For poets, as for other writers, there’s a balancing act to writing something that is credible and writing something that will appeal to a wide audience.
I also talk about this on The Patchword Podcast on Spotify and on YouTube.
Most of us base our writing on our own experience. Not necessarily direct experience, of course: it might be an overheard remark, or something which happened to a cousin or a friend of a friend, or perhaps something we read or remember from childhood. Basing our writing on fact helps to make it realistic and, after all, one of the first things that we are told as writers is, “write about what you know.”
However, one of the most frequent problems of amateur and novice poets is that when they write about what they know, they can’t detach themselves from it. This has two main consequences. First, the insistence on details that have no relevance to the poem, and secondly, a strong attachment to the writing which means that any negative comment is taken as a personal attack.
Inclusion of irrelevant details
The inclusion of extraneous information can happen to any of us if we don’t take great care: we remember an incident and focus on details and facts that are simply neither relevant nor poetic.
A while back, I asked a fellow writer to comment on one of my poems in progress. The poem, in which I invoked images from my childhood, contained the following lines:
We stand on the pavement, waiting
for the Lord Mayor's Parade.
Having attended the Parade year after year, my own memory provided me with a strong image to illustrate these words and I included the couplet with no further explanation or detail.
The critic, however, damned the lines with the comment: “The only possible defence for this incidental banality is ‘it really happened’, and you know that that's insufficient.”
I do indeed know that, but I’d momentarily forgotten.
It might have been different had I expanded the image, talked about how we felt while we waited, what we saw, who ‘we’ were etc. But all I did was drop this simple bald statement into the middle of a poem where it didn’t belong.
Beyond the truth
Imagine you’re writing a poem based on the memory of the first time you saw your wife. You remember exactly what she was wearing, exactly where you were and what you said to each other. But if you want your writing to rise above a personal account of what happened and touch your reader, you need to select only some of this information.
The ideas and images which are personal to you and your wife may not contribute to the mood and story of the poem at all; maybe it was a wet Tuesday afternoon at 3 o’clock and you’d left work early because you were feeling unwell. How much of this information adds to the atmosphere of the poem? How much of it actually moves the poem on? In this type of poem, if the facts don’t help, they should be omitted or changed.
I have a vague memory of Phil Spector saying that most people probably meet the love of their life on a Friday or Saturday night out, but “I met him on a Monday” sounded better, which is why that’s what the Crystals sang. So what about you and your wife? You met in a shower of rain on a Tuesday? Perhaps a wet Wednesday might be a more interesting phrase because of the alliteration. Or on a thundery Thursday. You actually met on Tuesday at three? Would Tuesday at two or Thursday at three sound better? Perhaps none of this is of any relevance at all, and it could all be cut.
If your wife will be offended if you change these details in order to write a better poem, perhaps what you are writing shouldn’t be considered poetry at all. Maybe it is actually a journal entry or a personal poem, not written for public consumption, but for an intimate audience of family and friends.
Personal attachment
Which leads us on to the problems caused by personal attachment to your writing.
This is particularly relevant when the subject matter is very personal. Many people write poetry about emotional situations, and all too often they do so before they have had time to separate themselves from the situation.
If someone you love dies, there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing about it. However, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to write a technically skilled poem until you have had some time to come to terms with the death.
If someone then criticises the poem it is hard to distance yourself and realise that it is only the poem they are commenting on: they aren’t criticising you personally, nor the person or event that you are writing about.
It’s never pleasant to receive criticism - I wasn’t exactly thrilled to have that couplet described as an ‘incidental banality’ - but if we want to improve our writing, objective criticism can definitely help.
You are, however, unlikely to receive such useful comments from friends and family. This is in part because they don’t want to hurt your feelings, and in part because they may share your ideas and memories. I’ve no doubt my sister would know exactly what I saw and felt when I wrote those lines, and so for her they would have served to evoke the feeling I intended.
I would, however, like to think my writing might reach a few more people than my immediate family circle, and so I need to work at evoking that feeling in someone who didn’t share the original experience. The criticism was useful because it told me just how unsuccessful I had been in achieving that.
There was absolutely no point getting defensive and insisting on how important the facts were to my writing. I’m not writing history, I’m trying to write poetry. And I’m trying to improve what I write so that it will be relevant to a wider audience.
So, although it’s reasonable to base our poetry on facts and personal impressions, these should only be the foundation stones. We should be clear in our minds whether what we are writing is intended for a general audience, and if it is, we should be prepared to distance ourselves from it enough to make it as good as it can be as poetry.
If you're a poet and you're interested in joining a workshopping group, do check out the Poetry Society Stanzas. (You don't have to be a member of the Poetry Society to join.) I run the Global Online Stanza, one of the online groups. The Writers Success Mentorship programme also caters for poets who are looking to hone their craft.
Comments ()