Billy Dean
POEMS FOR PEOPLE

If poetry were a tree, its roots would be deep in the ground of human history, and its branches would be the way it evolved to reflect the practices of professional and amateur poets and the preferences of academic and non-academic people. But there’s the rub—those practices and preferences are not as compatible as they once were.

Poetry was once an oral tradition and poets were the storytellers. When poets began writing poems for the page and experimenting with form and content, poetry began losing its story-telling power. Reading poems like those was like working a crossword puzzle without the clues. Then radio, television, and lyrical songs further displaced the role poetry had played in the past.

In school, students must unravel what a poem means rather than express how it affects them. So they leave school with an emotionally detached, find-the-meaning attitude toward poetry. On the Internet, some poets know poetry is a vehicle for the reader’s thoughts and feelings, but most think poetry is a container for the poet’s thoughts and feelings. Reading poems like that is like listening to a child pounding the keys on a piano.

You, however, want your poems to be well received. Like children, they deserve the best preparation you can give them, because once they leave home they will have to speak for themselves.

Let us go then, you and I, and explore ways to make the practices of poets and the preferences of readers more compatible. Ways to give them alternatives to the mass mediocrity of amateur poets and the style-and-content experiments of professional poets. If you apply these ways to your poetry, you will reach more readers.

Poetic Preferences

Poetry is like wine—bad if you don’t like it and good if you do. So, like wine, poetry is what it does—bad if doesn’t please you and good if it does. General readers are more familiar with prose than with poetry, so they won’t be pleased by enigmatic poems with complex crafting or by trite, maudlin poems with no crafting of the emotional content.

They will be pleased with poems that tell a story about things that matter. Stories that are psychologically valid, emotionally realistic and relevant to real life. Stories that merge showing and telling so their intellect and their senses are involved. Stories that reveal the consequences of choice, the value of solitude and self-discovery, and ways to accept the mystery of paradox and ambiguity. Stories filled with adventure, suspense, pain and pleasure, victory and defeat, belief and doubt. Stories that make them more awake, aware, and alive. Stories that reveal what they are seeking and you have found.

Poetic Practices

Writing without a motive and a purpose is like driving without a route and a destination. The journey will be like Yogi Bera’s mindless “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”  rather than Robert Frost’s mindful “I took the road less traveled and that made all the difference.”  So plumb the depths of why you want to do something creative with words. Knowing that will influence the kind of poems you write and the kind of readers you will reach.

Accommodate Prose-Oriented People

So accommodate the prose-oriented abilities, expectations and preferences of the general public with the understanding that you can satisfy your writer-centered motives with poems that evoke reader-centered outcomes. And study the poems of poets who use ordinary language in extraordinary ways to show people familiar things in fresh new ways. Poets who put as few obstacles between themselves and their readers as possible. Poets like Billy Collins, Denise Levertov, Emily Dickinson, Jane Kenyon, Maya Angelou, Octavio Paz, Robert Frost and Ted Kooser.

Craft Poems that Show and Tell

Words are only handles to carry the idea of a feeling from writer to reader, not the feeling itself. So telling readers how a character feels is less likely to evoke an emotional response than conveying images and information with showing and telling so readers can participate with their own feelings.

She stood on the cliff
weeping,
watching waves crash
against the jagged rocks below.

Establish Criteria for Line Breaks

Billy Collins said, “Line breaks give a poem a physical shape, which guides our reading of the poem and distinguishes it from prose.” Yeah, prose is merely about something, whereas poetry is something, and line breaks are one of the keys to the difference. They guide the attention of a reader like a canyon controls the flow of a river. Prose flows, but doesn’t care where it goes.

And, since line breaks determine the length of a line, they control the speed at which a reader rides the here-and-now wave of music and meaning—quickly with short lines and slowly with long lines. 

Emphasize a rhyming relationship:

Mary had a little goat.
“It swallows sticks and cans!”
She wrote.

Call attention to something significant:

The geography of Greece and Tennessee
are long ago and far away.
But I remember Miss Skibitski
her dress brushing the map
where the morning sun lit Australia.

Leverage curiosity onto the next line:

Amber was a woman of color
and depth. She saw no yellow ribbons
when she left that silver bus.

Evoke humor and surprise:

Amber had the cutest
kitten Bob had ever seen.

Convey double meanings:

Amber’s suitcase swelled with baggage
she left in Tennessee.

 Speed the pace with the compressed energy of short lines:

You find the list.
You sign, sit and
sweat a bit.

Slow the pace with the relaxed energy of long lines:

Your fingers strumming my heart paddled me down a long, meandering afternoon.

Craft Poems with the Right Words

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.”  Yeah, a synonym is sometimes a word we use when we can’t remember the right one. But every word is a commentary on what all the others leave unsaid. So enrich your vocabulary so you can choose the right words to evoke the feeling you are trying to convey with all the obvious and subtle richness of the English language. And James Dickey said, “Words go together in zillions of ways. Some ways go deep and some go shallow.”  So be careful how you put words together.

• Words aimed at the body give your readers sight, sound, smell, taste and touch so they can experience what you are saying with their senses.
• Words aimed at the brain give your readers perspective, context and meaning so they can interpret what you show them with their own understanding.
• Create sharp, focused, dynamic images of real things in action: “The orioles pecked the strawberries.” is active, and matches actor and action specifically, whereas “The fruit was eaten by the birds.” is abstract, passive and not specific.
• Use verbs that don’t need adverbs to convey action: “The rabbit jumped.” rather than “The rabbit jumped suddenly.”
• Use nouns that do not need adjectives to be specific and sensory: “She touched the bark.” rather than “She touched the rough bark.”
• But adjectives can limit the number of associations. “The boy rode his sister’s bicycle—the one without a seat and bent handlebars.” makes it less likely that readers will conjure up every bicycle they rode when they were a child.
• You want your readers to fill in what you don’t supply with their own imagination. But limit their imagination by not being too general or too specific.
• Being too specific is like walking your dog on a short leash: your readers won’t be free enough to bring your words to life with their own imagination.
• Being too general is like walking your dog on a long leash: readers will entertain too many associations and drift off the path you want them on.

Congratulations

You’ve acquired ways to craft poems for people, not just poets. So let your passion and prejudice hit the page and the stage like a lightning bolt!  Then, when you hear that silent, satisfying Snap! as your words fall into place, you’ll know your poetry is alive with sight, sound, sense and spirit.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Writing Tips.