Getting Started: Poetry
Writing Poetry: Where to Start
I started out as a fiction writer – I liked a good story, loved to read, wanted to convey a human condition. Then, I took one great poetry class and quickly realized my future lay in the lyrical, eruptive, concise and compact world of poetics.
The poet Lorine Niedecker called her tiny log cabin on Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin her 'condensery': there she wrote small, condensed poems that captured images, sounds, small moments of thought in a way that thrilled me and my love of the moment, the segment, the small but powerful space.
A good introductory poetry course will show you a few important things about writing poetry: it should show you that memory, image, conversation and nature (among many other things) are your tools, that the briefest encounter, the most intimate words of a mother, lover, friend, can be a poem. It can also show you how, taken out of the physical conformity of the long, left margin-ruled paragraph structure, words can find a new power- the power of space, rhythm and music.
Blogging about Poetry and Literature,· a discussion on licensing original work
It is a propitious time to begin discussing the protection of original works, given the expansion of specialised internet usage, be it through sites such as Wrting.ie, or the huge growth in blogging, through platforms such as Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress and Weebly. Those writers who market and develop outward from personal Weblogs begin to understand through their reviewing and online publication that there exist a set of protections for the writer’s original works. As reviewers we have a cognisance of our own work developing outward, and in referring to the works of another. The most common rule of thumb in review, referral and discussion of another’s original work that we may build upon is the Fair Use Policy.
Read more: Blogging about Poetry and Literature,· a discussion on licensing original work
Mary O'Donnell: What Poetry Is
Like many satisfying things, poetry can be difficult to define. I am reluctant to be categorical about what exactly a poem is, yet it seems to me that a good poem has a lot to do with anxiety. Its writer has a central anxiety, something which agitates and preoccupies him, which will not let him go until he has addressed it and faced it down. But you cannot say that a poem is an anxiety. That is not enough. But if the anxiety is the trigger-mechanism which creates the poem, we could perhaps speculate that a poem is a kind of resolution, a very open-ended one.
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