Advice for New Poets
Poems are driven by emotions. Love and grief are powerful engines for poems,
but don’t neglect the whole range of emotional states—pride, anger, wonder, gratitude,
amusement, disgust, anticipation. Active poets are in touch with their feelings and
readily respond to any emotions they experience. Even minor emotional responses can
prompt good poems. Li Po, the beloved Chinese poet, once wrote a poem on the
disappointment he felt when the friend he went to visit was not home.
The composition of a poem has a career. In “The Figure a Poem Makes,”
Robert Frost says, “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” He tells us that
writing a poem is a process of discovery, that a poet does not know how a poem is
going to end until he arrives at the end of the poem. Each time you embark on your
poetic journey, you will be traveling through new territory. Surprises await you along the
way as phrases, connections, images, and comparisons flow from your pen. When you
arrive at your destination, you will be rewarded with a revelation, something you didn’t
realize so clearly before your journey.
Poems are like dreams. Both are made up of complex combinations of images
bearing mysterious meanings. Even though we create our dreams, we are puzzled and
intrigued by their significance. Poems also speak through images, delivered through
sensory details. As you work with your images, you will generate meanings that may be
mysterious to you. Accept them; they are gifts from your unconscious mind. The
deeper meanings of poetry are rarely announced through abstract terms like freedom,
beauty, honor. They are suggested through vivid concrete images, just like the ones in
your dreams.
Poems should be packed with images. William Carlos Williams, the physician
poet, insists on images, “Say it, no ideas but in things.” You can write a good poem by
describing the things that are in front of you. In “Sunflower Sutra” Allen Ginsberg
describes a dried-up sunflower stalk that he saw by the railroad tracks. By describing
the sunflower, he illuminates the state of his soul, which is reflected in the sunflower.
As your poetic eye scans your immediate reality, it will be drawn to those things that
reflect truths within you. You don’t have to try too hard since as Goethe asserts, “All
things are metaphorical.” Don’t wait to write your poems until you have figured out
something deep about life. Wisdom, as Frost points out, comes at the end of the
journey, almost as an automatic reflex. Concentrate on describing immediate reality,
capturing the moment accurately but also allowing the unconscious mind free rein to
make connections with other fields in your experience.
Brainstorming can help you write better poems. In her book and website Writing
the Natural Way, Gabrielle Rico advocates clustering as a way to generate rich material
for poems. By jotting down notes around a circled phrase, you allow the mind time to
summon and organize material before embarking on the actual composition of the
poem. Five or ten minutes of clustering can yield a good poem. Clustering doesn’t take
any of the surprises out of poetic composition; in fact, it often multiplies them.
Poems do not make literal sense. Robert Lowell championed the value of
“unreality” in poetry. Poetic expressions are odd. They operate through exaggerations
and illogical formulations. The things you say in a poem convey emotional truths, not
literal truths. The poet must not write, “I will love you for approximately sixty years
according to actuarial tables.” Instead the poet will write, “I will love you until all the
rocks melt with the sun, until all the seas go dry.” A poet like Naomi Nye would never
say, “My mother prayed for me in my cradle.” Instead, she writes, “. . . my mother held
me in a cradle of prayers.” The phrase “a cradle of prayers” is wrong literally but perfect
emotionally. A poet like Paul Simon would never say, “The boxer was disillusioned by
false promises made to him.” Instead, he shows us a boxer with “a pocket full of
mumbles, such are promises.” Inject a healthy dose of unreality into your poems.
Poets love comparisons. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” asks
William Shakespeare. Through figurative comparisons, the poet can add sensory
details not present in the original subject. In “Constantly risking absurdity,” Lawrence
Ferlinghetti compares a poet’s performance to that of an acrobat and sustains the
comparison throughout the poem. The poet “climbs on rime / to a high wire of his own
making.” The poet balances “on eyebeams,” attempts to “perceive taut truth,” moves
with each step “toward that still higher perch / where Beauty stands and waits,” and
finally tries to catch “her fair eternal form.” Speaking of one thing in terms of another is
the favorite means of development for all poets.
All poets are keenly aware of the sounds and connotations of words. Alexander
Pope tells us, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” Pleasant sounds will
attend pleasant subjects, and discordant sounds will reinforce unpleasant subjects.
Rhyming is one device available to the poet, but others, such as the alliteration in
“dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,” are also effective. Puns and word play are welcome.
Mixtures of English and Spanish reflect our reality on the border and add interest to a
poem, as in this line by Ray Ramos, “Our machetes are dull, blunted / on the skulls of
coyotes en los mercados.”
Poets differ on the value of revision. Some poets like W. B. Yeats revised so
extensively that the final version bore little resemblance to the original draft. Allen
Ginsberg, on the other hand, claimed to revise little—“first thoughts, best thoughts.”
When each part of a poem grows organically from the previous part, the poem may
seem resistant to extensive changes. In my own experience, I find that I can revise a
poem for a couple of days, but I cannot come back a month or a year later and change
the words around. Like concrete, the poem is workable for a time and then sets. A
month or a year later, the best thing to do is write a new poem.
Read many poems to appreciate the range of possible forms and styles. Write
many poems in order to develop your own style. If you have time, come to a meeting of
the Non-Profit Poets Society, a student club, and share your poems with us. Finally, on
the good authority of Robert Frost, realize that maturity is overrated. The poems you
write now are as wonderful as any you may write in the future.
James Gonzales, EPCC
James Gonzales teaches poetry at El Paso Community College, is an advisor for the
Non-Profit Literary Society, and organizes the EPCC Poetry Slam.