“No matter what you are reading, in some shape or form it will influence the work that you are producing.”
-dimitrireyespoet.com
1. Make Sure You Can Thrive in Your Environment
First and foremost, you have to get comfortable. Now being comfortable can take shape in several forms. Certain writers want to be in a specific setting to set a defined mood. For example, you’ve all heard of the “Starbucks writers.” The reason those writers exist is because they like being in a space where there are a bunch of public things going on and everything just becomes white noise. So they’re hearing all this stuff but they’re really not listening to it. In turn, they’re able to focus more on their writing.
Other people like myself, prefer working in the privacy of my own home with my own desk, everything organized (or disorganized!) in a certain way and I can control the volume that’s happening in my apartment. I can have complete silence or music playing in order to create a constant white noise unlike a public establishment where certain noises, like babies crying pose a threat to my level of concentration.
Another way to get comfortable is to know what kind of materials you like to use. Personally, I rely heavily on my laptop because I can copy, paste, and move my work around. Other people like a more organic and old fashioned writing process with just some pen and paper. I actually read in a book before that a certain poet likes using no lines on their paper and a pencil because no lines on their paper means that there are no constraints on how large or small they need to write. The pencil is less permanent than the pen as well because you are allowed to erase rather than scratch out. It gives you a clean slate.
2. Read Old and New Work
No matter what you are reading, in some shape or form it will influence the work that you are producing. It’s always good to look at the greats such as Poe, Shakespeare, and Dickinson, but you MUST be reading your contemporaries. The Poetry Foundation is an amazing resource that gets posted on quite frequently and catalogs so many poets, from the Victorian Poets, to the Black Mountain School, to the Breakbeat Poets, all the way through this year’s most popular poets. To get even more up to date poetry you can even look at different literary magazines that publish poetry, fiction, non fiction, blogs, interviews and more. Some of these online magazines are Rattle, The Rumpus, Bodega.
3. Poetry is Music
Follow the regular music of language. Rhyme doesn’t have to happen all the time. We naturally speak in iambs and trochees which means that there’s a stressed/ unstressed pattern or unstressed stressed pattern in speech. If you realize that we speak music and you pay attention to language, as soon as you put your words on paper it is poetry. There’s no reason to have a rhyme there.
4. Everything is Material
All experiences are potential material for your art. Say you are walking down the road and you get a good idea for a poem, write it down because that’s something that you could use later. Also you may never get that idea again. Once that idea is gone, it may be gone for good! If you need more information on how or what you can actually use as material, you can check out my last blog post on “What Should Beginner Poets Write About.”
5. If You Like it Then You Shoulda Put a Title On It
No matter what feelings you are having about a poem or where you are in the completion of the poem, put some kind of title down. Whether the poem feels temporary, solid, or finished a poem needs to have a title because as soon as you put a title on a poem it obtains a certain energy. There’s a possibility when you go back to the poem (which we should all be going back to our poems more than once) there’s going to be that energy you had when you first wrote it and that energy that you are going to have coming back to it. What will happen at this point is that both of these energies will clash. The magic of editing is when you start getting multiple emotions, multiple layers, multiple voices, and multiple lenses gleaning into your poem and that’s what increases the complexity of these pieces to really make them stand out.
A title also communicates another layer of meaning for the reader, and maybe even yourself. If you write a poem about something and you put a title that’s a bit of a non-sequitur, the title and stanzas will start communicating with each other. This will create a dialogue that instead of having one contextual framework, you actually extrapolate it to create multiple meanings.
In addition to this post, you can watch the “5 Tips for Writing Poetry” video and many other tips, vlogs, interviews, and performances on my YouTube Channel. Just click on the image below to start watching.
If you need some writing help, I do offer services on my website.
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