Writers: how do you write a poem?

Poetry is soul-vomit, written with shaking hands and tear-stained pages.

There is no system.

I ask a question here & let the keyboard dance.

I don’t try to write them very often but sometimes I get the urge to express a feeling or a thought in words. It comes to me as a single line which usually becomes the last line of the poem and I try to work towards that. I leave it by my bedside table and modify it until I feel I can do no more with it. At that moment the poem seems perfect and only later do I realise I was mistaken and in fact it is no good. I have only written one or two that please me and one or two that have pleased others.

“Soul-vomit”? Hardly the way I would describe a lovely and lyrical literary form for expressing thoughts and feelings. Over the years I’ve read poetry-writing books and asked numerous teachers and fellow writers how to write it and never gotten an answer that satisfied me. So when I feel moved to write a poem, I just write it without worrying about how.

The best poems I have written, I have heard first in my mind and then written down.

When I was pregnant with my second child, I struggled with the issue of moving my first son out of the nursery and further down the hall. I woke up one morning with the line, “Raising children is not like catching fish/ instead of reeling in, you reel them out.” And the rest of the poem almost wrote itself. It is my best poem.

I learned to love most poetry when I learned how to be as analytical and as careful in my reading as in the poet’s writing.

Both Auden and Frost have said, for example, that they were fascinated by form and meter and often started with them, rather than the ideas and tropes.

Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form has been my bible since my son introduced me to it in 1980. H e was taking a poetry writing class at Wesleyan U.; this was one of the texts. The class has kids beating down the doors to take it and always had a long waiting list.

Why is Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle unto that Good Night” a villanelle, Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” a sonnet,” and Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” free form?

Why is iambic pentameter standard form for English, the Alexandrine common for French poetry, Welsh bardic poems writtten in 27 different recoginzed meters, and Anglo-Saxon verse with a central caesura (I love this stuff)?

That said, once I was comfortable reading poetry, I did try to write some, triggered initially by my brother’s diagnosis of Lymphoma. They weren’t bad and it was fun, but I liked prose better. (I brought some Yeats and Auden with me to rehab, but it took too much work to read. Watching “Sponge Bob, Square Pants” seemed more my style.)

This little gem can be reread and reread. By Auden, for his cat, Lucina. It is deceptively simply and gives hope to us would-be versifiers.

“In Memoriam, L.K.A; 1950–1952

At peace under this mandarin, sleep, Lucina
Blue-eyed queen of white cats
For you the Ischian wave
Shall weep
When we who now miss you
Are American dust
And steep Epomeo in peace and war
Augustly a grave-watch keep.

Honestly, I have no system. I just follow the inspiration. Sometimes I need to create a poem for an occasion but I just fail. And other times I can simply create a long one without paying a lot of efforts.

Concept before completion. Think about the theme – the message – the point of what you want to say first. Once you have your hands around what the concept will be, then deal with the words.

Otherwise you are building a structure with nothing inside it.

My attempts at sauce produce gravy.
My attempts at poetry produce rhymes.
I’ll probably eat out tonight.

Mine are just thoughts that keep pecking at my mind until I put them to paper. Started writing at 13 to alleviate depression and loneliness. I have a long poem that is one of my darkest times. In it is the line, “I am unique in a world of stereotypes.”
Sometimes it is a location that wakes me up. A few years ago, while walking our dog, it was winter and we had just had an ice storm. This is what popped into my head; “Branches clink together like champagne glasses at a wedding. The honeymoon is over.” Some day, my goal is to put everything I have written into a book and call it, “just me.” Maybe when I retire.

Thank you, all. I will look for the book @gailcalled linked for us and described at my library. I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that reading poetry and understanding it leads to writing better poetry. And I also agree with @elbanditoroso. Structure is important.

I have a system. It starts with a theme and notes around ideas that theme engenders. I then write sentences, which I cut and slice and edit. The remains turn into something that I apply rhythm and structure to, adding and removing syllables here and there.

I have written poetry all my life and won one prize at graduate school. Poetry is challenging. It does not simply appear on the paper for me.

It certainly does not simply appear on the paper for any good poet.

Auden used to talk about his fascination with weird meters like the amphibrach, used in Greek, Latin and Russian poetry.

Here’s another deceptively simply poem by Frost. I continue to find new meaning in it.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Although I shudder at the term of “soul-vomit”, there is literally no plan for me when I wrote a poem. It simply spills out from my heart onto paper (maybe that’s why mine is cheap drivel).

I like writing poems, but I’m certainly no expert. Although as I understand it, you don’t need to be one for poetry. Er, so I guess anyways. When I write poems I like building a frame, and a frame needs a theme, although that theme is apt to change drastically as the poem grows. But essentially I get a theme going, and when nothing fits or makes sense, I remind myself that just about no one will read it, and that anyways, it will be justified by being all emotional and shit, if it is read by others. It will be perceived as it will be perceived, as long as my theme remains the central idea.
Then I try to find proper wording, and I like rhyming, so I do that. I use a thesaurus when writing poetry, and find all these fucked up words that I can use. It’s goof for variance and finding rhymes. At least, more or less.
For rhyming I like to make every second sentence rhyme, leaves room for telling more.
You know like,

I am Viking so fuck you,
You will die cuz I said so,
Watchoo gonna do you damn foo’,
Sides crumble like some shmoe.

I also often try to make double rhyming, but I can’t explain that without an example;

I just watched Chucky,
It wasn’t all that bad,
It was slightly botched, the imagery was mucky,
Charles the killer, his story again was had, tis’ the 2000’s fad, poor dude ain’t lucky, I sure felt sad.

I find this rather difficult to do, and often have to improvise by being all goth in my writing; to your arms, I shall go not, you may sit there then, sit and cry and rot! But seeing as I enjoy this style, I find it acceptable to use, and fun too. Playing with words can be cool, although I will admit, my grammar sucks, and I should probably stop making up verbs and words, lest I become some kind of rap singer. But it sure cheers me up to fuck around when I’m all sad anshit, know what I mean, jellybean?

I personally seem to be hooked to the rhyming thing, but that is not a poetry essential, as I’m sure you know. I stand by it though, but I need watch myself, otherwise I get lost and the same words keep coming back, and verses get too long. I don’t always follow this personal rule, but I follow it enough to mention it as a significant part of my system.
I usually go through at least two drafts before I set everything up and finish the poem. Sometimes, months later, even a year or two, I go back and make adjustments, although I always consider the original final draft as the real thing.
I like dark and moody poems, so I’m also often influenced by Victorian writing, or whatever epic bullshit some bastard said in a vampire movie.

The one thing I’ve never quite got down was making the poem flow nicely as it is read. At least when I read most of mine, they usually feel real awkward and it just doesn’t flow nicely.

That’s the jist of my system, but I suspect that writing poetry and the systems involved in it really depend on your style, what you’re trying to say and how you go about all of it. Some people write for themselves, others write so that they may conjure something in someone? All I really know about that is that some Viking metal is awesome, while some of it is like…dude, pass me that horn you were blowing in.

So much hate for my terminology. I didn’t know how else to describe it. It’s certainly not a beautiful, hounds-baying-on-the-moor, where-is-my-quill moment. I write in pain, in agony, because if I don’t get out what I’m feeling RIGHT NOW, I could very easily hurt myself in response.

Never once have I written with the intention of making something good. It’s self-preservation.

I just write. I don’t know how to explain it. If it doesn’t come to me, I don’t write. Simple as that. It should not be forced.

@Seek_Kolinahr…no intended hate here. It was rather fitting, actually, since that’s how I write poetry too.

I’ve always believed poetry to be easy to write. As an example @ucme provided me with three random words: orange, month, and pint.

In this case I first decide how all of these words are connected. I then try and construct a form and meter that match the tone of what I’m writing. I find that it helps me to imagine James Earl Jones reading the poem aloud when I am picking and choosing breaks. It’s like a literary game of Jenga.

My personal taste and style lean heavily on alliteration and construct more than rhyming and strict meter.

Halloween by @Blondesjon

Cold colored with
obscured orange faces.
Ingesting, enjoying with equanimity
each precious pint as monsters
gambol and slide sinister shadows
across the yawning walk.
Irrevocably this terrifying
tenth month
dark month
dying month
the stoop bell must be answered.

for further examples please feel free to shoot me three random words

I feel it has allot to do with expression and emotion…...no system needed…..just the pen and paper.