About inspiration and verse

I have commented on another page about writing poetry, but these are some additional thoughts.

Writing real poetry is not something you can do to order. Either the inspiration comes - spontaneously, or it doesn't. By that I mean the idea -the start-up line, or two. The rest may flow, or have a long birth through numerous redraftings.

The poem Sunset Over Whitestone Pond came to me as I rode home on my motorcycle. The intense contrast of dark, dark cloud and the bright sun beneath blinding me as a rode uphill brought the line: " A diamond under a raven's wing". As soon as I got home I drafted the rest while the image was still strong. The poem has been redrafted several times since. I added the last verse recently. I think it's finished now - almost. But I'm still not hundred percent satisfied with it. You can read it on a page called Sunset.

In a newsletter produced by the Environment Agency (the organisation that looks after the health of England's water supplies) there was a poetry competition. "Write a poem about a field" they said. Well, if I had written a poem about a field I could have sent it in. But I haven't. And if I wrote anything that did not come out of a real need to express something, I would regard it as 'verse', not poetry. It would be an exercise in manipulating words to describe something in a particular way.

When the Dunblane Primary School shooting happened in Scotland I found it impossible to write anything. The horror was too immediate. It was only later, the result of a routine act of filing newspaper cuttings, that the imaginative image from which a poem developed, came into my mind.

I am very wary of the words "write a poem about" because I suspect so often they are thought up by people who are not poets themselves. The craft of writing poetry, on the other hand, is something well worth attempting, even if inspiration is not forthcoming, and so is reading all sorts of poetry and verse. There is something for everyone if you know where to look.

	A lot of modern British poetry does not rhyme, nor do the lines scan. in the conventional way. That does not mean it isn't poetry. Personally, I tend to use both rhyme and scansion, and a more-or-less regular format, though with certain degrees of freedom and rule-breaking. I suppose that is because of the sort of poetry I was brought up on. Anyway, you can do a lot with these conventions to produce a rhythm that expresses a mood. The important thing to judge, I believe, is whether the words in a poem sing to you. Sound good together. Strike a chord. Touch your emotions. Paint a picture. Give you a window into someone else's world. Mean something. A string of colourful words juxtaposed may be utter nonsense - a pseudo poem. Beware of these imposters. "Whan that Aprillé with his shourés sooute, The drought of March hath piercéd to the roote..." spelled something like that, is very sonorous. It's at the beginning of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which I studied at school.You have to pronounce the accented é to get the rhythm right. T.S.Eliot, on the other hand, has a very different voice, which influenced my poetry when I was seventeen. I loved the growling sound of: "I grow old, I grow old, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.." from The Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.
	Verse, on the other hand (as distinct from the verses in a poem) is a word I would use to describe the sort of poetry which is either written to order, like a news reporter on a paper writes a 'story' about some incident or is a long narrative with a large amount of non-poetic padding. Both of these may use colourful, even imaginative language, but do they have a soul? People may not see eye to eye with me on this. Let's agree to differ. The distinction between poetry and verse is a grey area. Edward Lear's book of nonsense verse contains some items that I regard as poems. They resonate, they are full of imagery, they describe emotions. They appeal to the imagination. My son loved "The Pobble Who Has no Toes" and now my granddaughter (aged three) asks me to recite "The Owl and the Pussycat", which I know off by heart.
	All this and more is to be found on the Poetry Society's site in Ten Tips by Roddy Lumsden.

Page created on 3rd November 1999

This page was last updated on 13 November 2006.