That first step is all-important, because it determines what comes next. Poetry starts from one word chosen, then another, and then another and then ... .
Once you've decided you want to try traditional poetic forms, you're already on your way.
A Different Game
I think it was Robert Frost who called writing in free verse "like playing tennis without a net."
What I believe he meant was that, once you remove the net, you don't have tennis anymore. You have a new game: it might be on the same court, using the same ball and racquets -- but you'll need to change the rules (as you go) to keep the game interesting enough to continue playing.
Because writing in "traditional" verse (using the net) is so long out of custom, it becomes a new game when we take the net out of mothballs and start playing tennis again.
To me, writing poetry is a game: words, images, metaphors communicate (serve) the meaning (thoughts, feelings) from poet to reader (or listener). The rules are understood by both parties: it is a game played by intuition.
And (re-)introducing the net changes things. But, no matter which form of the game you're playing, if played fairly, both sides win.
"Out!" "You're crazy! It was on the line!" "Still out."
If you're playing poetry "tennis" without a net, it's not tennis anymore. It's still poetry, but it's a new game. Now, what are the rules for the new game? Do you make them up as you go along? Do you change them as the service changes? Do both players agree to the changes beforehand, or is it more fun to figure them out as you go?
Each of these questions, and many more, must be answered, if the game is to continue. And that's what writing in free verse is all about. You, the author, read your latest draft to the coffee house audience on "open mic" night -- and you decide the next move based on the reaction you get: trash it, rewrite it, or type it up and stick it in your "chapbook" folder. Or your poetry circle's reaction helps you decide that next step. Or your best friend's. Et cetera. It's all part of the game: the audience in each case knocks your serve back to you, and you decide what to do with it. Not that you need a positive reaction to make that decision: you can decide that maybe the audience is wrong, or that your point was not to be liked in that case. (Some people thrive on others' hatred, as long as the hated is in control of their reaction, usually. Trust me on that one.)
But when you're writing in traditional meter (and rhyme), you've got the net up: you're playing The Game. You're not doing "word jazz" anymore, you've gone classical. Not that you can't read your trad stuff aloud on Open Mic at the cafe -- it's just maybe a little odd. Either the audience members tune you out, or they go: "What did you just do?" You put the net up, that's what you did.
So, trad verse is going to have some different expectations when you start to show it, or read it, to someone else. Which you're eventually going to do, right? OK, they may fish it out of your humble possessions after your wake, but they're going to see it. So before you write anything down (or just get it going in your head), you've got to start with those expectations in mind. The net is going to be there. Then what?
You decide. That's poetry, man.
Setting a Course
OK, more with the metaphorical conceits: if you're an explorer, you need to have an idea of where you are going before you can set sail. So you may end up discovering Hispaniola instead of India, but that's how discoveries are made.
And you'll need a compass, or a sextant, or know the stars, or have a really good sense of direction before you shove off, m'hearties!
Traditional verse starts with logic. Duhh ... . No, I'm not going to try and pretend I'm a qualified philosophy instructor. But I am suggesting that it helps to have a basic idea of syllogistic structure when you're starting out to write poems that fit into that "traditional" mode.
In short, the rules of rhetoric (actually studied as a kind of "communications theory" in the Middle Ages) demand a certain structure, and rhythmically rhyming posey fit into that early category.
Of course, the art of poetry (no matter what kind you're writing or what age) insists that the poet "bend" rules -- backwards and sideways and every way possible, if necessary -- in making his or her point. The "rules" in this case are the audience's or readers' expectations. They've got to have an idea of where you are going -- and so, dear poet, do you.
I'm off to find a copy of Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" here in the library stacks. So, my friends, 'til next time ... .
What It's Not All About
How many times have we heard that lately? Something (pick a topic: person, place or thing) is "all about the" something else (fill in the blank). Rarely do you hear "it's all about the" method, the means, or the manner of that something else.
And there's a reason for it: the "it's all about the" person, place or thing is just too glib. Too slick. Too easy. And, for those reasons, it's also false.
The hardest thing about writing poetry -- at least as I'm able to see it -- is in getting real. I mean, that's "what it's all about," wouldn't you think? But go to an average poetry reading sometime -- even by published poets -- and really listen to what's being said. How much of it is honest? How much of it is the poet's self-selection of the truth? How much is self-justification? How much of it is the poet trying to hide -- from you, from him or herself? You might be surprised at how much honesty you really hear! Or, maybe not ... .
We look at the Anthology of ... or the Collected Works of ... , admiring the poet's power of expression and nuance -- and perhaps not think of the other stuff. The stuff this outstanding poetry we now admire stood out from.
And when you look at some of that "other stuff", you can see readily what makes the collected or anthologized poetry stand out from the rest: honesty. Fidelity to truth, at least as much of it as the poet is able to apprehend and communicate through the medium of poetry.
It gets down to the word itself. I can remember one poet saying that some activity or another (walking in the woods, admiring a sunset, whatever) really "stokes my muse." How on Earth, thought I, do you "stoke a muse?"
You can stoke a fire, you can obey a muse -- but how do you "stoke a muse?" OK, what he obviously meant is that this particular activity really got him in the mood to write poetry. But his mixed metaphor betrayed his (perhaps unconscious) feeling that he was in control of the process -- the fact that the process was there long before either of us existed did not seem to occur to him. And his cracked verbiage revealed that flaw in his thinking.
I do remember logic class: I remember it clearly because the first instructor was so bad I decided to audit the same course a year later by a professor I really respected (and, in memory, still do). He spent at least a month going over so-called "informal" fallacies: not the "therefore, all men are Socrates" fallacies of formal logic, but the "When did you stop beating your wife?" type of fallacies. Those are the kind of fallacies that crack your thinking before you even begin to reason.
It's important to mention now, because I hear those informal fallacies all the time: hasty generalization, jumping to conclusions, ad hominem arguments, etc. The title for them all is more Latin: non sequitur. "It does not follow."
Emotional honesty is vital to all expression, especially poetry. Its very life blood is most transparent in free verse. Which is one reason that particular form remains popular: the minute you "talk falsely" at Open Mic Night, you're busted.
But in formal verse, craft can sometimes disguise dishonesty: emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. That's why you have to have a solid purpose and a strong foundation before you can start writing it successfully.
Rules, rules, rules ...
The device I'm using to write this down and send it to the world is (so I'm told) fundamentally based on the work of a man who taught himself high-end algebra. He used that notation as the foundation for his discoveries in the world of symbolic logic.
What George Boole found out was that (recalling my logic class -- the good one -- again) things don't have to actually exist to work in a syllogism. (If I recall correctly,) Western medieval commentators on Aristotle apparently assumed existence of the objects in a syllogism -- a conceptual mistake righted by Boole's work.
My point here (yes, I have one) is that when poets begin to use logic, we have to extend that conceptual framework out even further than Boole did. Love has its logic, irony its rules, anguish its regulations -- and we have to discover them. For ourselves. And then find words to fit them -- sometimes whether those words exist or not.
Back Formation's Back
There should be a hard-and-fast rule: Never discard a book.
You never know when you're going to need it, you see. But then, there are those moving costs -- so we should all be glad for public libraries (which is where I'm writing this, BTW). The book loss I'm bemoaning today is Otto Jespersen's Growth and Structure of the English Language. (I think that was the title. I always just called the book "Otto.") I'm not talking about the legendary Danish scholar's monumental work on the history of language, but a 250-page paperback where he sums it all up in plain English (is that a pun? I don't think so.).
The reason I'm bemoaning its loss right now is that old Jespersen really went into some detail (for the common man, anyway) about how this language we're using puts words together. He really had that subject down pat.
My reason's reason is that formal verse is almost guaranteed to require the poet to invent a word at some point. You're going to need a certain rhyme or a certain phrase in a certain meter, and you're going to be stuck without the ability to make up a word. And you can't just make one up out of whole cloth, either. Why? OK, "2938470ujre." That's my new made-up word. Like it? Great! Know what it means? No? Well ... .
In other words (OK, a kind of pun), there are rules for inventing words from other known words -- and Uncle Otto (he was avuncular, but not my uncle) knew them. I think you should find this book or one like it, and then I think you should make it your vade mecum for creative language. (See, no handy English term for "a companion reference book" -- so I had to use Latin. Now see why you'll need Otto?)
You won't need to make up a word often, but when you will -- you'll have one (with Otto's help) on the first draft.
Leave It to the French
It's not worth it. Really.
I've tried, and I can just tell you: it's not worth it.
What is "it?" (*sings* "It's in your face and you can't grab it!") "It" is writing English poesy in French forms.
You'd think that would be obvious, but so many try it, even well-known published poets. Why? Because English verse forms are boring, that's why.
Let's face facts: traditional English verse is basically iambic pentameter in couplets or quatrains. Ecch. But it's what works. ("Rhyme royale" is the two rhyme-forms stuck together, basically.)
You don't need me to prove it: look at Shakespeare's sonnets or his narrative verse. He just didn't do triolets or ballades (AFAIK, anyway). But he knew what did work within the confines of our common tongue.
There are exceptions to what I'm saying: Shakespeare wrote song lyrics for some of his lighter plays that are outside the standard "box" of English poesy. And modern greats like Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot adapted French forms for some of their finest work.
But if you look at the lyric poems of a writer like Swinburne, his own French-form material is very slick and expert -- yet kind of empty.
What I'm saying is that the free-verse poet trying out traditional verse for the first go can save a lot of time and trouble by avoiding French-form English verse.
Postscript, friends: That doesn't mean you can't benefit from reading it: I think Swinburne's translations of Villon are a great source. So are, in that and many other respects, Galway Kinnell's, for a modern take.
From C to Shining c ...
Here's a potential vade mecum you might want to consider, from a poet you might want to avoid.
Admirer of Swinburne, Ezra Pound played the pundit, edited "The Waste Land" (his blue-pencils are still controversial), and wrote a lot of confusing academic verse in something he called Cantos. An early poem of his was a sonnet ("Portrait d'une Femme"*) that conformed to his critical standards and wowed me as an undergraduate. I was a Poundian for my whole four years. Ah, college ... . It's a blessing those years don't last!
Anyway, toward the end of his checkered (stained, really) career and life, he edited (with Marcella Spann) a compendium of useful verse called Confucius to cummings: A Poetry Anthology. Handy and fun to read (I think you can safely ignore his notes, except for one), it gives you in one place whole batches of traditional verse outside the academic "canon" that are very helpful to study.
The only note of Pound's worth reading is an appendix (I think -- I don't have the book to hand) on Thomas Hardy. That's right, the novelist who quit mid-career to write poetry. Pound includes a Hardy poem or two in the Browning mode for the anthology proper, but he later lists a whole bunch (yeah, "bunch," as in flowers) of his theme-related verse re: a mid-life love affair. It's eye-opening and candid (Hardy's love-affair stuff, not Uncle Ez -- please!), and it's worth getting Hardy's Complete out of the public library to find 'em from Pound's list.
As far as versification goes, Hardy did some very interesting things in those poems. (I'll let you figure just what those things are for yourself now, but I may post on that someday.)
Anyway, why not thumb through C to c at your local bookseller sometime, and see what you think? I don't believe you will waste your time.
P.S.: There's one in the Pound book you can find online that will be worth your while: "I Shall Not Die for Thee" by Padraic Colum. There are pages I found with links to his Gaelic versions as well.
*Editor's Note: No. It was "A Virginal." Do you see why the confusion occurred?
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