The Process of a Poem

A few days ago I wrote a blog entry on the process of a painting, but I am not a painter. So I directed you to someone else's blog, where she demonstrated her steps in producing a painting.

I am however unsuccessfully, a poet, so today I will discuss the process of a poem. I'm not going to go in a linear step by step manner. Rather I am going to discuss the various things I have done in writing poetry so that you can assemble your own process. For those who do not want to write but want to understand, I hope that you can see inside the feverish skull of a poet at work.

I was first introduced to poetry when Beat poet and ad copywriter Lew Welch came and spoke at my high school. He read a few of his poems which I neither remember now nor understood then, but I like something about poetry and I caught the fever from Welch. He said we could write poems, that we could put anything we wanted in them, even a shopping list. So a wrote my first poem, complete with a shopping list. I give gratitude to God that I long ago lost the poem, although I may try sometime another shopping list. The important thing was that I began writing. Maybe, like the Zen poets, I'll write a death poem --and it will be a shopping list.

Then I discovered that poetry was about emotion, So I began to write in states of emotional ecstasy or emotional longing. I wrote in a pagan language, deifying the woman of my imagination and worshiping forces of nature. In other words I was a teenage boy who had discovered poetry. Again I give gratitude to God that I long ago lost these poems. But the value to writing them was that I my emotional state grew deeper and I gradually reached towards the subtle emotions. Often in a poem, we don't at first perceive that there is emotion involved at all. We have to leap into a visual or intellectual world of the artist to feel the emotion. We have to be there with the poet. So the job of the poet is not to give an exact description of his state of mind or heart, but to beckon us forward to the edge of the known universe. He invites us to fall into his world like Alice fell.

Then I began to read the great dead poets, and a few living ones. I read Dylan Thomas and Hopkins and I fell in love with their use of alliteration and assonance. I learned that internal rhyme could provide rhythm even in a free verse poem.

I learned about the majesty of long lines in Whitman. I played around with end rhyme verse. Eventually I learned how to count the accents of my poetry and meter it and I learned from Hopkins how to spring that meter free again, in an irregular meter that wasn't quite free verse.

I learned from the contemporary and from European poets something called the deep image --a sort of surrealism I suppose, but tamed a bit. Where you use deep and inexact images from the subconscious in a poem that includes less deep imagery to provoke. In other words you shift levels of consciousness to bring the reader into your deeper place. The poem may have a non-surrealist structure but it has deeper images as well.

Then I learned to fall completely into the poem, to let it overwhelm me like a shamanic trance. Each poem I wrote I had to find the place where I was to begin and that was a magical struggle. I put my desk in the center of my room, and I put an old typewriter on it (this was before PCs and Macs) On one wall I put a bookshelf filled with volumes of poets --Blake, Neruda, Lorca, Whitman, Thomas and others. Every morning I walked around my desk. I kept walking under I felt I was ready to enter the word of poetry. Then I picked up a poet to come with my on my walk around the desk. I read some poems--maybe even out loud. I learned to hear the poet even when I read him silently. I read until poetry overwhelmed me and I moved past the state of being the listener to the state of being the poet. Then I sat in the chair and fought with the keys of the typewriter to hammer out a poem.

When I finished a draft of the poem I pulled it out of the typewriter. I stopped being the Shaman and applied intellect. I counted it's meter. I looked for opportunities to enhance internal rhyme. I determined what I really meant.

Then once more I became something else. I became an alchemist. I began to grind, boil and recast my metals, precipitating and refining over and over and over. Having spent an hour or so writing a page of poetry, and a few minutes to an hour lending a critical eye to it, now I alchemized the poetry and myself. I cut myself to pieces and I floated down a river until I reassemble as a new poet with a new poem. I sacrificed everything. I spared known of my pride in producing the finely crafted poem.

All of those poems were lost. Only God knows them. But that allowed me to begin again. I had deepened and matured the channels. I didn't need to use the exact same techniques, but I need to learn more about emotion and poetry. I stopped writing for several years, but poetry loved me and I loved her. She was my wife and no man could set aside what God had joined together.

The summery of my old method still exists in mature technique. I write without reservation, I lend a critical eye, and I edit without mercy.

Again my reader I will go back. As I promised you, this is not linear. I want to cover some techniques for starting a poem. One can copy the first line of another poem, follow the lead of that first line but with your own heart. Then in editing the poem, you destroy the other poet, you place him on the sacrificial altar.

You can start with lists. You can list five images of colors, five images of scent, five images of sound, five images of object, etc and then take a knife to the list. Let the list run blood. Start over again with the hacked up and pulpy remains and construct a poem.

You can go for a walk and record the pressure of the word against your skin and ear drums. You can let the world sing to you. Then you can leave that world in order to describe the emotions it gave you. You can walk in the memory or the imagination of that world. The emotions are pinned by your heart to the wall of your mind. it doesn't matter if the world is real or the word alone is real. You can follow the walkway to where the heart left it for you.

Or you can refuse to write the word down. You can memorize the word before you sleep and fall into the dream of those words. You can walk with the words for a day or longer and tumble them over and over, speaking them in your mind over even in your tongue until you can't hold off any longer. And you reach for your beloved and move with your beloved. But then you have to move away from your beloved. To move back towards the world in savage reordering of the words.

The poet must never be afraid to start, to look or to change. Where do you being. Sit down and make a shopping list.