How I Write Poetry (Imbolc 2016)

Discarded Bells

Imbolc is the Celtic holiday associated with Brigit, the Irish patron goddess of poetry. When bound inside by the rigors of winter, many ancient peoples turned to poetry as a way to brighten their long, harsh nights.

A friend and I were discussing poetry a few weeks ago. She described it as the veil words between the indescribable and you. I like that. I think of poetry as a sheer curtain that gives form to the wind. How do you describe the wind to someone who can’t feel it on their face?

Marcel Proust is quoted as having said, "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." For me, that captures poetry as well as my initial process for writing.

Because I only write poetry occasionally, I don’t usually seek out inspiration. It usually finds me. Moreover, it clubs me over the head and drags me by the hair back to its cave.

When inspiration strikes, I usually find myself confronting something I’ve never seen before. By that, I mean never paid attention to before. People who know me have seen me at social gatherings, in a park or on a trip studying something seemingly ordinary, almost enraptured by it. It could be something as simple as the sound of wind sighing through pines, a lizard challenging me with its territorial push-up dance, or the rise and fall of conversation at a party.

And then sometimes it really is something I’ve never seen before. A few years ago, we were driving home on a cloudy, late afternoon and saw sunlight bouncing off the Gulf onto the underside of the clouds with a strange bronze light. Or another day after a week of fog where the clouds rose to a high, thick haze that took on a platinum color that used to be very popular as a metallic paint for cars.

What I’m thinking when I have that thousand yard stare is, how do I capture what I’m seeing and put it into words?

The key for me is to try to capture the essence of what I’m seeing right then. To somehow make the moment set in my mind. If I wait too long, I’ll lose it. That means jotting down notes. Notes of lines. Lines of description. Metaphor and simile. I don’t dwell on getting them exactly right, just capturing an impression. One impression leads to another, and another. Before I know it, I might have eight to a dozen lines in my notebook.

As soon as I get back to my computer, I type in what I have. When I first review those lines, I don’t think they are very good or that many will survive, but most do with just a little tweaking. I clean them up to deepen each impression just a bit. If Karen was with me and took pictures, I note where they were. If the lines form a narrative, I create a file with a title I put in a folder called Working Poetry. I write down everything related as notes, including where and when I wrote them. Sometimes new lines come to me then. Sometimes not. But those notes are indispensable. It could be weeks, months or even years before I get back to them.

If the lines are one-off individuals (like when we are out running errands), I stash them in a file of random lines for future use. As a college roommate of mine is fond of saying, I file it under “I” for “I might need that someday.” Right now, I have scores of them tucked away. I could probably sit down and compose several poems from just those pickup lines. I don’t always use them in poems. Sometimes they go into descriptive essays, sometimes into short stories.

If I’m particularly fond of a line, I’ll post it on social media. A risk, but it forces me to finish the line before (or soon after) I post it. It gives me a little feedback as to whether people like it, whether it resonates. It also keeps me thinking about what it represents, setting the impression and emotion further while allowing me to view it from another angle if people comment.

At that point I usually let the lines or piece settle. This is critical. My first impressions with poetry are not always right. I have to let my subconscious chew on it intuitively for a while. I see this step as a settling pond where the murky sediment drops out to leave clear water. This is a step I repeat again and again before I finish.

When I finally sit down to finish a piece, I start by rearranging the lines into an order that supports whatever secondary theme I’m going with. On the surface, Water Falls (a recently posted poem) is about the various waterfalls we saw on a trip with a secondary theme of the water’s life journey as it falls. Often when I start, I don’t know what that underlying theme might be. So I arrange lines in an order that seems to flow. With poetry specifically I can’t finish a piece if I don’t know the underlying theme, the tie-in that weaves throughout, or at least closes it.

While I wait for the secondary theme to emerge (if I don’t have one in mind), I start playing with the lines and words. For me, this is a meditative process. I get lost in it. In this step, I use two vital tools, a thesaurus and a dictionary, both of which I have as throwback standalone programs on my computer which will be impossible to replace when I upgrade to a new operating system. I like the standalones because I don’t have to wait for load times or see annoying ads on Dictionary.com (though I use it, too). The thesaurus is convenient as I can click my way through a chain of words and meanings very quickly.

The thesaurus I mostly use so I don’t repeat words too often unless that’s my intent to create an impact. I try not to use complex words for their own sake, though using unusual words is a weakness. I almost always look up the words I choose in my dictionary, mostly to ensure I have the meaning (or meanings) right. And as much to examine their etymology. Sometimes nuances in the meaning only emerge from knowing a word’s origin and history. As well, both tools often lead me on little games of hide and seek where I know there is a better word out there but it just won’t surface. Sometimes I come across a completely different word that I really want to use.

I play with words. I repurpose them. Sometimes I make them up, or transform nouns to verbs, or vice versa. I repeat this process one word at a time, turn of phrase by turn of phrase. Internal alliteration is important to me. As is the cadence.

Once I get the words into some decent shape, I starting reading stanzas or the full piece aloud. I pause anytime I feel a burr in a stanza, word or rhythm. While I never write rhyming poetry or lyrics, rhythm is very important to me. I don’t focus on anything formal like measure or meter, I just see how it flows from one word to the next, from one stanza to the next.

After I reiterate that process to get the piece into something resembling a final form, I let it settle again. That could be an hour while I take a nap, or a day, or a week. If I feel the piece is close to finished, I’ll let Karen read it then to get her impressions. Or I read it to her.

Once I feel it’s ready, I embark on the final read-alouds and edits. Again, I focus on any burrs. I also look for opportunities to simplify the language, where simpler words or phrases will do. I try cutting out adjectives and adverbs, or whole phrases if they don’t really contribute anything. I spend a ton of time changing one word, changing it back, rearranging the stanza one way then another. Moving stanzas up and down. Swapping lines between stanzas so they reinforce each other and make better sense.

In Water Falls, I kept stumbling on a particular stanza. After at least an hour of consideration, I finally figured out that the first phrase of the stanza felt like it belonged at the end but the last three phrases felt more like a beginning. Once I understood that, I found another stanza at the beginning and started swapping phrases. Once I was finished, it felt much better.

Throughout the process, I pay carefully attention if I feel any point of resistance. That resistance can crop up anywhere in the process from the initial choice of a word, to the flow of a line, all the way to the final read-aloud. How any given line feels is very important to me. I know it’s right when it gives me chills. Not all of them do. Like almost everything I write, I try to lead with an impression to set a tone and close out on a strong note. In between, I’m mostly looking to transit from point A to point B. Transitions and lead-ins from stanza to stanza create that sense of journey.

Reading this, most people might think I do this all as a deliberate, logical process. Not exactly.

As we were watching a series of lectures on Strategic Thinking last month, the instructor described how true strategic thinkers think. As a rule, they don’t identify the problem, then come up with options for the solution and evaluate them one by one. True strategic thinkers see the problem and the solution all at once. I looked at Karen and said, that’s the way I think, whether when I’m designing software, war-gaming or writing. It’s a weird feeling that is really hard to describe.

I’m pretty drifty in the initial phases of the process. There are a lot of conditions I feel I need met to work on poetry, which is probably why I don’t do it as much. I need a lot of space and time where I won’t be interrupted. At times, writing poetry is an oddly non-verbal process with me. If I get interrupted while trying to sort feelings and impressions into words, everything derails. I need to feel safe, and that my responsibilities are taken care of. It helps to feel comfortable, nice temperature, breathable air, maybe a little sun, but that isn’t a requirement. Some of my best or strangest lines have come to me while I have a headache that borders on a migraine. I think because those proto-migraines sharpen my vision and force me to see the world differently. Almost like synesthesia (the overlapping of one sense on another).

As a way to cultivate this in people not quite so neurologically cross-wired, I offer an exercise. Write one line a day. Just one. Take the time to sit on your porch, or to look out your front window and describe the thing you see, the thing that initially catches your eye. Like in drawing, you need to really see it, to study it, to make sure your mind doesn’t shortcut it and make it a symbol. That’s the difference between describing a chair and describing the particular chair you are sitting in. Make the line the best you can. If you need more structure, make it fit into a Tweet (144 characters) or some other arbitrary limit. Do this every day for a week, a month, a year. A few years ago, I posted a line every day on Twitter for just over a year. It’s harder than you might think (as at least one of my readers found out). Not everything I wrote was great but I still have a few of those lines that stand out in my mind.

That’s a quick and dirty look at how I write poetry. At the Spring Equinox, I’ll talk about essays. Until then, let’s get out there and write.


© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III