March 26, 2016
Saturday Writers Meeting
Speaker: Jason
Sommer: Poet
In honor of National Poetry Month in April, Mr. Sommer spoke
on the process of bringing a poem from thought to life.
One of the most important things is
to be alert to the world around you. It
is important to read poetry also.
You can start with a narrative
poem. Narrative poetry is a form
of poetry that tells a story, often making use
of the voices of a narrator and characters as well; the entire story is usually
written in metred verse. Narrative poems do not have to follow rhythmic patterns.
Free verse is a
literary device that can be defined as poetry that
is free from limitations of regular meter or
rhythm and does not rhyme with fixed forms. Such poems are without rhythms and rhyme
schemes; do not follow regular rhyme scheme rules and still provide artistic
expression.
Poetry differs from prose in that it connects
the readers’ interior with the interior of the poet or poem. Meter can have a sort of hypnotizing effect.
The Paris Review has a series of interviews
with writers, poets, prose writers, etc.
Writing is rewriting and rewriting and
rewriting….
It helps to have a difficult history behind
you.
Sylvia Plath—good poet, Candles is a great
poem. Though her death obsessed book is
less well received.
A true poet should be life obsessed.
Poetry is a lot about likes and dislikes. Different strokes for different folks. What one person reads and likes is not going
to be liked by the next person.
Pentameter:
a line of verse consisting of five metrical feet, or (in Greek and Latin
verse) of two halves each of two feet and a long syllable.
This is the average poetic line.
Longer than five and you start getting into the
head (Whitman, CK Williams, Ginsberg).
Shorter than five is teachy, imparting wisdom like
“a penny saved is a penny earned.”
Verse: In
the countable sense, a verse is
formally a single metrical line in apoetic composition. However, verse has come to represent any division or
grouping of words in a poetic composition,
with groupings traditionally having been referred to as stanzas.
Stanza: an
arrangement of a certain number of lines, usually four or more, sometimes
having a fixed length, meter, or rhyme scheme, forming a division of a poem.
A stanza does not need to be a particular
number of lines, but stanzas usually have a recurring structure such as lines
of the same length or with the same pattern of rhyming. The word
"verse," derived from "versus" in Latin, may also be used
to refer to "poetry" as opposed to "prose" and can also
refer to a complete work of poetry.
Use different meters, such as hexameter and trimester
or symmetrical quatrains.
When working and rewriting poetry, often things
that drop away. Even the original inspiration
of the poem may go away when you finish your poem. You can keep those lines elsewhere and use
them in another poem or work if you simply love them but they don’t belong in
your edited version. Writing sometimes
is “kill your darlings.” He recommends “unkill
the child.”
Elizabeth Bishop: another great poet. One Art, excellent example of a villanelle. In The Waiting Room is another great poem.
Villanelle:
a nineteen-line poem with two rhymes throughout, consisting of five
tercets and a quatrain, with the first and third lines of the opening tercet
recurring alternately at the end of the other tercets and with both repeated at
the close of the concluding quatrain.
Sonnet: a poem of fourteen
lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically
having ten syllables per line.
Sestina: a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a
final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six
different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words
appearing in the closing three-line envoi.
Get your
framework down, then work it down. Get
the idea down on paper, then deal with the editing/rewriting/reworking. It may look completely different when you are
done. It’s a process of analysis. A recipe.
A poem is a repository for feelings. Bishop references this in “(write
it!) in the last line of her poem. One
Arc shows distillation and order out of what was previously written. Her poem goes from smaller to larger to HUGE
(VAST) and ten instantly back to small…even you….interesting take on losing
things.
Now….GET
WRITING!!!!
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| Jason Sommer speaks to the Saturday Writers Group March 2016 |
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