#3 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…
Unlock the door, open the window— This week we discussed the sweet spot in a poem where a reader commits to the poem, or the place where the reader enters into the experiance of the poem with the speaker. This is often a spot where the speaker offers what’s at stake for the speaker to be sharing this experiance, or a note of vulnerability bringing us into the emotional core of the poem. Sometimes, it is a line early in the poem that creates surprise or is shocking to the reader; a line that makes the reader sit up and go “whats happening here? Where are we going? What did you just say?” such as Lucille Clifton’s poem Leaving Fox from her 1996 collection The Terrible Stories. We talked about, as writers, the balance between the need to bring details of ourselves to the page as portals of vulnerability, and leaving or creating space for the reader to enter the poem with their own schema, “just as there is space between stars in a constellation” as Robert Bly writes in News of the Universe (119).
We also looked at the power of writing into the negative. Here we looked at how by writing that something is absent eg. there was no rain today, it is asking the reader to conjure rain in their mind and hold it against what the speaker has said there is present eg. the sun was out. Which is to say that when we write that something is absent, we are manifesting it in the readers mind, thus creating the tension for the poem to come alive, or the stake, (or context) as to why the moment, as simple as watching a hummingbird on a honeysuckle, may be worth the writer and the reader’s time. This is demonstrated beautifully in Czeslaw Milosz’s poem Gift “A day so happy…” where by writing what wasn’t there: pain, envy, feelings of striving to possess, suffering etc we can see the miracle, or importance of noting the simple beauty of the garden. This technique can also be used to invoke a state of calm, or an almost meditative state, when the reader is asked to hold two opposites at the same time. As the mind try’s to reconcile holding equal forces of duality simultaneously, the mind goes quiet.
Lastly, we close read Ada Limon’s “What I Want To Remember” and explored how through the use of memory; stating something that wasn’t present, was a way of creating a safe place for both speaker and reader to face and digest the horrors of what was in the present moment. We examined by how using memory, (as a form of writing into the negative) she was able see-saw between memory and current moment to spoon feed the harsh truths that wanted to be expressed in the poem without pushing the reader away.
Do you have a favourite poem that writs into the negative?
Happy Writing everyone!
Śivani