| Author | Message | ||
| M
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 34769 Registered: 11-1998 |
Even if you already know this, it never hurts to hear it again. And to our new/emerging poets, this is important information. I recommend you heed it. Ms. Addonizio really knows how to tell it like it is. And if you think you can get away with not doing your homework, think again. Editors can tell immediately who's studied, and who hasn't. Love, M From Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio “read this” ………“When I first read Keats’ poem, “Ode to a Nightingale,” I didn’t understand it. I was blown away, and I didn’t know why. “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: -- Do I wake or sleep?” – those are the last lines of the poem. After reading them, I felt as though an electric current was running through me. I didn’t know what certain words in the poem meant, like “Hippocrene.” I didn’t know exactly what Keats was saying about hearing this bird singing, or why, at one point, he wrote about wanting to die. Later, I memorized that poem because I loved it so much. As I memorized and reread it, more of its meaning unfolded. I understood the desire of the speaker to move out of himself and join the nightingale, to die into its seemingly timeless aria. Yet the poem still holds mystery for me – the mystery of what it was saying has become the mysterious nature of life itself, something I am brought back to each time I read the poem. ………You don’t have to understand something to be affected by it. ………If you’re new to reading poetry, don’t worry if you don’t get it. You’ll get parts of a poem, and not others. Reading a poem several times helps. So does reading it aloud. Memorizing is even better. And once you know a few poems by heart, there will be occasions to say them. I have recited poems to bartenders and cabdrivers, to lovers and partygoers and bookstore audiences, to mourners at funerals. When I play tennis with a poet friend, we shout lines back and forth across the court. By taking poems into your body, you will get closer to them. ………Books of poetry will teach you more than your mentor or professor or the well-known poet you have traveled to a conference to work with. Reading is like food to a writer; without it, the writer part of you will die – or become spindly and stunted. If you’re afraid that reading will make you less original, don’t be. Falling under the spell of – or reacting against – other writers is part of what will lead you to your own work. Reading in the long tradition of poetry shows you what has lasted, and those poems are there to learn from. Reading your contemporaries shows you what everyone else is up to in your own time, so you can map the different directions of the art. There’s never one route to poetry, one style. Reading widely will help you see this. ………Here is a sobering statistic: Poetry, which has been for many years one of the premier poetry journals in America, has about ten thousand subscribers. Every year, it receives ten times that many submissions from writers hoping to land a poem in its pages. ………That’s a hundred thousand people, writing. ………Are they reading? Possibly. Maybe they’re not subscribing to Poetry because they’re spending their money on books by Neruda and Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser and Derek Walcott. But in fact, a large number of people who want to write poetry don’t seem to like to read it. Many journals have a circulation of a few hundred copies, and poetry books sell dismally compared to fiction or memoir: the first print run is usually one or two thousand copies. ………Maybe you’re one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don’t read, your writing is going to suck. ………Once, while visiting a university creative writing class, I was approached by a student who told me that he liked novels, but not poetry. “Interesting,” I said. “How many poems have you read?” He said not many, but he’d been required to read a few for class and hadn’t liked them. “Ever run into a novel you didn’t like?” I asked him. “Well, yeah,” he said. ………It hadn’t occurred to him that he could hate some poems or be indifferent to them, and still like poetry. He probably hadn’t found poems that could matter to him. So he skipped poetry, and moved on. ………If you want to write well, read. If you just want to be a poet the way some people want to be rock stars without actually learning the guitar, playing scales, and practicing – then you are free to fantasize. ………When you read, read like a writer. For me this means that I am always paying attention, trying to solve a problem in my own work or pick up a new technique or move outward from what I already know. When I was trying to get a feel for long lines, I studied C. K. Williams. I took apart his sentences to understand their structure. I read and reread certain poems that spoke to me. I was like a medium, channeling a spirit. I had never met him, but he was one of my teachers. Every single writer I’ve read has taught me something. When people ask who my influences are, I can’t answer. I’ll mumble a name or two, and then a half dozen more, and stop. Otherwise I would go on forever. ………Reading in this way doesn’t dampen your enjoyment. When accomplished musicians listen to another player, they hear the notes differently than nonmusicians, with greater appreciation for the other player’s skill. When you understand how sonnets work, you get more out of reading the sonnets by Shakespeare or John Donne or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Marilyn Nelson. You can see how they handled, beautifully, the challenges of the form. ………I can’t stress this point enough: You need to soak up as many books as you can. Even the ones you don’t like can teach you something. If you were a painter, you’d spend time looking at works of art from every period in history. A chef I know, whenever he travels, eats enough for three people – he wants to sample all the dishes. Boxers study the great fights of the past, like the Ali-Forman “Thrilla in Manila.” Marketers look at the successes of past products to try to duplicate those successes. Poetry isn’t a product in that way, but you see what I mean. Read. Imitate shamelessly. Steal when you can get away with it. T. S. Eliot said, “Good poets imitate. Great poets steal.” ………So read. Let other writers teach and inspire you. ………Unless you really want your writing to suck.” . | ||
| Fred Longworth
Senior Member Username: sandiegopoet Post Number: 6460 Registered: 05-2006 |
 YOUR FOOTNOTE ADVERTISEMENT HERE. Call 1-555-555-5555 and ask for Fred. 10% discount if you mention Wild Poetry Forum. | ||
| Lazarus
Senior Member Username: lazarus Post Number: 5301 Registered: 10-2005 |
I want you to know I thought of you, M, the first time I read this. (And a few others I won't mention that I thought could learn something from it.) I also made a promise to start memorizing a few poems. So I needed this kick in the ass. Thanks! Also want to say that the number of submissions to subscriptions really floored me and I'm going to find a few journals to subscribe to. It's the least I can do. -Laz | ||
| Eclair
Intermediate Member Username: eclair Post Number: 315 Registered: 05-2009 |
M, I just finished this book of hers! It's very, very good. I need to go over it again. A wonderful resource for all writers. I highly recommend it too. | ||
| Fred Longworth
Senior Member Username: sandiegopoet Post Number: 6461 Registered: 05-2006 |
Speaking entirely from testosterone . . . Ms. Addonizio is a very attractive woman, easy on the eyes, saucy (to say the least) and smarter than a whip (the intelligence of whips has been much exaggerated.) ********** People who don't read other's poetry for fear they they will "corrupt" their originality are either nuts, stupid or horribly misinformed. Mozart, for example, was a HUGE fan of Bach. It didn't "stifle" his creativity, and his works weren't Bach spinoffs. ********** I write much of my best stuff directly after reading someone else's best stuff, and after I have reacted thusly -- Wow! I would bet that most all the other posters to this thread have the same tale to tell. Fred YOUR FOOTNOTE ADVERTISEMENT HERE. Call 1-555-555-5555 and ask for Fred. 10% discount if you mention Wild Poetry Forum. | ||
| Kathy Paupore
Moderator Username: kathy Post Number: 12169 Registered: 12-2003 |
 Kathy You're invited to: Wild Flowers Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.~Robert Frost | ||
| Catherine Edmunds
Valued Member Username: delph_ambi Post Number: 105 Registered: 04-2009 |
Wise words. Catherine Edmunds, writer and illustrator |
