Gordon Lindsey

Writing Poetry: A Personal Postscript

It is notoriously difficult to define what constitutes poetry. Many poets and academics have tried. William Wordsworth, for example, defined it as impassioned expression of emotion. Wallace Stevens described it as a revelation in words by means of the words. And T.S. Eliot thought poetry was marked by intensity of feeling and gravity of import.

            I have tended to gravitate to more provocative answers. One comes from the French poet, Paul Valery. He said, A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words. Of course, this definition begs for another. What is a poetic state of mind? That may be just as hard to define as poetry itself.

            Maybe it is just sensible to admit that we cannot define an art whose effect on us exceeds any rationality. Emily Dickinson did just that. She once wrote a friend:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

            As a poet who considers himself still something of a neophyte in the art, I would be foolish to hazard a suggestion. But through my limited experience in writing poetry, I have come to two convictions that govern my own practice.

The Challenge of Craftsmanship

As an art, poetry works in the medium of words, spoken and written. The poet must master the skills of working with words. They are skills that can only be learned by constant practice and critique from more experienced practitioners. So, the first rule I have learned in mastering the craft of poetry is write, then write more, day in and day out. Make your writing a hard-to-break discipline.

            When I practice that discipline, I sense myself becoming progressively more liberated. But if I take an extended break from writing, I find that when I try to resume writing again, it is a painful slog. My imaginative muscles have become atrophied. It takes real effort to get fit again. Many great writers report this practice. They set aside in each day a time to write. They abide by that schedule religiously. It matters not what they accomplish that day. The important thing is that they are at their desk writing at their set hours.

            Many people assume that the craftsmanship of poetry consists in writing fluent meter and rhyme. Both characterize most of English poetry written before the 20th century. Modern poets, however, tend to drift away from them in part because they find them too artificial and in part because they find them too constricting.

            I find it helpful, however, as a student to write in these old traditional forms. Learning to express poetic thoughts using meter and rhyme without losing the tone of natural speech is not easy. Here Robert Frost serves as my tutor. He did it exceptionally well. When I write in traditional forms, I am trying to develop my skill in writing poetry as patterned speech.

            I use the word speech deliberately. Poetry did not emerge in human history first and foremost as a written art. Its origins are rooted in oral speech. Homer’s epics, for example, did not emerge in an indoor study. They arose as oral recitations that bards sang or chanted at warrior banquets and other public occasions. The power of the words was to be found in large part in the effects created by oral speech.

            The craftsmanship of a poet can be measured to some degree by the effectiveness of his or her linking of sound and meaning. One who did that well was Alfred Tennyson. In his poem The Splendor Falls on Castle Walls Tennyson writes these lines:

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

To pronounce the words blow and bugle, one must actually explode a puff of air. This puff of air reflects in a way the blast of a trumpet. The word dying in pronunciation has a sharp refining sound followed by a dying away effect, much like an echo fading among the hills.

            Learning to become comfortable with the musical quality of words is why I continue to explore some of the old historic forms of poetry that involve meter and rhyme, as well as alliteration, assonance, and parallel structure. Parallel structure was the basic rhythmic core of all ancient Near Eastern poetry. The most obvious specimen is Psalm 119 in the Hebrew Bible. Its 176 lines of parallel thoughts play a multitude of variations on the theme of the surpassing value of the Law of the Lord.

Parallel structure is very significant for modern poetry as it offers one of the most fruitful rhythmic devices in free verse. It creates that somewhat hypnotic quality I sometimes experience when I read the poetry of Walt Whitman. As I experiment with these old tools, I hope that I am building up my poetic muscles so that I can write more robustly when I choose to depart from them. The bulk of my work is in free verse, but I hope it has been strengthened through my forays into more traditional forms.

            Another important tool a new poet must master is the use of figurative language, especially similes, metaphors, and personifications. It is here where I think poets move from mere craftsmen into artists, for it is metaphor in particular that transforms verse into art. Art communicates the immaterial through the material, whether that be through paint, stone, or the images evoked by words.

            Thus imagination, which links the two, is the highest gift a poet can enjoy. It shatters the frosted glasses through which he or she views the world and enables the poet to see a unity in experience that was not seen before. This leads me to speculate. Does the poet when she seizes on her metaphors actually brush against something metaphysical? Scientists are increasingly illuminating the cosmos as a finely wrought network. All is tied together from small atoms to gigantic galaxies, including the worlds of spirit. When we create our metaphors, are we possibly joining hands with God in the task of cosmic integration?  

            A student of poetry has said, A poem is not an elaboration, but a condensation. Puzzling as it may seem, this is the implication of the word metaphor. The metaphor is not be used to express a thought in a more florid, exotic style, but to communicate a thought through comparison and linkage.

            The metaphor implies that the meaning cannot be fully communicated except in reference to the metaphor. This is why it is impossible to adequately express the thought of a poem in a prose summary. Francis Thompson communicated the searching love of God for human beings through the metaphor of a blood hound chasing its prey. To express the thought without the metaphor plunders the poem of the richness of its meaning.

            Immature poets often assume that ineffable emotion is most effectively communicated by metaphors drawn from mystical, exotic settings like Coleridge’s palace of Xanadu or by passionate, fractured emotional phrases. Imagery is most artistic and effective when it is drawn from concrete experiences in time and space. Marianne Moore has written that real poets are literalists of the imagination, creating imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

            One notes this effect in these lines from Sir John Suckling describing a shy bride:

Her feet beneath her petticoat,

Like little mice, stole in and out,

As if they fear’d the light.

His simile draws upon the image of real live mice, concrete images from experience.

The metaphor is more penetrating if it draws upon the sensory experience relatively common to both the poet and his or her listeners/readers. This is the source of another common rule among poets. We are told to show our listeners/readers through our descriptions, not tell them. Rather than tell us a woman is ravishingly beautiful, describe her attractive features. Then let the listeners or readers to draw the conclusion. We leave space for them to complete our thought rather than our completing it for them. When we do, poetry becomes a collaborative art, in which both the poet and the listeners/readers have a role.      

The Challenge of Authentic Expression

 I opened this essay saying that writing good poetry presents two challenges to the poet. One is the challenge of masterful craftsmanship. Now I want to turn to the second: the challenge of the poem’s content or message. Certainly the power of a poem is communicated by the poem’s craftsmanship–how the poet expresses his thought–but equally, if not more, importantly the power of the poet’s message is found in what the poet is saying. The poet Babette Deutsch once expressed this distinction by writing, The distinguishing feature of verse is its formal aspect, that of poetry is its imaginative power.

            Some poems are forgettable because what the poem is expressing is so conventional. We’ve heard it all before. There is nothing that bites and sinks its teeth into our consciousness, then does not release its hold after we put the poem down. We consume it like cotton candy.

            We have trouble letting go of other poems because the poem surprises us, delights us, startles us, troubles us, soothes us, charms us, stirs us to action, causes us to ponder, causes us to laugh, moves us to lament, snags us in its ambiguity. Often such poems take universal experiences and expresses them in words of such power that we feel we look at life with new eyes. They feel authentic to life as we live it.

            There is value, as I argued above, for the poet to imitate the verse forms of other poets. That is how a poet can hone his or her craftmanship. But the personal voice coming through the poem seldom sounds authentic. Poetry’s power is tied in some inextricable way to the poet being his or her authentic self, speaking with a voice as unique as one’s fingerprint.

            I also want to call attention to the values of ambiguity in a poem. Sometimes the ambiguity arises from lazy writing. The poet has not thought out deeply what she is feeling or is employing sloppy grammar and syntax. Other times the poet creates confusion by being pretentious. But real human experience involves a lot of ambiguity, especially when it comes to our feelings. None of us purely love, but then none of us purely hate. We experience multiple feelings tumbling one after another. A poem can preserve that authentic ambiguity.

This poses a particular challenge to anyone who writes religious poetry, as I frequently do. T.S. Eliot noted this challenge in writing about the 17th century poet George Herbert, who wrote exclusively religious poetry. He said:

The great danger, for the poet who would write religious verse, is that of setting down what he would like to feel rather than be faithful to the expression of what he really feels. Of such pious insincerity Herbert was never guilty.

Eliot’s observation carries a real sting for a poet like me.

            Let me say one last thing on the challenge of content. We are often seduced by the idea that the most universal truths must be expressed in the most general and abstract propositions. We sift out the particularities of individual experience or happenings in an effort to say something that will apply to all, regardless of all the features that make up individual identities. But poems that take that approach always bore me. They feel lifeless.

Paradoxically I find that it is when we are most our particular selves and tell our most particular stories that we stand the best chance of approaching universality. That’s why I think stories fascinate and captivate people far more than philosophical discourses or scientific monographs. Christian theology, for example, holds that it is not in the tomes of theology, but in the birth of a particular baby in a Palestinian manager that the divine enters our world. Let a poet, therefore, choose his details carefully, describe them vividly, eschewing abstractions. When she does, she will link our spirits to our senses and bodies. The poem will then lead us through the door of particularity into the realm of the universal.  

 – Gordon Lindsey