Nuts and Bolts of Poetry Writing
“Poetry is when an
emotion has found its thought and the thought has found its words” – Robert
Frost.
How not poetic is
the title, that reads puts nuts and bolts, those steel, heavy, lustreless,
dabbled in black grease things with something as beauteous, as soft, as
sophisticated, as classy a thing like poetry! Well, if we separate the bulk of
poetry that is written for self consumption, or say consumption of those
unsuspecting room-mates or the doe-eyed lover, what remains is pieces of art
that have nuts and bolts which work together, with an intent, towards producing
‘good poetry’.
For most of us
introduction to poetry occurs in elementary school. Some loved them others did
not. I loved poetry. The ability to say so many things, having multiple layers
of narratives, in only a few words, often craftily used, intrigued me. Then the
rhyming of those words, more often than not in those poems in the school
textbook added to the lyrical beauty. A
few lines had the power to take you from the uniform riddled classroom with
wooden benches and desks to just about anywhere and transform the mood to just
about anything. And it was that power of poetry that was alluring.
And that ushering
into the world of poetry was a lovely experience for regulators (ICSE, CBSE,
etc) did a good job recommending books that had Eliot to Keats to Tagore to
Ezekiel. And they covered nature, love, war, pain, mirth and scores of
emotions.
‘On the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ by John Keats (CBSE
Class 8)
But I often thought
why someone would absolutely dread such a lovely form of expression. Why would
someone abhor attending an English poetry class? Among many, notwithstanding
few that had to do with disdain for the teacher or timing of the poetry class,
the generic one I think has been the difficulty to ‘interpret’ the abstract,
which however is the staple examination question.
The appreciation of
poetry got lost in the curricular requirement. The curricular requirement since
could be met by the innumerable ‘guide books’, did not incentivize deep
thought, analysis, critical appreciation and understanding.
A man's destination is his own village,
His own fire, and his wife's cooking;
To sit in front of his own door at sunset
And see his grandson, and his neighbour's
grandson
Playing in the dust together.
Scarred but secure, he has many memories
Which return at the hour of conversation,
(The warm or the cool hour, according to
the climate)
Of foreign men, who fought in foreign
places,
Foreign to each other.
A man's destination is not his destiny,
Every country is home to one man
And exile to another. Where a man dies
bravely
At one with his destiny, that soil is
his.
Let his village remember.
This was not your land, or ours: but a
village in the Midlands,
And one in the Five Rivers, may have the
same graveyard.
Let those who go home tell the same story
of you:
Of action with a common purpose, action
None the less fruitful if neither you nor
we
Know, until the judgement after death,
What is the fruit of action.
‘To the Indians Who Died in Africa’ by
T S Eliot (ICSE Class IX)
I
dabbled with writing poetry since an early age. Few of them were assignments.
Few of them were an effort in trying to impress someone or the other (assuming
the other had the intellectual bent for such art form). Few were to try
different forms of poetry, of which the 14-liner sonnet appealed the most. The
dabbling paid dividend during my graduation years in Bangalore. In a ‘Creative
Writing’ competition in the annual college fest I wrote a poem for a topic ‘Do
boyfriend/girlfriend have an expiry date in today’s world?’ (that was in 2007).
I bagged the first prize for it.
I was
happy with my effort. However I was deeply aware of my shortcomings, which were
plenty. I have always put pen to paper to write poems with a decent frequency.
I have posted few on my blog (sambitspeak.blogspot.com), but that would perhaps
be because it doesn’t cost a dime. What I write could well tuck itself in a
diary which has a thread around to hold it not escape to the view of others.
‘Poetry
Workshop by Arundhati Subramanium’. Seeing the announcement in the
all-exchange-users of the university was delightful. I had to go for it,
however strange the concept of a ‘workshop’ for ‘poetry’, which otherwise is so
subjective, so personal, so intimate, sounded. Go I did.
Poets
have that ‘aura’ of a mystic whose gaze goes beyond the threshold of the immediate
into the oblivion to conjure images and words and weave them into the tapestry
that is both mystical and mundane. Arundhati Subramanium was that and was not
that. A day long of indulgence (safe to term it so because who spends a day to
learn poetry writing who wouldn’t become a poet) had some significant
takeaways.
The 5
essential features that makes a ‘good’ poem, as the acclaimed poet told the
small audience, and as I remember it now, which is three weeks and a lot of
non-poetic work later, and which I hope makes sense to anyone who wishes to
polish their craft of poetic writing, are:
1. Sound
“I would define,
in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty” – Edgar
Allen Poe
How does the poem
sound, what does the texture feel like, does it have a flavor, rhythm, texture, does it impart a flavor, a
taste… These are few questions one should ask while reading a poem or white
writing one.
To rhyme or not to rhyme. That’s the question.
We have grown up with poems that rhyme and
perhaps that has an indelible mark when we attempt to write one, often
searching for pair of words like sun-fun, near dear, bake-lake, etc. It has
been a late realization but perhaps rhyming is not a cornerstone in poetry
writing. Also free verse is not prose with few ‘Enter’ keys.
The example of perhaps the most popular poem
of all times is the one by Robert Frost. Note the rhyming there. Just
brilliant.
Form of the poetry, iambic pentamer or sonnet
or anything else might and ideally should come later in the stage of poetry
writing. That, unless one is too smitten by a form and cannot help but think
and write comfortably cocooned in it.
An example of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry
(free verse).
2. Imagery
A good poem, like what a good prose does in
numerous lines, should make the reader see an image that the writer wishes to
project, and only in a few lines.
The effective way of getting to do that with
your poem is to follow the image. Stay with the image and follow it. Showing
the reader should be the intention, not telling.
This can be inculcated by being reflective, by
following a thought, by seeing through the eyes of mind the vividness of a
scene.
Observe this example of a Luke Pretlusky poem.
The colors have so wonderfully been attributed to other things that one can
almost visualize it as one reads it.
While this is an example of literally adhering
to the imagery as we best know it, with colors and everyday objects, a piece of
poem should be able to build that image, practically of anything that is
intended.
3. Tone
A piece of poem need not be read aloud by the
poet to convey its tone. The choice of words, the flow of lines should attain that;
it should convey the tone to the reader. Tone gives emotional access to the
reader.
A melancholic poem should sound sad, a
romantic poem should sound filled with love.
Thus while writing one, one should observe the
tone. It might need some effort to get the tone right. Often reading the poem
after having written it, and perhaps after many rounds of reading, one can see
that the tome that initially the writer thought was conveyed has changed.
In this example of a poem by Nissim Ezekiel
note the tone (ah, the words ‘note-tone’). Set in the Indian Emergency era the
ten-lined poem drips with sarcasm.
4. Economy
Each word, as Arundhati put it in the
workshop, should earn its place in the poem.
Using words to fill a piece up so that it
becomes rhyming or use of words that doesn’t add value to the poem must be
avoided. It is not as easy as it sounds.
A writer is compelled to believe that whatever
he has written is print-worthy yet on revisiting one’s piece, on
self-critiquing, one can observe that a poem can be shortened and it will still
convey what one wanted to.
Here I am not talking about Haiku’s. They are
a different genre and perhaps very tough ones to write. Though in the
Twitter-land every other person may become a haiku writer, it is in actuality
deeper than that.
The next example is of a translation (of a
medieval Kannada poem) by A K Ramanujan. Notice the brevity, the economy of
words.
Another
example depicting economy of words is by Emily Dickinson:
5. Surprise
All that has to be said about love has been
written, all about hurt has been written, and all about God has been written.
So a love rhyming with dove or pain rhyming with disdain might well be
predictable and juvenile. So would be anything that the reader can anticipate.
While a poem is not a murder mystery, the surprise element needs to be taken
care of.
The surprise could be the narrative itself, in
the beginning or the end but ultimately should hinge upon saying something like
it hadn’t been said before.
Another Jack Prelutsky example for depicting
surprise:
Anyone can write poetry. I am a firm believer of that. Those who say it is not their cup of tea or their mug of coffee have not given insightful thought to it perhaps. Or there is that baggage that poetry has to be of a certain kinds and not seeing oneself conforming to that alliteration, that pattern, that arrangement acts as a deterrent. Break the barriers, you are beautiful, everything around you is. Your emotions are yours, your thoughts are yours. Read poems. Appreciate them. Critically analyze them. Feel them. I am no poet, or at least I wouldn’t call
myself one, but a day long indulgence with the nuts and bolts of poetry was a
unique experience. It had those essential two components – unlearning and relearning.
Disclaimer: All poetry shared above is freely
available online.
PS: This piece originally appeared in author Kiran Manral's blog as guest blog of the week (https://kiranmanral.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/guest-post-of-the-week-nut-bolts-of-poetry-by-sambit-dash/)