#2 This Week's Poetry Craft Tips and Considerations.
“This Week’s Tips and Considerations” is a short note about some of the key points that were covered or came up during the poetry writing class I taught this week. If you are interested in learning to write poetry with me, you can check out my teaching schedule as part of Versed Community where we focus on cultivating skills in close reading, craft and community.
This weeks tips and considerations…
Questions in Poetry— This week we discussed the different types, and benefits of using questions in poetry. This included: is it more powerful to ask questions we (the writer/speaker) have the answers to, or that we dont have the answer to? What types of questions are optimal to be used as doorways of engagement with the reader? How can a question shift the aperture of a poem? (From the big ‘mystery of life’ questions at the end of a poem vs. questions voicing self doubt on a personal level.) We explored the different ways the use of a single question, or multiple back-to-back questions affect the pacing in a poem. We also explored how questions can be used to create and explore a speaker’s vulnerability, and how it can give the reader something to reflect upon and relate to, thus creating reader investment in the poem.
We also discussed Rilke’s quote from “Letters to a Young Poet” in letting your life be guided by questions that, to you, are currently unanswerable. How learning to sit without immediate answers, but instead with faith that “Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer” is a practice of contemplation that brings much gold to our writing. How in the striving for answers, we are often living, and therefore writing, from a place of fear, while by allowing the state of patience to lead the moment, we are in fact opening our writing into the space of Love.
Of course, we can’t talk about living into our questions and non-striving without bringing in Keats’ concept of ‘negative capability’. This is the concept that a great thinker (and I would offer that great writers are inherently great thinkers) is someone who is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Therefore, non-striving or not trying to escape from challenging or difficult life circumstances (on and off the page), creates more space inside of ourselves to bring forth deeper, more honest writing.
Whats your favourite poem that asks a question?
Happy Writing everyone!
Śivani