EXERCISES FOR POETS

It might surprise you to know what exercises poets use to hone their craft. Just like other types of artists – musicians, dancers, singers, painters – serious poets work hard practicing the fundamentals of their art. So when they sit down to create, they have the technical skills to make clear, strong, evocative poems.

So what are the poetic equivalents of say, practicing pentatonic scales on piano or guitar, a singer’s breathing exercises, a ballerina’s workouts at the barre?

A poet’s apparatus is not a musical instrument or a physical body; it’s language. So a poet needs consistent, close study of language, and that means reading a lot of poetry, finding a beacon to reach towards. Two of my beacons are Lorna Crozier and Kim Addonizio, poets whose work is easy to read yet complex at the same time.

More than study, it helps to have a fascination with language. After all, there’s not a lot of room in a poem to develop an idea, tell a story, evoke an emotional reaction. Each word must be carefully selected, must be precise. A poet’s reference material is not sheet music but a thesaurus.

In addition, a serious poet does exercises to explore and perfect the elements of style and structure. Here’s an example of an exercise I recently completed, from poet Dorianne Laux’s workbook, Finger Exercises for Poets. The focus here is on syllables and lines, and the challenge is to:

• write a simple eight-line poem in couplets (two-line stanzas)
• use one-and two-syllable words
• use one three- or four-syllable word
• work with the idea of twos.

(If you think this sounds like TOO FUN TO BE LEGAL, you may be a poet!) Here’s what I came up with:

Twin maple trees in winter
stand close as this popsicle

just pulled apart.
My daughter's eyes

round and keen
await like the tree branches

keenly await spring sun.
Soon: two types of sticky sugar treats.

This little poem illustrates another aspect of good technique, best explained by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, who said that the fact that something happened is the worst reason to put it in a poem. A poet, he said, must be a maker instead of an utterer. In other words, a poet may use something that happened as a springboard into a poem, but rarely is it justifiable to keep something in a poem just because it happened. When a poet makes something out of that actual event… well, that’s a better poem. And sometimes it’s completely made up, as this one is, and as those of you who know me will have suspected, the first clue being I do not have a daughter!

Now you know! Poets work like any other artist to master the fundamentals of their art: through practice and study they develop the technical skills that allow them to give readers a sense of enjoyment and maybe even expansion. That is the goal of any art, yes? As I wrote in a recent poem,

… you write all this down hoping just one reader

finds themselves saying, “huh”

which is universal-speak for when a human pauses and realizes something new.

Lee Ann