Kathleen J Graber on How to Write Poetry

Many people find it difficult to find their voice when they are writing poetry. What advice would you give them?

Most artists learn by imitation. This is certainly how I learned to write poetry, and this is how I encourage my students to learn. At some point as an apprentice, you realise that you might finally possess enough skills to fashion a reasonably passable imitation of the artist whose work has inspired you, but something other than ability prevents you from achieving the perfect fake. The thing that will keep getting in your way will be your own voice. Ironically, then, in trying to write like the poets whose work I loved, I learned to write like myself. There are so many kinds of poems. Perhaps at the start, a student cannot say why she loves the work of another poet, but contained in that attraction are the seeds of her own aesthetics. Eventually a poet can say, ‘Of all the kinds of poems that I might have chosen to write, I write this kind. And I write this kind because I value this kind.’ While all poets ought to have a wide palette and read other poets of all sorts, their own writing testifies to what they themselves think poems ought to do. We choose.

Let’s start with Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty. 

For the first decade of my working life, I taught in schools. A friend asked me to chaperone a group of her students who were going to a poetry festival. I reluctantly agreed. At the festival, Mark Doty read two or three poems. When he was finished, I thought, ‘I want to learn to do that!’ Doty is an exquisite image-maker. His language is so precise and lush. He allows himself to linger over his descriptions, and his poems emerge out of that careful attention. I have never written a poem as beautiful as any one of his poems. But his work is not all shine (or sequins, as he says in one poem addressed to his critics). I love even more than the rendered image, the engaged, inquisitive mind that animates his vision. The poems are not just conscious but self-conscious; they are inhabited by a soul that is not simply talking to some specific other or many others but also talking to itself. The body of Doty’s work is profoundly moving – many of the early poems having been written in the midst of the Aids epidemic – but the poems are also funny and self-deprecating. There is nothing Mark Doty does not do well!

Your next choice, What Goes On: Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009, is by an old teacher of yours, Stephen Dunn. 

Stephen Dunn was my first teacher. What Goes On is his second book of new and selected poems, but his influence on the way I think about poems extends beyond the reach of any one collection and also beyond the reach of the poems themselves. I was already in my mid-30s when I enrolled as a continuing education student in Dunn’s undergraduate class. I had a lot of big ideas that I wanted to express in poetry, or that’s as close as I can come now to whatever it was I thought I wanted to do. For a year I wrote very bad poems, consistently among the worst in the room on any given evening. Dunn’s advice, which I understood but couldn’t manage to follow, was to set aside ideas in favour of things. William Carlos Williams is so often quoted in this regard: ‘No ideas but in things.’ I think Stephen wanted me to try, ‘No ideas at all!’ 

Dunn is himself a very philosophical poet, and this was odd, somewhat dictatorial advice coming from someone who always mixes image with intellect, but he knew that I could think. He also knew that I couldn’t render an image. He wanted the horse before the cart, or, at least no carts without horses, as those things aren’t going to go anywhere! Every thought in Dunn’s work emerges as a direct response to experience. Hence, his ruminations, which tend to undermine our daily assumptions and comfortable moral values, feel as though they have emerged from life rather than from scholarship.

Let’s move on to another influence – Black Zodiac by Charles Wright.

The first imitation that I wrote that felt in any way like a successful poem on its own was an imitation of Charles Wright. While Dunn had rightly tried to steer me away from too much intellectualisation in my writing, Wright is a poet who moves between a generally profoundly understated moment in his life (most often he’s just sitting in his yard watching birds or lightening bugs as twilight comes on) and metaphysical pondering. One gets a sense that the mundane and the overarching are always merged, approaching together on the wind. He gave me permission to quote from other texts directly the way an essay might. There is a difference between Wright’s appropriation of a text and Eliot’s. Wright generally gives you all the contextual information you need right there in the body of the poem. He isn’t interested in opacity at all. 

I didn’t know poems could do that! It was shocking to me. I love the wonderful texture that these other voices introduced into his poems, and I love the way Wright moves from the quotidian to the elevated, from the humidity of an August night to snippets from Roberto Calasso or Augustine or Wallace Stevens or one of the Chinese poets he loves so much.