Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014

Poetry flies the flag of freedom
Poetry country

But not all poems are narrative, and not many find their way into novels. Probably the biggest reason I write poems is because I’m a word person. When we strip away story, what’s left is words: the sound of them, the look of them, their meanings and double meanings, the ways we can arrange them on a page. Poets explore words in all their glory.

When I write a poem, my mind moves into another zone in my brain. Gravity isn’t as strong here, time wobbles, and logic is out of kilter. The laws are looser than in fiction writing. Poetry flies the flag of freedom.

The nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

So she felt an amputation (temporary, I hope). I experience an addition, as if a ruby or an emerald is glowing inside my chest, and the glow fades slowly. After I write a poem—happy poem, sad poem, doesn’t matter—I go around grinning smugly until that, too, gradually wears off.

This sad and angry poem that I wrote illustrates a few of the possibilities of poetry:

MARY SHERRI MARK DARLA JAKE NOAH OLIVIA

More heads coming off, but not, I suspect, as Emily Dickinson meant! In this poem, the poet (me) regards the page almost the way a painter views a canvas. Words can go anywhere. I’m interested in the look of the poem as well as its meaning and feeling, although feeling predominates in this one. And the feeling is emphasized by the spacing of the words and letters, the crowding together of the happy party people, the isolated I and me, the capitalization and separation of the letters in the word hour, so we feel time ticking by, connecting the words in the laughinglaughing line.

Notice also the title of the poem, “Mary Sherri Mark Darla Jake Noah Olivia.” Surprising, right? Poem titles have at least as much significance as book or story titles. In this case I’m emphasizing the crowd that the speaker of the poem feels excluded from. The first time I wrote it, I made the first word be the title and called the poem “Why.” Poets do that sometimes, start the body of the poem in the title.

Punctuation is absent, but we know where to pause anyway, because of the line breaks and the occasional capitals. But you don’t have to capitalize, either, if you decide the poem would be better served without it. E. E. Cummings, a famous twentieth-century poet, was known for putting words where he believed they should go, no matter what anyone else thought. He often made up words, used real words unconventionally, and ignored the rules of capitalization and punctuation. For example, occasionally he put a parenthesis in the middle of a word. The surprising title of one of his poems is “And What Were Roses. Perfume?For I Do.” The lack of a space after the question mark isn’t a typo; it’s the way Cummings wrote it.

He and other poets sometimes fiddle with words themselves. Here are a few silly lines I made up to demonstrate:

The bab-

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon

played for an our

with hour

ball-

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon

Here I switched the words our and hour, and I broke the words baboon and balloon into two lines each and stretched out the o’s so you’d be extra aware of the oo sounds. I’m not claiming this is much of a poem or even a poem at all; it’s just an example of the fooling around we can get into in poetry.

Three paragraphs ago, I wrote this about capitalizing: “But you don’t have to capitalize, either, if you decide the poem would be better served without it.” How do we make the decision about what’s best for our poem?

We gain experience as we write more and more poems and read more and more poems, because it’s as important for poets to read poetry as it is for novelists to read novels.

And just as we sometimes do in our stories, we try things more than one way. The brevity of poems makes experimentation less time-consuming than in stories. We can move words around, change capitals and punctuation, try a new title, and have a revision in just a few minutes. We can rework the poem again and again, and then compare versions to see which we prefer.

Poets expect more from the reader than fiction writers do. When we write stories, we make entry as easy as possible, because we want the reader to lose herself in our plot. But most poems are too short to get lost in. Instead, we want the reader to regard a poem in much the same way as people look at a painting. With a painting, we have a response: we like it or we don’t or we want to think it over; we notice the colors, the paint texture, the composition, the size of the canvas, the way it makes us feel. With a poem, we have a response: we like it or we don’t or we want to think it over; we notice the placement of the words, the rhyme or lack of rhyme, the meaning (which may be clear or not), the length, the way it makes us feel. We may linger over a poem, just as we stand for several minutes in front of a painting, or we may turn the page.

Writing time!

• Write a poem about one of the seasons, or about an event, like the first day of school, using your words, lines, punctuation, and capitalizing in the unexpected ways we’ve just discussed.

• Rewrite your poem three ways, making new decisions about the look of the poem. Decide which you like better. Put the poems aside for three days and then reread them. Has your favorite changed? Revise again, if you discover ways to improve one or all of them.

• Write an argument poem, but instead of using quotation marks, put the different voices on different sides of the page. If you like, you can move the voices closer together when they agree, farther apart when they disagree.

• Write a poem about an activity—playing basketball, cooking, walking the dog, whatever—and make the placement of the words, along with the meaning, show what’s going on.

Have fun, and save what you write!