A Poem A Day, Every Day, for A Month: How Poetry Can Make You a Better Writer
By: Suzanne Lagrande
Tags: Creativity, Creative Writing, Poetry, Poetry Writing, Writing

The Writer by Suzanne LaGrande, Mixed Media

National Poetry Month begins in April, but I thought I’d start early.

Although I have written a novel, several screenplays, short stories, essays, plays, poetry always intimidated me.

Perhaps its because it’s so easy to do it badly and so hard to do it well.

I edited a feminist literary journal in college, and we got a lot of bad poetry submissions. We decided to hold an annual bad poetry contest — everyone could invent their own category, and of course their were costumes and everyone won some kind of a prize.

It was great fun to actually just go for — create the worst poem you possibly could, with gusto, and it broke the spell cast by academics, critics and perfectionists that poetry was a rarefied art form, that only the anointed few should even attempt.

I knew I could write intentionally bad poetry, but I was still intimidated to write poetry in earnest.

I noticed over the years that the writing that I was drawn to, that moved me, had a poetic quality to it, and the essays I particularly loved were mainly written by poets.

Two years ago, I finally got up my nerve the fear of it being embarrassingly bad, and bolstered by a bad breakup, I decided to just try writing poetry.

Writing poetry badly, or doing anything badly is the price of admission you must pay to begin practicing any art form. If you can’t practice, if you can’t be bad at it, you will never put in the time to learn the skills you need to actually get better at it.

My willingness to write poetry was bolstered by a bad breakup: Even if I wrote lots and lots of bad poems, at least it would be cheap therapy.

When I actually did begin writing poetry, I discovered something I’d lost in all the years of working in earnest on improving my writing: Delight

At some point, very soon into the writing process, writing turned into hard work. And being a workaholic, I dug my heels in with word counts and multiple drafts and spent serious time showing up, butt in chair (which began spreading out, the more time I spent sitting writing).

I approached writing like a job, and treated it as a profession. The only problem was, the harder I worked, the less I enjoyed writing. I worked at a job in order to be able to have time to write, but over time, my writing became like my job, with long hours, little or no pay, and scant recognition.

When I started writing poetry I re-discovered the sounds of words. Children, when they learn to speak, and when they learn to read, spend a lot of time trying out sounds, playing with the sounds of words. It’s fun. Try it. Making sounds. Playing with the sounds of words, exploring not the sense words make but sound sense they make.

As poets and songwriters both know, words are first and foremost and remain a kind of music.

So starting now, today I will begin writing a poem every day for a month, and to show how willing I am to be publicly and throughly embarrassed in order to continue writing poetry, I will post my daily efforts here on Medium, along with daily reflections about the process of writing poetry and an occasional writing prompt in case you’d like to join me.

For writers who have never considered writing poetry or for those who are on the fence about dipping their toes into the world of poetry, here are five reasons why you might consider trying to write a poem or two, or perhaps, a poem every day for a month.

Whether you write good or bad poetry, the act of writing poetry makes you a better writer.

1) Poetry invites the spirit of play into the writing process.

In writing poetry you have the opportunity to play with the meaning of words, with the sounds of words, with nonsense and with multitude of sense that words make when they are not constrained by the need to make grammatical sense or habitual, well- worn common sense.

2) Poetry allows you to delve deeply into the sensuousness of language, and to cultivate an erotic relationship with the words you use.

We experience the world through multiple senses, yet in our haste to communicate clearly with a minimum of unnecessary words, we often resort to language that is transactional, abstract, hackneyed.

Consider the well known and overused phrase, “I love you”

Now consider how June Jordan expresses the same idea in her poem, Poem For My Love. Jordan uses eighteen words instead of three. But she also unpacks what “love” means in a way that is sensuous, memorable and concrete.

I am amazed by peace

It is this possibility of you

asleep

and breathing in the quiet air

3) Poetry distills meaning. It helps a writer to attend to both the specificity and the multiplicity of meanings contained in a single word.

Consider the subtle differences in the following word choices:

I appreciate you. I’m fond of your. I enjoy you. I cherish you. I adore you. I like you. I want you. I favor your company.

All writers think about their word choices, but because the meaning of a poem can turn on one word, poets in particular practice paying attention to word subtleties.

4) Poetry helps writers incorporate a greater variety of words into their vocabulary.

In every day communication, whether written or spoken, we tend to over rely on and reused the same words.

Kono Kim estimates that the average English speaking adult knows between 20,000 and 30,000 words total words.

This number is misleading for it counts tenses of the same word, such as run, ran, running, as separate words.

Kim compares Shakespeare’s vocabulary to that of words found in the Wall Street Journal. Shakespeare uses 25,000 original words in his masterworks, more than 10 years worth of words published in the Wall Street Journey.

The actual words a speaker uses regularly is considerably less.

John Bagnall that there is a difference between words people actually use (active vocabulary) and words they understand but don’t use often or at all (passive vocabulary) “Clearly, a person’s passive vocabulary is (much) larger than their active one.”

Further, of the words people actually do use in speech or writing, many of these words are overused, or “crutch” words — those you use out of habit.

As writers and as readers you have probably had the experience of being astonished by a wholly original turn of phrase.

It depends on your writing style and your audience, but as a writer, I would like to be able to write more like Shakespeare than the Wall Street Journal. The originality of Shakespeare language has everything to do with the fact that his language is anchored in poetry.

5) The practice of writing poetry invites the writer (and the reader) into a relationship with mystery.

So much non-fiction is intent upon giving us answers, offering advice, insight, solutions. Fiction creates a mystery and then tries to solve it.

Poetry is an art form that asks questions without expecting the poet or the reader to answer them. How often do we allow ourselves to entertain and hold open a question without rushing to google to give us an answer. Google gives us a quick answer, the one that their search engines spiders, bots and crawlers all agree is the most common, and therefore the best answer.

We are suffering not just from too much information, but from an overwhelming glut of other people’s opinions.

In all the noise of our world, we rarely give ourselves the contemplative space to not know. To entertain, and to revel in mystery, much less develop a relationship with it.

In poetry, observation and description are not used as support for an argument with a clear thesis.

We may enter the world of a poem and linger there without knowing what it means. The willingness to not know and linger in the space of not knowing helps us to recognize we are in relationship to the world around us. We are not always in control of the meaning of our experiences or the world around us. And if we can appreciate and allow for this space of not knowing, we can arrive at new questions, ones that google never entertained and cannot answer.

Poetry develop in poets and in readers of poetry a greater capacity for wonder and awe.

Wonder and awe fuels curiosity.

Wonder and awe deeps our capacity to feel.

Wonder and awe allows us to push past what we know, without having to arrive at, or know the answer.

Wonder and are is surely useful to writers, and to anyone who strives to live an ecstatic life.

ec·stat·ic

adjective: 1.feeling or expressing overwhelming happiness or joyful excitement.

“ecstatic fans filled the stadium”

synonyms: enraptured, elated, transported, in transports, in raptures, euphoric;

2. involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence.

“an ecstatic vision”

noun

1. a person subject to mystical experiences.

or, in the words of Sufi poet Hafiz:

I Have Learned So Much

I

Have

Learned

So much from God

That I can no longer

Call

Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,

a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself

With me

That I can no longer call myself

A man, a woman, an angel,

Or even a pure

Soul.

Love has

Befriended Hafiz so completely

It has turned to ash

And freed

Me

Of every concept and image

my mind has ever known