Writing Poetry As A Therapeutic Practice

Think of each poem that you write as practice. Every poem that you write benefits from the poems that you've written prior to this one. Poetry writing is a therapeutic exercise.The practice of writing poetry helps us smooth out the rougher edges of our character, helps us pull down the masks we wear to show the world the way we think it wants us to be. Writing poetry helps us get closer to finding out who we really are.

Writing poetry can also serve as a form of permanent record, something to look back on to recognize that changes have been made, that we've changed, that we've grown. In the same way that we build up a photo album, we can build up a poetry album of snapshots of our emotions and look back with fondness or dread at the way we used to be.

Some psychologists believe that the rhythms of poetry stimulate the part of the brain which governs emotions and that the act of writing these emotions down on the page brings a kind of order and control back into the writers life.

In poetry we are encouraged to be original, in fact it is probably a rule for good poetry. We are encouraged to not spell it out but rather to just suggest it and this is in someway helpful. Metaphors are used with great effect in poetry and you can hide a lot of pain inside a metaphor To quote the poet Sage Cohen: "In a culture where we like things black and white, right and wrong, poetry says YES. What if there were no right or wrong - only poetry? What if everything we could possibly dream up were acceptable? fabulous? enough? Poetry can be your own personal oasis of invention, where you can do no wrong”.

As poets or aspiring poets we need to first calm down and then to trust our own voice. There is poetry to be found in the most minute and mundane of thing. It is the awareness of the world around us and the writing or reporting of that awareness that is so important. Poetry is not, nor should it be an exclusive form available to a select few, but instead belongs to us all and is within us all. We can all participate in a compassionate dance of poetrymaking. And the place to begin is where you are!

How To Memorize Poetry

How To Memorize A Poem by J J Hayes

For a while in my career I was known as the person who could perform from memory poems of any length. On two days notice for instance I was able to perform, in its entirety, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." That performance took 45 minutes! People thought I had some sort of amazing memory. In fact the secret was this almost mechanical technique which allowed me to commit huge amounts of text to memory. If what you want to memorize is long the process can be a grind and tests your commitment to the project. But for shorter works it is amazingly quick and easy.

Step One: Read the poem to yourself (not outloud)

Step Two: Now read only the first line of the poem outloud. Take your eyes from the page and immediately, outloud, say the line again. Glance quickly to make sure you got it right. If you made a mistake, do it over. Now move on to the second line and repeat the procedure- one outloud reading followed by one outloud recitation of the line from memory. Do this for every line in the poem (in order, I guess it goes without saying).

Step Three: Once you have completed going through the poem, go back to the beginning. This time read outloud the first two lines, look away and repeat them outloud. Check briefly that you got it right. If you make a mistake do it over. Now move on to the next two lines and so forth going through the poem two lines at a time.

Steps Four thru Seven: Repeat the process three lines at a time, then 4 lines at a time, then 5 and then 6. I have found that by the 6th pass, no matter how long or short the poem, you will have the whole thing committed to memory. At some point in this process you will find that you are able to recite the whole poem without hardly a glance at the poem. I recommend doing all six passes even if you already seem to have the poem down before then.

Step Eight: Recite the whole poem, preferably just before you go to bed at night.

Step Nine (IMPORTANT): Stop thinking about the poem and just sleep on it. Your sleeping mind is very important for memory- it sort of saves to your brains harddrive what has been floating around in its RAM while it worked through the poem.

The next day you should find (perhaps with a little glance at the first line of the poem to kidkstart your memory) that you can recite the whole poem. Now recite the poem once more, to yourself with meaning! Depending on when you want to perform the poem you may want to recite it once a day or every couple of days before your performance. You have mechanically memorized the text, now is your opportunity to explore the poem and all its hidden meanings and connections without needing the text in front of you.

Note: This memory may fade over time, if you do not give it a run through every so often. I couldn't recite "Howl' straight through now if you asked me to. Give me a day or two.

The author J.J. Hayes gives us a good take on what works for him in memorizing poetry.
Poertyguy

How To Write A Love Poem

When we set about to write a poem about
love or the ones we love, the temptation is
to write with sentimentality which has a tendency
to make the poem sound soppy and insincere.
One way to avoid this and to make use of the
romantic is for the writer to use distance.
Distancing creates romance and also forces
objectivity onto the writer.

To write about how special someone usually
sounds sentimental, but if the writer compares the
person to something else they prevent the risk of
soppyness (is that a word?).
One of Shakespeares more famous
sonnets starts with this very idea:
..' shall I compare thee to a summers day.'

Below is a feeble attempt of mine to show how
this effect might be used in a love poem for a lover
who likes gardening.

You are
The buds of springs flowers
Without you Im
A lonely blade
Growing between rocks
Prickly as a
Cactus, growing in
The desert
You are the perfect
Passiflora
Around you I bloom
Lets worship Spring Glory
Hiding together under
Cover of Squirreltail Grass
Growing our fruits
Of passion
(I did warn you it would be a feeble attempt!)

Ok. Your turn to write a poem now.
Choose someone or something you are fond of.
Choose a subject you know something about
and mix them together in the above fashion.

As a young boy I can remember my father
and two brother walking and riding our
bikes about an hour away from our home
to fish the richly populated waters of a large lake.

If I was to construct a poem about how
much I loved my now dead father. It would
say much more about our relationship if I
wrote about 'the summer days we fished the
lake together' or if I was to write about my love
for my mother I could write about the 'wonderful
aromas and tastes of her roasted dinners' instead
of 'I love you mother'.

T.S. Elliot called this 'objective correlative'
To quote Elliot:
'The only way of expressing emotion in the form of
art is by finding and 'objective correlative': in other
words a set of objects...which shall be the formula
for that particular emotion'...
These objects, the bike ride, the fishing, lake, the roast
dinners stand for the emotions the poem is about.

Ok . Your turn again .. construct a poem around
a memory of someone you love or are fond of.
Dont write about your feelings like 'I love you Dad'
instead let the facts be a metaphor for the feelings.

How To Write Poetry

The poet William Stafford came from Oregon in the pacific north west of America, he was a 'late bloomer' in the field of poetry. One of his closest friends was the poet Robert Bly. Staffords style was compared to Robert Frosts and his poetry focused on the ordinary.

The first thing he did in the morning upon wakening would be to begin writing a poem before his conscious mind could start censoring what was flowing onto the page. When done he would tape
his poem onto the mirror as he shaved and look at it for clues on editing

He had a number of students that he taught and he would require of them that they write one poem a day. He said 'if your a poet you write poetry.' One of his students said to him, 'but Mr Stafford I can only write when I have the right inspiration and it just takes so long to find it, what should I do?' Stafford looked at him and said, 'lower your standards.'

His poem.... A Ritual To Read To Each Other :-


If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--should be clear:
the darkness around us is deep!

May we use this poem as a kind of invocation as a community wishing to be better poets and write better poetry!

How To Understand Poetry

A first critical step in understanding poetry is to support the idea
that the words on the page that form the poem are words that
have come alive as a living entity. Though a poem is not a full
expression of something the writer thinks or feels it is a journey,
through itself in a sense to an ending or a climax.

A poem is about a starting out, a commencement of a journey,
and although the writer may have a theme that he starts out on
this journey with. Generally the poet doesnt know where they
are going and are finding a way to get there.
This is one of the key pleasures of writing and, hopefully, that
pleasure is in someway felt by the reader or listener.

The ending of the poem is unforseeable and in fact the ending
of the poem is something the poem is busy creating. Its almost
as if the journey through the poem is the only way to access
the ending. One of the jobs of the poem is to bring its own ending
into being.

Lets look at some examples and as you read them you can
see that they have a life of their own and how it develops
and grows as it goes along on it journey
and how it evolves as a living entity.

If

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Kipling is very gender specific here in his ending and doesnt
let on what happens to women but you can see through
out the poem how its on this journey always asking the
question 'if'? at times the poem gives some opinions
along the way. You can see how the poem is searching
or seeking its own ending and how it actually finds its
destination in the last two lines.

Lets look at another:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye

We see here how the poem steadily evolves and grows
until it finds its own ending in the last stanza. With each
line we can see how the author is being drawn to the
ending and how the ending is finding itself as it draws
nearer to the climax.

How To Copyright Poetry/Poem

No one I know copyrights their poetry and there is a simple reason for this, poems arent marketable.Also, putting a little copyright symbol on your poem isnt going to make you appear professional in fact it has the opposite effect. Most journals when they agree to publish your works want what is called 'first publication rights', they want exclusive rights to publish your poetry before any others. When the magazine or journal appears the rights automatically revert to the author.



According to US Copyright laws your work is protected as soon as you write it, creating it makes you the copyright owner, regardless of whether you register it with the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. or not. However, you cannot win a copyright infringement case unless your work is registered. Be assured no Literary agent is going to swoop on your poetic verse and sell it off to Hollywood to make it into the next big blockbuster movie. Most of the better publishers will copyright in your name when they accept your books or work for publication, if you have money to burn you may still prefer to fill out the form and send it in before submitting your work. You can download forms from the Library of Congress at http://www.copyright.gov/.

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