😉 

Now, a reader writes, “I get ideas for a poem, then I sort of lose the plot. Even if I finish a poem, I find myself stuck for a title. Any tips?" Oh, but how I empathise! I have moments when I honestly can't believe I have another poem in me. As for titles, I can spend almost as much time thinking about those as writing the poem. 😉

We all need a distraction from the coronavirus and if you enjoy poetry, it can be fun as well as enlightening and therapeutic to try your hand at writing as well as reading it. Why enlightening? It may surprise you just how much you have observed about about nature and human nature as the poem progresses, about yourself too.

Now, every poet has their own way of energising a flow with which mind-body-spirit instinctively feels inclined to follow, and there are far better poets than me. Me, I will often sit by my kitchen window, look down at the garden below or at the sky above, and look for clues as to what I should write about next; given that both are an everchanging landscape according to its various wildlife behaviour and seasonal plant life from dawn to dusk, the inner eye will hopefully be drawn to one aspect or another, and lo... a poem may yet start to write itself in my head. 

Creating and shaping a poem from beginning to end is no easy task. Yours truly enjoys wring poems in classic forms such as the villanelle or kenning, but the chances are a poem will find its own way of shaping up. 

I can spend as much time on a first draft as the poem I end up with to which, more often than not it will bear little or no resemblance. One can try to hard to breathe life into a poem that hasn’t the will to live. The keyword is distraction. Leave the poem for as long as it takes to distract your attention. Go for a walk or get on with some housework. whatever. You may have left the poem, but if you have the motivation and passion to finish it, there is no way the poem will leave you. Indeed, it is likely to spring out at you when you least expect it, and take you further into it; the further a poet ventures into a poem, the more likely it is to take on a life-force of its own.

A feeling for rhythm and/ or rhyme (internal and/ or external) is necessary to breathe life into a poem; any poem is a living organism in so far as it relates to the reader and the reader to the poem. Even blank (non-rhyming) verse requires a sense of rhythm.

The importance of titles cannot be overestimated; the title of a poem is a reader's first introduction to what follows, and any poet needs his or her reader onside from the start for it to work for them, however well-constructed the poem may be. For me, a poem with the title ‘Untitled’ will invariably leave me cold; it might awaken some interest, but I am unlikely to make whatever journey it  may be that poem and poet would hope to steer me. I use the word ‘steer’ rather than ‘share’ because the reader’s experience of the poem is unlikely to be quite the same as the poet’s; mind-body-spirit may well take off at tangents from time to time, all credit to the poet for envisaging this, and to the poem for encouraging it.

There is no ABC guide to writing a poem, but hopefully the above goes some way towards answering the question.

Take care, everyone, be safe, and keep as well as any of us can expect to feel with Covid-19 unlikely to be finished with us yet awhile. Even so, thank goodness for the vaccines.

Thanks for dropping by, always much appreciated,

Hugs,

Roger