Writing good poetry doesn't just "happen." It takes practice as with any other skill. In writing this little article, I by no means imply that I'm an expert either, but after writing hundreds of poems, most of them bad and a couple that may be deemed excellent, I feel that I can speak to the writing process, as well as to the philosophy and practice behind it. By practice, my meaning is three-fold.
(1) Practice, as in working at it over time will hone your deftness with the "body" or flesh of the poem (e.g. language: style, word choice, rhythm) much as exercise gets our bodies into shape. This is like Logos in rhetoric--requiring right thinking and ability.
(2) Practice, as in consciously choosing and engaging in a set of actions so as to shift some aspect of the self -- like meditation, a daily walk, mindfulness -- or what Gary Snyder calls the "Practice of the Wild." This is akin to Ethos in rhetoric, where right action (credibility, authenticity and ethics) is key.
(3) Practice, as in offering professional work or services to the wider community, like a therapist or lawyer's practice. This requires a certain standard of us--to work at the other two kinds of practice in order to more effectively offer up our poetry to the world. In rhetoric, this is Pathos--how we reach out and connect with others, how we appeal to their humanity in a world full of meaning.
Now consider how poetry might be approached from each of these three perspectives. To write good poetry, you must sharpen your writing skills as they used to cut, shape and sharpen their pen quills in the old days.
To write well, you must develop the spirit behind your poetry by deepening and expanding yourself through diverse experiences. Take time out for reflection and critical thinking. Meditation I would recommend to everyone, but also cooking, gardening, biking, shopping, "yard" work--all of it can be viewed as a "practice" if done mindfully. Getting out of your comfort zone or being confronted with a new experience is always food for poetic thought.
To write best though, you must keep your audience in mind--that is, your writing must hold to a purpose, to some greater-than-you and greater-than-the-poem place in the world. Poetry can be used for self-centered gratification -- or it can contribute in a meaningful way to the ongoing Conversation.
When I was younger and first started writing poetry (aged 7), it was a process almost entirely between mind and paper. Thinking this was the way it was done, when I had an inspiration, I would grab paper and sit down to write until complete. There was little blending of every-day life with art--and almost no later revision.
Poetry as Vajra Practice: Visioning versus Envisioning
Around the time that I began to write poetry and stories more compulsively, I also began keeping a dream journal. Images and sensations in dreams grabbed me, almost writing themselves into poems. For a few years though, I became fixated on the idea of dreams and visions, and worked through a lot of my own skandas. In other words, I was overwhelmed by the massive influx of sensations, images, ideas, visions, thoughts and musings that I'd begun noticing thanks to beginning meditation, but could not see past them. I couldn't see "the wood for all the trees." Envisioning was my form of poetry then, i.e. envisioning reality through my dreams, desires, musings and hopes.
Then I started meditating regularly and something else developed: "one-pointedness." Through meditation, I've discovered that my mind may be like a tumultuous sea, filled with darting slippery creatures, a frenzy of sub-surface activity -- but instead of my awareness going in ten directions at once, now I can pierce through and focus on one thing -- either one fish or better yet, peering through to the ocean floor. This is akin to the Sanskrit word "vajra"--used in Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism and often translated as both "thunderbolt" and "diamond." Vajra Seeing is Visioning, that is, piercing through our projections, expectations, habitual perceptions and internal dramas to see that actual existing world (within and without) with freshness, with creative spontaneity. Thus, Vajra-Seeing (or Visioning) is one-pointed, like the lightning or thunderbolt truth, blinding you with its brilliance, heaviness, realness. Vajra-Seeing or Visioning is also like diamond truth--more beautiful and radiant than any other piece of earth, yet also the hardest substance known, able to slice through anything.
Meditation sharpens poetry, tightens it, brings it together. That is because your mind itself, your focus has been honed into an instrument of clarity. Meditation also deepens poetry because of the impact it has on our everyday awareness. Instead of muddling through the day directionless, meditation encourages you to deal with life one moment at a time instead of jumping ahead or behind. For myself, such a mindfulness allows me to more fully experience my life as it's happening. I notice the smell of the trees or the way the shadows on the wall are multi-dimensional ... food has more meaning, as does the simple activity of walking, be that to the bathroom, to class or work, or out in the woods.
I still try to cultivate an outpouring of images, archetypes, emotions and perceptions from that "other" realm beyond consciousness, as that is very much what I see Feral Poetry doing. It returns to the "wild" (that is, our deep more-than-consciousness) and brings back into consciousness certain truths and gifts relevant for the poet and also reader. In my own writing now, poetry is not so much about envisioning, but that vajra visioning--seeing, accepting and writing about "reality as is." By that I don't mean reality in some sterile, unbiased and laboratory sense. Such poetry is impossible. We are all formed by bodily perceptions, cultural bias and habits, our experiences, our bioregions, etc. Instead, it's imperative to develop a self-awareness of those perceptions, biases, habits, experiences and influences ... and doing so is the requirement of all good writers, be they of prose or poetry.
Poetry as Bioregional-Body Practice
"Bioregion" simply means "life place" or "life area" -- inhabiting a habitat. A lot of my poetry and meditative practices are directed towards re-settling back into the landscape. "Re"-settle? Re-align? That implies that I was somehow unsettled or out of place. And with that, I'll agree. As I observe, study and learn more, I notice an apparent trend in our society towards"displacement"--that is, a cognitive dissonance or mental distancing. The interconnections between ourselves and some of the most fundamental ecological and social processes have become invisible to the modern consumer. We don't see where our food comes from. We don't see where our waste goes and how it impacts that place.
We imagine life in our heads as something that can happen in a closed machine environment -- not a living, dynamic system within systems. Once upon a time before the industrial era, humans held the animals they killed and ate, knew our craftsmen and tradesmen by name, gathered or grew food and other raw materials from very real places that they and their social and spiritual histories were entwined together with. There is a wisdom in this kind of "embodied" living because it means we can very quickly see when something goes wrong due to over-cultivation, over-consumption, waste, and other such place-based problems. In turn, our mind-bodies need the more-than-human contact that is mysterious, spontaneous, unpredictable. It opens us up to the hidden joys and experiences of what it means to be human.
Bioregionalism as a movement and idea is about acknowledging our place-based interdependence within a dynamic context, and then learning to live within that context in a mutually enhancing way. Bioregionalism goes hand in hand with other body practices--that is, anything that reminds our thinking selves that we are just as much bodies too. So walking or swimming mindfully, cooking and eating, taking a bath or shower, having sex, using the toilet, washing our hands, doing yoga, tai chi, martial arts, or dance ... the list goes on. As Gary Snyder would say, "Anything that connects us to the actual existing world and its wholeness" ..... THAT is embodied practice, and as we connect to the actual existing world and its wholeness through where we are now ... such a philosophy naturally leads us to bioregionalism.
Poetry as a bioregional body-practice makes sense. Language itself arose out of the mind-body-place interplay (place includes time and space), so poetry has a power to return our awareness back to the body, back to place, to being "now here" as a living, breathing, feeling, probably over-thinking being. But I don't just mean poetry has the power to return our, as in the reader's, awareness back to body and place (so practice in the 3rd sense) ... but I also mean that the process of writing a poem has this same thought-altering influence on us.
Likewise, it is important to let go of the idea that "I" am writing the poem. Who is? I may be the being taking action ... but "I" am immersed and influenced by the place in which I'm writing the poem .. maybe too the place I'm imagining in the poem ... and all the other places and experiences I've had before now. Poetry as bioregional body-practice requires openness. My body was shaped by evolution and genetics -- both of these were influenced by places -- and places sustain the health, vitality and abilities of this body. Places have just as much an affect on the mind as they do on the body.
One of my favorite ways to write poetry then is to go for a walk or hike. I love exploring along the Eno River (my own bioregion & watershed), where I can be human (whatever that means) and sink my mind back into this fundamental "actual existing world and its wholeness" where mind, body, place, past, present and future are all one.
As a writing process, I first must let the cloudy sediment in my mind settle. Then certain ideas, thoughts, images, phrases or sensations may make themselves prominent in my awareness. Using the voice recorder on my phone, I speak forth into the world these little pieces of my "now" and sometimes, just sometimes, they come out almost as whole poems or more often, little gems around which a poem can grow.
I find "speaking" my poetry far more powerful than writing. Speaking requires that I create in the moment, rather than engaging in that pervasive "inner editor" who can make writing poetry "unnatural"--that is, contrived. Oral records from generation to generation were primary sources of knowledge for our ancestors in times past. The oral record still carries on today--in life experience anecdotes and wisdom, pithy sayings and idioms, etc. -- things that we were told and received as children or at some other time in our lives.
Poetry as Engaged Process, not End Product
After speaking a poem, I then transcribe it later on. Sometimes I try to wait at least a couple days before I do this so that the ideas, images and flow are fresher. After processing the "raw" words and images, then it's time to re-write. For many years that was the end for a poem of mine. I did almost no other editing or re-writing. Now I will set aside a poem for three months before editing again. I've also found it helpful to set it aside for nine months more, before a "final" edit. Every few years, review and going through again means that I discover which poems really "mattered" ... were really worth something to me. Time also gives the added advantage of a different perspective.
I appreciate that when we do "revision" work on our writing, there is an element of "revisioning"--re-seeing our writing and selves/communities in a whole new way. Thus, poetry is like life itself. You're not supposed to freak out about not achieving perfection or churning out a molded end product. The projective verse poets got this right in their ideas. Life is organic, sometimes predictable but often just plain crazy and "random" to our finite minds. Thus, life is a whole process, moment by moment. You have to engage in life or before you know it, it'll be over and you'll wonder where it's gone. Poetry requires that you engage with it, that you work at it and keep the process going. This is an indicator of health--when the cycle continues.
The Celts for example discuss God as "Being" rather than a being. Here, in the old Scottish name for God, "Oran Mor" or Great Song, we see that it's not just the noun "song" but also the verb "singing." This illustrates what I mean about poetry as process, rather than product. When we approach poetry and art with the same verb-oriented creativity, we align ourselves with the actual powers of creativity that sustain our cosmos, planet and ecosystems. This should not be underestimated. To see the process of ecological succession or homeostasis maintenance, or just evolution in general, as manifesting through our poetry, we begin to align the mind of poetry with the mind of place -- and bring together human, culture and the wild together.
John Keats also wrote extensively in his journals about poetry as process rather than product. I have never forgotten where he once wrote to a friend that if he'd written poetry all night long and in the morning, it was burnt away in a fire, he would still be glad. This indicates detachment to product, to ego-pride in preserving "self" forever. Instead, Keats said that what mattered was the actual experience of writing and creating the poems to begin with, and what it gave him as a lesson and reflexive action for "soul-making." He believed that the effort of skillful creating is what creates and shapes our "soul"--whatever that may be. And maybe he's right? Who knows?
In reality, the products of our poetry will die one day. The paper will rot down to mulch. The data file will disappear. The memories will be forgotten. But what matters is what that living poetic presence offers to you and readers / listeners now. Does it mean something? Does it offer fresh perspective? Or are you just repeating what others have already said? Are you contributing in a meaningful manner befitting the poem's truth? Is this written for the author's self-interest and almost self-masturbatory enjoyment? (which is ok for some poems) Or is there some higher or deeper process going on?
Such are the questions I ask with each poem that I write or that I read of someone else's. That is the standard by which I judge. A high bar, but quality over quantity is more compassionate in the dharmic sense.
Perhaps now you can see what I mean by "Poetry as Practice." A skill, a gift, a path to compassion and truth, an experiential process, something that must be cultivated and worked on.
