ucbesvax.turner@ucbcad.UUCP (07/28/83)
#N:ucbesvax:7400005:000:2084 ucbesvax!turner Jul 22 03:22:00 1983 W.H. Auden had an interesting method. In school he wrote a poem a day (usually a sonnet). He then showed these to Stephen Spender, who usually didn't like them, but who was often able to root out the best line. Auden would then throw out the poem and write the line in his notebook. Eventually, he was able to construct poems largely out of nuggets filtered from the dross by Spender's discriminating ear. This is why many of Auden's poems are pretty incoherent, but sound too good to be anything but great. Poetry is condensation before structure. Much of what I read in net.poems is, by contrast, language spread thin. An important strategy for condensation is metaphor: saying one thing with another, and therefore saying two things at once. Allusion is another, chancier, technique: saying one thing by oblique reference to another, and thus amplifying meaning at the risk of losing a part of your audience that might not recognize the allusion. (Those who *can* will feel complimented.) In one of Burgess's "Enderby" novels, the poet-protagonist is quite vexed by a student in his writing class who claims that "poetry is made of feelings". Not so. Poetry is made of words. Vocabulary is important. And not "poetic" vocabulary either: any word recognizable as such is no longer poetic, but rather a cliche. E.g., "dross", above. What else? Draw, if possible, from your own experience. Abstraction doesn't work, usually. Avoid the commonplace, if you can't infuse it with some novel aspect. In poetry, it is the unexpected that is a source of delight. Unusual events, words, conjunctions, rhymes, meters, and arrangements can all work to good effect--*if* there is, in fact, some effect toward which they all contribute. Unite diversity. Throw out what doesn't fit. And if all else fails, pull out the best line and junk the rest. Too many "poets" are merciless toward their critics, and coddling toward their "poems", the exact opposite of what they need to become better writers. Expecting Your Response, Michael Turner ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner