The Poet: #7- My rules for writing poetry
The Poet: Chapter 7- By about 1989 or 1990, as I got into the habit of writing poems on a regular basis, I came up with some personal rules for writing them
I have very few photos of my younger self. But I found this, it’s a video still shot of me (in the blue T-shirt), and fellow BMX freestyler, Randy Lawrence, from the 1989 intro to an ESPN BMX TV show called The Huntington Beach Street Scene. This is what I looked like when I was quietly writing quite a few poems, and not telling a single person about them, because I was embarrassed to be a poet, in 1989.
I started writing a lot of rhymes, “song lyrics” in my mind, in 1987, because of my girlfriend. I’ll write more about her in a future chapter. After writing notebooks full of garbage for a few months, I slowed down, and wrote less, but with better results. My “lyrics” went from absolute garbage to some halfway decent lines, once in a while. Over the next two or three years, after the girlfriend and I broke up, I kept writing “song lyrics” and poems, and didn’t show them to anyone. As time went by, I developed a few informal rules for writing poetry, which helped me get the poems down on paper more often, and not miss the better ideas.
I thought I had two or three informal poetry rules when I started thinking about it. It turns out I have six main rules for writing poetry. Here they are:
(One) Don’t force poems, let the ideas come out when they are ready.
(Two) Carry a pen with me at all times, seriously, 24/7, to be able to write down any insights, ideas, and whole poems that come to me.
(Three) When a poem idea hits me, I stop whatever I’m doing, no matter what it is, and focus on getting the poem down on paper.
(Four) When a line for the poem pops into my head, I write it down. Then I go “fishing” mentally for the next line, the matching rhyme.
(Five) Don’t edit mentally while I’m writing, just let the ideas flow as freely onto the paper as possible. I can always edit the poem later. This is the hardest part, just letting the ideas, the poem, flow naturally through my head and onto the paper.
(Six) Once I have the poem to where it feels “done,” I stop, and I close the notebook, or put that piece of paper away. I don’t look at the poem, not at all, for at least a week.
During that period of time, the late 1980’s into the early 1990’s, I was a hardcore BMX freestyler, and went out into parking lots to ride my bike, almost every single night. The reason I did that was because it was fun, most of the time, and because I wanted to practice the tricks I knew, and I wanted to learn new tricks. While I wasn’t a great rider, I was a decent, middle of the national pack, amateur rider. BMX freestyle was my main creative outlet during those years. Writing poetry was this little side creative endeavor, that I thought of mostly as therapy. I was in my early 20’s, incredibly shy, pretty much socially retarded. I had more issues than the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble. Writing poetry, and not telling anyone about it, helped me to figure things out, to some degree, in my continuing drive to “get my shit together.”
BMX freestyle, particularly practicing flatland tricks, has a meditative aspect to it. I’d go out and try the same physical moves on my bike over and over, at times for an hour or more, focusing on one trick. Sometimes while riding, or other times, like the cliche’s of taking a shower or waking up in the middle of the night, a new idea would just seem to pop in my head. When I tried to remember those ideas later, they were usually gone. So that’s when I started carrying a pen with me, to “catch” these ideas on a scrap of paper, or even a piece of cardboard, I’d even write on my hand. I’d transfer the idea to my journal later, when I got back home.
I lost a bunch of poem ideas by trying to remember the basic idea that popped in my head, later on. Then I started to stop, and write the poem down, wherever I was. So that’s what started me coming up with rules for writing poems. As time went on, and ideas kept coming to me at totally random times, I added more rules. I’ll go deeper into these ideas in future chapters of The Poet.
Go back to Chapter 1 of The Poet
There are no paid links in this post
