ten rules for writing poetry

When I first got started writing – that is, all my life – I would obsessively read anything a writer had written about writing itself, hoping some transportable truth would reveal itself, something I could take with me. I hoarded copies of the Paris Review interviews, John Gardner’s books on fiction, even a children’s book or two about writing. Most of the time the writers were just talking about themselves, though, of course. How they worked. This in itself was valuable, in that it showed me that each writer is just a person, writing. In my childhood and teens I just wrote, instinctively. I wrote all kinds of stuff. I can remember revising poems at my desk in my room – the big old desk my grandfather had written his sermons on – and not being sure if I was “doing it right,” was there some method considered proper for the revising of a poem, would I even have called it revising? No idea. But I also instinctively knew I was right, was doing it right.

Within that knowledge, that what is right for you isn’t easy for him, and that what works for her is hard for you, it is very valuable to read writer’s accounts of writing. About 15 years ago I got hold of a wonderful little beige post-war book called Writers on Writing, edited by Walter Allen. Its first half is poets – throughout the centuries – on writing poetry, and the second half is novelists on writing fiction. I read it and read it and read it.

I can also heartily recommend Stephen King’s book, On Writing. It comes out of his own practice on teaching and is – aside from the incidental and anecdotal Walter allen book – one of the two best I know. The other one is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. (Her ten-year-old brother, in despair at the kitchen table over an essay assignment, The Birds of America. Her dad: “Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Bird by bird.”) It contains a whole chapter called “The Shitty first Draft” – worth the price of the book for that alone. Just pay no attention at all to those apocryphal stories about how John Updike only ever handed in first drafts and needed no editing! Says who? Oh yeah, sez him!

So at the weekend, the Guardian ran its Ten rules for Writing Fiction, based on Elmore Leonard’s famous ten rules – which includes his famous “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip” – in which many current writers give their own personal ten rules. None of them are quite up to Elizabeth Bowen’s piece in Walter Allen’s book, but then that was pages long, so it was more than just rules. It was technical and brilliant. Some of these are very very good indeed. Add them to the lore!

Most of the rules would, of course, apply equally to writing poetry. Writing is writing. The first and main rule is: “Write for yourself.” If you aren’t delighting yourself, you won’t delight anyone. Or: if you’re bored, imagine us!

Anyway, asked in response to that what my tips on writing poetry would be, I came up with these:

1. Read as widely as you can, & learn from what you don’t like as well as what you do.

2. Try every trick and technique, and find out what works best for you.

3. Be yourself. Writing comes out of the self and the world you’re in.

4. Choose the words that say exactly what you mean – poetry is an art of precision.

5. Remember that a poem is a gift, a work of art, not just ‘self-expression’. Make it as true and tight and beautiful as you can, and send it out there – into the ether, if not the actual world.

6. Keep going. Do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again…

7. Always be open to writing: when the Muse calls, it’s just as well if you’re in.

8. Revise and revise. Learn to tell when the poem’s done. Then stop revising.

9. Don’t take rejection personally. Be ruthless with yourself, always send your best stuff, and keep going.

10. Do it because you love it.

My fellow Salt poet Steven Waling came up with another rule, which I wish I’d thought of: “Stop looking for your voice. It isn’t out there.”