Read poetry in multiple languages, and get bilingual editions if you can. Read and listen. Memorize your favorites. If you're a writer, pick a line from a poem you love, write it at the top of a page, write a few pages (by hand) of your own words to continue that line right after you wake up.
My favorite fact about poetry is that poets in ancient Rome had beef tracks the same way modern rappers do. Like Catullus has poems just utterly slamming other poets, calling their work "shit-smeared scrolls" and the like. Some aspects of human culture are just way older than we think.
Some words have a gravity. A trace meaning over space and through time. These words pull readers into a poem. They bring together a meaning making moment b/w reader and author.
https://ElizabethSiddal.com was a brilliant Victorian poet who lived, undeservedly in the shadow of her husband and friends. Known almost exclusively for her face & hair, her work was never published in her lifetime and remains un-anthologized, unstudied and largely unknown.
A simple rule of thumb: if you cannot remember your own exact words to the poem you wrote, you shouldn't really expect anyone else to remember your words.
The Lake by Edgar Allan Poe can be read both as a somber contemplation of mortality and darkness, and as the ravings of a man who gleefully dumps bodies in a lake.
Sestinas are really cool! They are made of six stanzas with six lines using six repeated ending words, followed by one stanza with three lines using pairs of those ending words. They usually follow a pattern where each successive stanza swaps the order of the ending words, it's fun.
Read "The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms" edited by Eavan Boland and Mark Strand. Superb resource for understanding poetic forms with examples. #poetry
Ted Kooser (former Poet Laureate of the United States, won a Pulitzer for his book "Delights & Shadows") has a book called THE POETRY HOME REPAIR MANUAL: PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR BEGINNING POETS. Lots of great information in this book.
you often hear about rhythm in poetry, but folks rarely mention texture which is the umbrella under which rhythm sits. there are many more components to texture, such as the specific words used for what are otherwise synonyms and such which all effect the final product
I find that breaking an established pattern in poetry can have a profound effect. A common example is when song lyrics deliberately neglect to rhyme to draw attention:
Mary Oliver has a book about writing poetry I HIGHLY recommend. Also read a lot of it. Read every poem you can find. Every kind, about every topic, from every time period. Drink poetry like it's your first time having clean water
Poetry is a means of summarising meaning with few words ideally making the text into a sound-texture as well-
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue..
Paging @drjaydrno.bsky.social, my poetry Prof from University to check my work.
What I would say is that you have more "classic poetry" up until modernism comes in, which I would personally mark as WW1 with TS Eliot's "The Wasteland", and then you can basically say you have modern poetry since then
Obviously, there's major movements within those two broader groups, but that tends to be how I see it. Where as poetry before modernism focuses a lot on form and genre, modernism focuses more on deconstruction form and genre (at least, the real fun stuff), as well as challenges....
Dr. Jay Gamble, who I've tagged, is a poetry professor at the University of Lethbridge, and was my supervising professor for an undergraduate study on Blue's Poetry within modern music (and how it stems from Black artists).
His poetry rocks.
He knows a LOT more about poetry than I. Esp Canadiana
Poets who break outside ordinary thought, and being someone earthy, archetypal, and transcendent:
George Mackay Brown
Guillevic
Ursula K LeGuin
Gary Snyder
Constantine Cavafy
Federico Garcia Lorca
Jean Valentine
Robinson Jeffers
Jane Hirshfield
Robert Duncan
The strangeness of poetry is its virtue. Poetry that thinks it has to be grammatically correct prose broken into arbitrary lines on the page is a current fashion in American poetry that makes poetry mundane, and forgettable. We remember what is vivid and breaks us outside ordinary thought.
Lots of people obsess on versifying, which is only one kind of poetry. Doggerel can be good poetry, but usually isn’t. There are several acceptable ways to do a sonnet. Poetry has been called exalted speech, and compressed expression; both are true. Vatic poetry is the mode American poetry forgot.
When Eve walked among the animals and named them--
nightingale, redshouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer--
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, /Name me, name me./
My favorite poet of all time is Hilda Conkling, who was born in 1910 and who talked like this as a little girl:
The world turns softly
not to spill its lakes and rivers.
The water is held in its arms
and the sky is held in the water.
What is water,
that pours silver,
and can hold the sky?
My poetry advice is to keep a folder of them on your computer and save the ones you like, especially anything you find yourself thinking of again days after you first read it. <3 I cherish my folder.
Harryette Mullen is incredible. She has this way of writing where sometimes it looks like gibberish until you read it aloud and figure out the irreverent wordplay with homophones, or you start to notice a constellation of historical allusions she's making. See also Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons
Imagism is really big for me. It's free-associational in a way that can feel liberatory, but then you find out Ezra Pound was an actual first-generation fascist
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is still an incredible distillation of what it means to be human and ageing and mortal even though T.S. Eliot turned out to be a weird Tory
Also once you start looking for it you'll find that the King James Version had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the lexicon of anglophone poetry that goes away beyond Christianity
Things I love to read in translation that kind of stand apart from these anglo poetry trends: Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, Miyazawa's poems especially as translated by Hiroaki Sato
Comments
you should know more good poems
have a strong sense of that, and the words will start showing up.
OED helps.
Loosely based on Ginsberg’s style
- Kristi, poetry teacher. 🐦⬛✨
Here are seven syllables
That is all I know
Just kidding , I am no help, sorry.
I'll show myself out now....
https://www.youtube.com/@WritingwithAndrew
Read it.
Ponder.
The poem Hávamál has some striking language, especially the fifth section with stanza 138 onward.
https://alliteration.net/resources/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_verse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse_poetry
DARK and STORmy NIGHT
theres a natural rhythm.
dark AND storMY night
sounds strange.
Using the rhythm to form a pattern is a key part of most poetry.
to BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUEStion
while a limerick might follow this pattern:
there ONCE was a LAdy of STYLE
I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words
I wish I found some chords in an order that is new
I wish I didn't have to rhyme every time I sang
(from Stressed Out by 21 Pilots)
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue..
Maybe watch that movie Patterson with Adam Driver where he just drives a bus around writing poems about everything and nothing happens.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
What I would say is that you have more "classic poetry" up until modernism comes in, which I would personally mark as WW1 with TS Eliot's "The Wasteland", and then you can basically say you have modern poetry since then
Because modernism doesn't just do one thing, that'd be too easy.
It's also REALLY pastiche in the last couple decades.
OKAY I AM DONE SKEETING
One of my favourite poems on that topic would be my old High School teacher, Calgary Poet Laureate Derek Beaulieu
https://theamericanreader.com/bookcase/please-no-more-poetry-the-poetry-of-derek-beaulieu/
His poetry rocks.
He knows a LOT more about poetry than I. Esp Canadiana
That being said... I probably have 20+ books of or about poetry on my shelf.
My FAVOURITE book on philosophy is the collection "The Philosophy of Poetry", edited by John Gibson, by OUP. Photo of ToC attached.
Happy to send you any resources I have (since we're in Canada and these books can be hard to get a hold of).
Happy to chat about this in detail further than I give here, and I'm sure Jay would be too 😊
George Mackay Brown
Guillevic
Ursula K LeGuin
Gary Snyder
Constantine Cavafy
Federico Garcia Lorca
Jean Valentine
Robinson Jeffers
Jane Hirshfield
Robert Duncan
Ada Limón
When Eve walked among the animals and named them--
nightingale, redshouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer--
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, /Name me, name me./
The world turns softly
not to spill its lakes and rivers.
The water is held in its arms
and the sky is held in the water.
What is water,
that pours silver,
and can hold the sky?