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    Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
    Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
    Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
    Ebook417 pages6 hours

    Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry

    By Stephen Dobyns

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    About this ebook

    This accessible writer's guide provides a helpful framework for creating poetry and navigates contemporary concerns and practices. Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 26, 2011
    ISBN9780230118782
    Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
    Author

    Stephen Dobyns

    Stephen Dobyns is the author of eleven novels and six books of poetry. Born in New Jersey in 1941, he attended Shimer College, Wayne State University, and the University of Iowa. His most recent novels include Saratoga Bestiary and The Two Deaths of Senora puccini. Concurring Beasts, his first book of poems, was chosen the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1971. Black Dog, Red Dog was a selection of the National Poetry Series in 1984. Stephen Dobyns has taught courses on poetry and writing at many colleges and universities and is currently a professor of English at Syracuse University

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      Next Word, Better Word - Stephen Dobyns

      one

      approaching subject matter

      the path of writing poetry begins with a love for the way sounds bang off one another, the hesitations and rush of rhythms, the unwinding of syntax, and the juxtapositions of meanings. But to keep moving down the poet’s path, one must ask: What will bear the burden of all that noise? How does a writer first discover, and then approach his or her subject matter?

      Perhaps a person believes that he or she has a story to tell, a love affair to describe, an argument to make. Perhaps someone turns to writing because he or she feels there is no other outlet for the mass of emotion and idea bubbling up inside. Pablo Neruda’s first published work was an essay entitled Enthusiasm and Perseverance (Entusiasmo y perseverancia), which appeared in his hometown newspaper when he was thirteen. Neruda felt like an outsider in his family. His mother, a schoolteacher, died two months after he was born. His father, who worked for the railroad, had a low opinion of writing and literature, while the city in which they lived, Temuco in southern Chile, was still a rough frontier town. Neruda’s primary confidant became a sheet of paper.

      Or the young poet might have undergone a long period of convalescence, as with the Spanish poets Rafael Alberti and Vicente Aleixandre, who suffered from tuberculosis as children and spent the time reading and thinking. Or the sense of being an outsider might arise from great shyness (Hayden Carruth), or mental imbalance (Theodore Roethke), or he might be a stutterer like Philip Larkin, or a have sense of isolation like Emily Dickinson, or the young writer might belong to an ethnic minority, be gay or lesbian, an atheist in a town of believers or a believer in a town of atheists: anything leading to the acute sense that one is different and the feeling that his or her natural voice has been stifled. But it might be none of those reasons. James Dickey once said in a radio interview that he began to write poetry while serving in a U.S. army night fighter squadron during World War II. He had been writing love letters to a number of women back home, and then one day he took another look at the language of his letter, saw that it was good, and decided to write poetry.

      The term subject matter is an abstraction. An idea is not subject matter, but it might become subject matter. A memory, a love affair—nothing by itself is subject matter, but may develop into it. In fact, anything can become subject matter. Poets like Baudelaire and Gottfried Benn showed that even the ugliest material may become subject matter. But nothing is subject matter by itself.

      The subject matter of a poem is not simply its content, in the way a piece of journalism may be said to have a content, announced by its headline. A poem’s subject matter is also the manner of its telling—its language and how that language is presented. In the best poems, matter and manner carry equal amounts of information. In fact, the more a poet uses his or her language only as the medium of expression at the service of content—using it journalistically, as it were—then not only does the poet diminish the possibilities of the poem, but he or she also discards many of its primary tools. One might also say the writer is not writing a poem but something else, or is simply writing a bad poem, especially if we define one condition of poetry as an equal combination of manner and matter.

      This doesn’t mean the language of every poem needs to be rich and noisy. The form and content of many of Frank O’Hara’s poems are completely united under the umbrella of his particular aesthetic, which was to create a poem that had the appearance of a quick sketch that seemed spontaneous, off the cuff, and realistic. But it would be a mistake to think his poems were easy to write or easy to imitate.

      One doesn’t read a good poem for the sum of its content, its kernel of truth, but for the whole experience of which meaning forms only a part. The reading is not a means to an end—some epithanic moment—it is itself an end. The emotion that gave rise to the poem’s articulation emerges out of the whole, is integrated into the entire experience. Its meaning is not an answer, like two plus two equals four. A poem is not an essay; it cannot satisfactorily be paraphrased; it is always more than the sum of its parts.

      One of the demands of poetry, especially of Romantic poetry and its off-shoots, is that it must have an appearance of spontaneity which creates the impression that the poem was flung off fully formed in a moment of inspiration. Any sign of scaffolding (such as obsessive reworking or refinement) might jeopardize its credibility. As Yeats wrote in Adam’s Curse: A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.¹

      In addition, Romantic poetry demands a high degree of verisimilitude. In order to excite rational sympathy, [the poet] must express himself as other men express themselves, Wordsworth wrote in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.² I use the examples of Yeats and Wordsworth to stress that ostensible reality doesn’t mean writing in nonmetered verse.

      For the young poet these requirements of apparent spontaneity and verisimilitude can be a trap; they may create the impression that any utterance can be a poem if the writer calls it a poem; they may make it seem that the language of poetry is indeed no more than a vehicle. Of course, the more the poet reads, the more he or she will see that form is a hugely complicated business, but at the beginning the poem’s apparent spontaneity and verisimilitude may seem ample evidence that all one needs is a story to tell and a burning desire to tell it.

      The writer who set me thinking that form and content could carry equal amounts of information was the philosopher and aesthetician Susanne Langer. Certainly I knew that form carried information about subject matter, and I understood that the poem was always more than the sum of its parts. And I knew that it did not simply use metaphor but was itself metaphor. But I wasn’t quite clear about how these elements fit together. In her book Problems of Art (1957), Langer wrote:

      The import of a work of art—its essential, or artistic import—can never be stated in discursive language. A work of art is an expressive form, and therefore a symbol, but not a symbol which points beyond itself so that one’s thought passes on to the concept symbolized. The idea remains bound up in the form that makes it conceivable.³

      Reading this, I found four crucial points. First, the import of a work of art cannot be stated or paraphrased in the language of analytical reasoning. Second, a work of art is a symbol of an expressive form. Or, as she says elsewhere, it is the symbolic presentation of subjective reality.⁴ Third, the symbol doesn’t point beyond itself in the way that the symbol of the cross points beyond itself; rather, it is complete in itself. Fourth, the idea is bound up in the form, and only with the form is it possible to conceive the import of the symbol.

      Here is William Blake’s London that appeared in Songs of Experience (1794).

      I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

      Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

      And mark in every face I

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