Who do you write for?

Do you write for yourself or for readers?

Purely in terms of writing, there’s nothing wrong with either approach. When considering publishing the piece of writing you’ve been working on, there’s a big difference. Two things have prompted me to think about this question recently. Firstly writing thirty draft poems during April. Secondly a long comment made on one of my reviews.

To comply with NaPoWriMo’s target of 30 draft poems in 30 days, the focus has been solely on getting a draft written free of concerns about whether the result, after editing, would be publishable or not. The task now is a sifting through of these drafts and deciding which ones do offer a reader something and which are more personal and not worth trying to get published.

In the comment on my review, the writer explained what she was trying to achieve with her poems and wrote about what she was doing and why she’d chosen the approach she’d taken. What puzzled me was that I stopped reading her comment part-way through and had to go back and read it again to try and understand why I found it difficult to read.

It wasn’t the writing, the style or the vocabulary she used: it was the focus.

Writers talking about their own writing often do sound pretentious or precious. All artists do, simply because the finished piece has to stand on its own merit. To an audience it doesn’t matter if you dashed off a poem in ten minutes or spent months agonising about the comma in line three. What matters to them is whether the poem’s any good. Talking about how you wrote your poem is irrelevant and doesn’t act as a guide to whether it’s any good. The method might be interesting to other writer or to someone who wants to learn to write, but to a reader it’s meaningless. Some writers will happily talk about their methods, but most know that such a conversation isn’t going to add anything to the finished poem so they find it awkward.

This was why I had to read the comment on my review again. I’d switched off because it was all about the writer, what she’d tried to achieve and how she’d tried to achieve it. Not once did she mention the reader or give any indication that a reader might be involved in her work. I’d stopped reading because I’d felt excluded.

Once a piece of work is published, readers are definitely involved. Readers are individuals with their own emotional baggage, their own ideas and their own responses to what they are reading. If your poem mentions a swan, some will see a swan on a lake, some will see images from the ballet Swan Lake, some might think of Leda’s story, some might think of Proust and at least one will remember the time they were attacked and chased because they got too close to a nest. Whatever it was your swan was to represent, it needs you to communicate that so your reader is guided towards your intentions because if you don’t, the person remembering being attacked is not thinking about a swan’s grace and about to think your poem’s failed. It takes a writer’s skill to guide and communicate to a reader.

When I look through my NaPoWriMo drafts, I won’t just be looking for poems that are technically competent or that carry an important message, but for poems that can reach out and draw a reader in. They’ll be the ones I’ll be working on to bring up to a publishable standard. I know before I look that there are three that are only written for me. They will be edited, but they won’t be published. I’m the sole reader; they won’t appeal to a wider audience so I won’t seek to get them a wider audience.

That’s the difference. There’s nothing wrong with writing for yourself, but if you aren’t writing for readers, there’s little point in trying to publish that work. When seeking to get work published and reviewed, you need to ask who you’re writing for and whether your writing involves readers.

Most writers start by writing for themselves whether that’s the book they wanted to read or because a poem won’t leave them alone. But when the editing process begins, that’s when most writers start looking at markets and readers and begin looking at what they’ve written with a readership in mind.

By Emma Lee

Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”

This year the 11 February saw both the 50th anniversary of the publication of “The Bell Jar” and the 50th anniversary of the death of its author, Sylvia Plath. Whilst her death was undeniably tragic, I can’t see Sylvia Plath’s life as one of tragedy. In my review of the film “Sylvia” I argued that her life was not foreshadowed by her death. Even “Ariel”, the collection she was working on just before her death, contains moments of joy. The first poem, “Morning Song” ends, “Your handful of notes/ The clear vowels rise like balloons.”

I was introduced to Sylvia Plath’s work by a Ted Hughes poem, “You hated Spain”. School taught me that men wrote poems about war. Either women didn’t write poems or women’s poems weren’t worth studying. I didn’t believe either option. When I read “You hated Spain”, I wanted to find out more about this woman whose poems were yet to be written. I started with “Ariel” and worked backwards. Finally: proof that not only could a woman write poetry but also that she was worth studying.

I don’t believe you either have to be “pro Sylvia” or “pro Ted”, I enjoy poetry by both poets and don’t blame Ted Hughes for Sylvia Plath’s death. She’d left the manuscript for her “Ariel” poems carefully organised so the first poem started with the word “love” and the last ended on “Spring”.

Ted Hughes faced a difficult task. Unable to see into the future and predict if there would be enough demand for him to be able to persuade a publisher to publish any further posthumous books by his late, estranged wife, did he alter her manuscript to include her most recent poems or did he go with her original order and risk the most recent poems being left unpublished? With hindsight, it’s easy to say he should have left her manuscript alone. But now both versions are in print: Ted Hughes’s arrangement and Sylvia Plath’s original. Readers can make their own minds up.

In this 50th anniversary year, I’d strongly recommend readers do read the original Sylvia Plath. It’s what I’ll be doing.

By Emma Lee

Write a Sonnet

Go on: look out of your window and set the scene. Don’t worry about iambic pentameters yet, just write what you see: you can shape it later. Now pick a specific object, a bird, an animal, a car, and write the scene from their viewpoint. Use this as the basis for your volta, the turn that lies at the heart of the sonnet, and draw a conclusion. Now you’ve notes for your sonnet, shape it.

Decide on your rhyme scheme, look at your stress patterns, shape them into iambic pentameters and read it aloud. Does it scan? Can it be read without your tongue twisting? Look at the logic, does it make sense? Check the grammar and punctuation. Double-check the spelling.

You have completed a useful creative writing exercise, but do you have a poem?

Paul Lee once commented, “sound and syntax are every bit as important as sense. More so, I would say, otherwise how is poetry different from prose? I read a lot of poetry that is prose masquerading as poetry. It’s like throwing the potato out with the peelings. And I hear so few writers saying how much they enjoy writing. I can only remember Simon Armitage saying how much he loved writing, and he meant that word ‘loved’. He also said how much he hated being a writer. Usually I hear what a pain it is. Well, why bother then? Is it because you want to be a writer, rather than write?

“Can creativity, can this sense of joy, be taught? I’m not sure ‘taught’ is the right word. I think you can try to awaken it, and that it’s never too late. I know of poets who did not start until late into their fifties or sixties, and who were published. The oldest I know is into her nineties, and still writing.

“I didn’t start to get published until I’d re-united the two halves of my brain. That’s the other lesson for writers, I think. You have to learn to sweat, you have to learn the craft, poets just as much as other writers. There’s more to poetry than just the line. Otherwise, again, how is it different to prose? And craft can be taught.

“In this process, I learned that I am predominantly a poet who employs stress, rhythm, and rhyme. I like structure, I like regular stanzas. I’m concerned about the shape and appearance of the poem on the page. I’m decidedly on the side of form, and like writing villanelles, sonnets, triolets, pantoum and haiku. I’ve written a sestina, and won’t for a long time again. I’m currently playing around with the rondeau form. I admire poets who write in rhyming tercets, terza rima, but haven’t yet myself, simply because I’ve not yet written a poem that called for that form. BUT, I don’t force them. I let the poem dictate its own form. If it insists on writing itself as prose, I let it, so long as it’s poetic. I indulge in pure wordplay.”

Look at your sonnet again. It may technically be a sonnet with its fourteen lines, volta, iambic pentameters and rhymes. It was a useful exercise as the best way to understand the sonnet form is to write sonnets. Even poets who predominately use free verse benefit from understanding the foundations of a recognised form and developing an appreciation for the technical side of poetry.

But I doubt very much your sonnet (no matter how accomplished it is as a sonnet) is a poem. Chances are your sonnet was rather flat and observational. Your window-view is similar to a million other window-views so, unless you teased out that detail that makes your street scene so vividly memorable, it’s unlikely you have a poem.

A poem is not simply the sum of its parts. Adding rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration and/or other poetic devices to prose and subtracting padding, ornate descriptions, consciously poetic phrases won’t equal a poem. Underlying a poem is a desire to communicate, a need to say something. Without that, it’s just an exercise in technical skill.

By Emma Lee

About a Deer: Poetry and Plagiarism

Write a poem about deer.

OK, you don’t have to actually write a poem, but think about the processes involved in writing a poem on a specified topic. Brainstorm and scribble a few phrases about:

• A deer’s appearance, its most striking features and colouring
• Its habitat
• Other wildlife that share a deer’s habitat
• Personal memories of encountering deer or the management of deer herds
• Using the deer or its habitat as a metaphor

First thoughts tend to focus on the immediately obvious. For a deer’s appearance that’s the fur, the soft eyes, hard hooves and possibly antlers with a colour palette based around brown. Its habitat is a forest where it lives alongside typical British wildlife. Personal memories might involve a walk through a forest, walking in the grounds of a stately home, witnessing or participating in a hunt or a childhood memory of watching an adult’s reaction to the deer. Perhaps you’ve scribbled some remembered phrases from reading about deer in the past.

All of these initial thoughts now require further exploration. This might involve researching images and facts about deer, reading up on British countryside and wildlife. Or scouring poetry collections, anthologies and magazines for poems about deer for inspiration.

Perhaps your keep copies of poems you particularly like and type them up so you can refer to them easily or to try to deconstruct successful poems to work out what makes them successful. If you are in the habit of doing this, include the poet’s name so you (and others looking through your notebooks and computer files) know who the original poet is.

It is entirely probable that among your notes you’ve included a line or phrase from someone else’s work. Even if you can’t place its source, you’ll know it’s not yours. Poets who read poetry will both consciously and sub-consciously pick up imagery and phrasing that strikes them and find themselves borrowing someone else’s phrase in the process of drafting a poem until a new, more personal image or phrase is found which does a better job.

Writing out someone else’s poem to use as source text for inspiration is not plagiarism, providing the resulting poem is new and recognisably in the voice of the poet writing the new poem. Taking a source text, making a few changes such as altering the location, changing the gender of a person mentioned within and altering a couple of phrases so the new poem is still recognisably based on the source text is plagiarism.

Recently the organisers of the Hope Bourne Poetry Prize found the poem their judges had selected as the prize-winner was in fact a close copy of a poem by Helen Mort, “The Deer”, which had won the Café Writers Open Poetry Competition in 2009. Both original poem and copy can be read on Matt Merritt’s blog (scroll down to the comments section). The copyist has apologised, but only after “This is Cornwall” published the story.

With plagiarism, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. Having your poem stolen by someone else is not flattering. Saying so is akin to telling a burglary victim they should be flattered someone thought their house was worth breaking into or that their possessions must have been worth stealing. That more people have now read the original poem isn’t much comfort either unless those people start buying books and magazines featuring the poet.

If anything positive has come from this situation, it’s the resulting discussion and awareness raised about the issue of plagiarism, both what it is and the fact that no one should benefit from it.

By Emma Lee

Does Sentiment Make a Poem?

The Leicester Mercury published a poem, a very rare occurrence. The poem concerned was clearly heartfelt and of monumental importance to its author, Yvonne Clegg, in memory of her son Ashley.  She happened to show it to a police officer who asked if it could be used to use in schools as a warning. Mrs Clegg is aware that most children will ignore it, but thought if it encourages a few children to listen, it was worthwhile.

It is loaded with sentiment. However, sentiment alone does not make a good poem. No matter how heartfelt the subject, it still has to work as a poem.

As a reader who doesn’t know the family at all, but understands the tragic waste of a young life, I wanted a better feel for who Ashley was. In the poem he “enjoyed his young life going judo, Cubs. His life full of fun,/ had lots of friends and enjoyed the sun,” he grew up and “As time went on the girls would fall,/ for Ashley was now blond, blue-eyed and six foot tall./ He would be out clubbing with all his mates,/ having a good time on a few good dates.” His mother thought the world of him, but who was he? Did he give up judo and why? Which clubs did he go to? As they stand these are rather generic descriptions that don’t get to the heart of what made this man Ashley rather than one of his mates.

His mother’s bafflement at her son’s addiction and the isolation both she and he felt are captured. Readers don’t learn anymore about addiction itself: that’s beyond the scope of the poem.

The author’s chosen rhyming couplets but not all couplets rhyme and the rhythm is loose. It’s safe to say it won’t win any literary prizes.

Should it have been published? And should the police be using it?

I’m torn. Being able to share real-life experiences with children is a good thing, mainly because it not just another adult telling them not to do something. However, I wonder if Ashley wouldn’t have been better served by a good poem.

What are your thoughts?

By Emma Lee

Why isn’t fiction tackling relevant, contemporary themes?

Or where are all the poems about Iraq or Afghanistan? Or why aren’t novelists writing about the Eurozone crisis? Or why has there only been only play (so far) about last summer’s riots?

I’ve heard various variations on these themes frequently recently. The fact is, writers are tackling and writing about these themes and other contemporary issues but readers aren’t able to read them yet because:

• there’s a necessary time lag between writing and publication
• publishers and editors can’t predict the future
• the best writing doesn’t occur in either during the event or in its immediate aftermath
• fiction is not journalism.

Let’s look at each in turn:

Time Lag between Writing and Publication

It’s impossible to be a writer and critic simultaneously. It takes time to polish and hone writing to the best possible standard. There needs to be a separation between writing a poem and editing the poem (and don’t even think that a first draft might be good enough: it never is). Therefore rushing off a first draft to an editor or publisher is a good way of guaranteeing rejection. You wouldn’t dash out for a job interview in the clothes you wear to do DIY without researching the job you’re being interviewed for, so don’t be unprofessional in approaching editors.

Editors and publishers often feel instinctively when a submitted piece is right for publication, but still may like to take time to think it over and check they are making the right decision. Even if an editor or publisher does make an instant decision, they can’t make an instant publication.

Editors have to wait for the next available issue of a poetry magazine. Even a quarterly magazine still might involve a three month wait and that assumes your relevant, contemporary poem will fit with the next issue and not be held over until the issue afterwards.

It generally takes at least two years to publish a novel. Publishers schedule that far in advance so that they are not launching books within days of each other, that a marketing plan can be put in place, publicity and review copies are sent out in advance and that staff have a flow of work. Priority will go to authors who the publisher has previously worked with and who can produce books with a proven track record. A first time novelist will go to the back of the queue, even for a novel on a big contemporary theme.

Publishers and Editors can’t predict the future

No one likes to look stupid and where there is no predictable outcome, there is also a natural hesitancy about committing to publishing a book about a current event that might turn out to be mistaken about cause and/or effect.

The best writing doesn’t occur either during the event or in its immediate aftermath

Wilfred Owen did most of his writing at Craiglockhart. He may have jotted down notes or lines of poems whilst at war, but the actual writing was done when recuperating in a convalescence home where he had time, space to consider what he was writing and a trusted reader to spur him to write better. Keith Douglas edited his poems went back in England, not at El Alamein.

Writing that gets under the skin of an event, gets to know it, gets to explore it and gets to examine cause and effect, will not be written in the immediate aftermath. It takes time and emotional distance to produce a piece of good writing.

Fiction is not journalism

Writing that reports what happens, no matter how eloquently or beautifully, is not fiction. A poem that merely describes an event is not a poem but a description of an event. A story that records an event as it happened is not fiction but reportage.

Fiction is not just inventing characters or a narrator and putting them in the thick of a significant, newsworthy event. Fiction enables readers to empathise with characters, to explore and understand why events happened the way they did and allows readers to explore their own feeling about those events and further their understanding.

Research has shown that reading fiction can foster empathy, equipping the reader with skills to understand real people around them by relating to and understanding perspective of fictional characters. Studies have been made at Washington and Lee University into whether fiction can provide prosocial models and influence behaviour in the short term. Mere reporting of facts can’t do this.

People caught up in events don’t have the gift of hindsight or the ability to separate and analyse their emotional response. A writer may know that they will write about an event they are experiencing, but they won’t know how. It takes emotional distance and time to be able to think through and around an event and reactions to it.

There are poems about Iraq and Afghanistan, there are stories about the Eurozone crisis and stories about last summer’s riots, but it’s unlikely you’ll be reading them in the near future.

“The Light Forecast” Paul Lee (Original Plus) – poetry review

Paul Lee didn’t shy away from tough subjects and tackled them with a sensitivity and fitting gravitas,  allowing details to speak for themselves and giving space for readers to draw their own conclusions. For example in “The Incident Room, 3) Afterwards”

“Spilled chemicals will seep into the earth,
callers cease to visit with toys, cards and flowers

wind will scatter, rain turn to a mulch
the Council will pile into a skip and take away.

For the time being, a bedroom will stay at ten years old.
Scrapbooks will fill with cuttings, cupboards memorabilia.

A packed memorial service will follow a private burial.
Next year, they’ll be bouquets from friends and family:

thereafter, a single wreath laid on the same date
at a place the future will remember as somehow significant.”

It was inspired by the aftermath of a child’s murder and explores the way that, once the story fades from the news, most return to normal lives whilst parents still carry their child’s memories and slowly adjust to an absence they will never recover from and others will go through the ritualistic motions of laying an annual wreath even after forgetting exactly what the wreath is for. The alliterative use of “s” sounds in the final couplet creating a gentle, fading away sound to echo the sense. Other poems
tackle the treatment given to the mentally ill and how they focus on the diagnosis, not the person with the diagnosis, with the tongue-in-cheek cynicism such treatments deserve. Paul Lee can deftly handle satire.

“Rosa” is a pre-war Latvian seduced by the ideals of Hitler’s youth,

“She chose, like others, to retreat from the Red Army

into an ebbing Reich that had convinced her it could still win:
heartsick, she walked, unraped, the thousand miles back home.

Yes, Rosa, this is your farm. It’s dusk. There are lights in the windows.
Your people knew you were coming. Just listen to that dog.”

The stronger, more emphatic ending here echoes the small welcome offered by the dog and sounds a note of hope that Rosa will, in time, re-emerge, re-invented in her family home.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there’s a lighter touch in some poems, e.g. in “her green lap”:

“on the tarmac slab where hung the box on chains

dropped into which and launched
I laughed and strained to clutch the wary birds

and offer them the joy of my first knowing
of the first time of the world.”

It captures that early childhood memory with joy and without labouring the point or loading it with a significance that wasn’t there at the time. Or in a playful villanelle, that plays on the word Brummschädel (or Brummer) from the German for a type of lorry, which ends,

“he smears on his windscreen to a greyish slurry,
Brum brum he rumbles, regaining his poise.
Herr Brummell guns his Brummer – sorry, lorry,
no fly buzzing round his cab like worry.”

The title poem resulted from a typo from a weather programme and starts, “Patchy light in the West,/ more general in the South and East;/ some of it prolonged and heavy…” and ends

“We expect darkness at noon
in Northeast England andEast Scotland,
with comets, shooting starts, radiant angels
and fiery visitations to relieve the gloom.

Here ends the light forecast.”

It broadens out from being merely a play with a typo to something more wide ranging. This was Paul Lee’s main strength, his ability to take an idea for walk and put it through its intellectual paces, drawing on a wide reading and broad knowledge base.

Paul Lee died on 19 October 2011. His funeral was held on 4 November in Leicester. It would impossible to celebrate his life without including at least one of his own poems and below is the one that was read (not included in “The Light Forecast”):

The Book Fair

for Emma

smelt of mould, foxed paper, wet Barbours,
a melange of musts that kept me near sneezing,
threatening to shatter the reverent susurrus
of shuffling browsers, the mutters and whispers,
the rustle of pages being caressed apart.

I dithered over Decline and Fall, a Life of Yeats,
Five Centuries of Ballads and Broadsheets,
avoiding the sellers’ eyes, but decided no,
remembering your shelves of the second-,
third- and fourth-hand, my nose wrinkling in reflex.

What was best was walking there and back,
how you turned to smile up at me
from under your fake fur hat,
the Cossack calpac, sugared by the sleet
so that it seemed like a black pastille.

You made me feel like some illiterate uhlan, in love
with the daughter of the town academy’s librarian.
You were taking me to see your father’s tower,
its stock of thesauri, Psalters and incunabula
as vast and disciplined as the Emperor’s Horse.

Paul Lee (1952 – 2011).

“The Light Forecast” is available from Original Plus.

Why Blog Post Titles make Lousy Poem Titles

When looking for a non fiction book or article, clear, descriptive titles that reassure people (and search engines) they’ve found the right place will help get the book or article read. However, descriptive,  explanatory titles don’t work for fiction. Fiction titles need to grab the reader and novelists know the importance of that opening paragraph.

With poems, the title is of utmost importance. Not only can it make an editor snowed under with submissions stop and read your poem but it can draw a reader in. Most poems are published in an anthology format: either in a magazine or book or listed on a search engine results page if someone is searching for  poems on X. Someone scanning down a list of titles or skimming through a pile of poems isn’t going to stop and read “untitled”. After all if you can’t be bothered to title your poem, why would anyone read it?

What makes a good title? It’s easier to give examples rather than checklists. There’s no magic formula (nor should there be) as the title is dependent on the poem.

What’s the poem about, specifically? A title that encourages a reader to ask questions can compel the reader to read on and find out the answers. Eg “The Phone Call” won’t encourage readers. It’s too commonplace and doesn’t prompt the “why?” question. If you give your poem a commonplace title, you signal to potential readers that the poem itself is probably commonplace and ordinary.

What specific details can be added to the title to encourage questions? Time, place, type of phone, person?

“Phone Call at 3am” It’s an unusual time to make/take a call so readers might be asking “why then?” Night calls generally contain important family news or are made by insomniacs. “Phone Call at 11am” becomes more commonplace and less intriguing.

“Phone Call from Ecuador at 3 am” only works if readers expect the poet or poem’s narrator to be based somewhere not in Ecuador and if the readership are likely to see Ecuador as someone exotic or unlikely. The location has to be reasonably well-known – no one’s going to consult an atlas or search engine to find out where Lushanta is if they don’t already know and readers don’t like to feel stupid. It needn’t be a specific location either, “Phone Call from the Waste Land”, “Phone Call from the Bar at the End of the World” might intrigue.

Here, the time doesn’t add any intrigue at all because it’s not clear whether it’s 3 am for the call recipient or for the person making the call so it loses significance. Telephone calls from points of arrival or departure such as airports or train stations such as “Telephone Call from Ecuador Airport at 3 am” raises questions about whether someone’s arriving or leaving and why.

“The Phone in the Call Box Rang” creates an unexpected scenario – will the poem’s narrator answer the phone, who’s calling, why? Would have made a better title for a certain Hollywood film too, but also might put the film’s plot in the mind of potential readers and risks their disappointment if the poem doesn’t live up to its title.

“The Red Phone Rang” leads to the question “why is it red?” or a sense of urgency, a red phone could represent a hotline. Similarly unexpected people using a type of phone creates curiosity, eg “The Android-freak called on an iPhone”, “An Acid Attack Victim phones on Skype.”

How about the person making or receiving the call? “Phone Call from My Ex-Lover at 3am from Ecuador” raises several “why?” questions.

What none of these suggestions do is come at the poem’s subject obliquely. It’s possible to be too clever. Any poem with “phone call” in the title will set up the reasonable expectation that a phone call will feature somewhere in the poem and frustrating a reader’s expectations will discourage them from reading anymore of your poems.

Whereas a blog post title needs to be descriptive and predictable, such qualities in a poem’s title will kill it.

You are Not Wordsworth

Being able to quote “I wondered lonely as a cloud” and wanting to be a poet, doesn’t make you a poet. Wordsworth wrote some wonderful poems and time has filtered out the also-rans, leaving an impressive  body of work, but that does not make him a suitable mentor for someone writing now.

Yet, when judging poetry competitions, I often find myself weeding out the poems that clearly used Wordsworth as a mentor or template for what makes a good poem. These entries are generally on love or nature use archaisms, and invariably are arranged in four line stanzas with clunking end of line rhymes on lines two and four.

What these entrants have failed to appreciate is that we are now in the twenty-first century and writing as if the twentieth century had never happened won’t win prizes or get published. There are good reasons for this:-

The world is now a global village

Wordsworth walked around the Lake District. Travelling poets usually only got as far as Europe. Today not only have poets travelled further but films and the internet means poetry readers are much more aware of what far-flung places look like, sound like, the tastes of the local food and local customs. Therefore, less description is required. More attention needs to be paid to ensuring a poem is not a travelogue or slice of botany.

Drop the Didact

Poetry readers get their reading fix from a variety of sources and have grown up watching films, TV, YouTube clips so expect to be shown a story and expect a poem to allow them space to draw their own  conclusions. Poems that tell the reader what to think or preach to the converted (eg by telling us victims are innocent, criminals are bad and painting the world as black and white) will turn readers off.

It’s harder to shock or surprise readers

Even bookshops stock volumes of anthologies of love poems and why should readers pick up your nature poems instead of John Clare’s? Can you find an original angle or contemporary twist on either subject?

People and Language Evolve

Literate women don’t bustle about in voluminous petticoats learning how to run a house and make an advantageous marriage anymore. Modern poetry readers want poems that reflect their own lives and speak in their language. Archaisms create a barrier between poem and reader and if the effort required to read isn’t rewarded by the poem, readers will move on.

Respond to what readers want

Nineteenth century audiences have passed on. You need to write for today’s audience if you want your poetry to be read and today’s poetry readers want poetry that tackles contemporary subjects and concerns.

If I want to read Wordsworth, I’ll read Wordsworth himself, not a pale imitation. When I’m judging a competition I’m not going to award a prize to a poem not written for the twenty-first century.

Why Poetry Headlines Do Not Translate into Poet’s Earnings

Good to see poetry in the headlines again: Derek Walcott was awarded this year’s T S Eliot Prize and for the second year running the overall Costa Book Award went to poetry, this year to Jo Shapcott’s “Of Mutability” and last year to Christopher Reid.  Whilst Derek Walcott is recognised in his native St Lucia in street names and the national Nobel Day in recognition of his being awarded the Nobel Prize, both Jo Shapcott and Christopher Reid can walk British streets without the fear of being recognised.

Despite poetry’s apparent popularity, it doesn’t sell.  Even a prize-winning poetry collection will still sell in the region of 1% of the sales of a comparable, literary novel. 

Poets have to do the performance circuit, take up teaching poetry or become writers in residence if they want to earn money from poetry.  Poets won’t make money from selling books.

Why has poetry become so devalued?

Poetry in School

Most people are introduced to poetry in school, where generally a poem is presented as an esoteric piece of work.  A poem becomes seen as something to be worked out often interpreted by pupils as something only the academically inclined can do so poetry becomes too hard to read and thus irrelevant.  Poetry then is boring and difficult.  It’s rare a teacher will simply read a poem out loud so pupils can appreciate the rhythm and sound patterns and so understand that you don’t have to work out a poem to like it.

Occasional Poetry

Poetry is something read at weddings and funerals or turned to at times of strong emotions whether that be love or distress.  It’s not read daily like a novel or newspaper. 

Whilst initiatives such as Poems in the Underground go some way to countering this, they tend to be in specific localities or done as part of a literature festival.  So overall poetry is seen as something for special occasions.

Defining Poetry

Unlike a novel or an article, poetry is harder to define.  It’s like being in love, you know when you are, but trying to define love or how you know is very difficult.  Poetry is more than “not prose”, it incorporates rhythm, sound patterns, stress patterns, may (or may not) rhyme.  If prose is walking, poetry is dance.  Poetry takes its definition from what it is not rather than what it is.  The lack of clear, independent definition hinders attempts to describe it or share what it is that makes poetry special.

“It has to Rhyme”

It doesn’t.  Alongside a solid library of rhyming poetry sit Shakespeare’s blank verse and Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.  But it’s easier to say “poetry rhymes, prose doesn’t” than explain that each poem has its own internal structure that may be based around sense, rhythm, syllabics, internal rhyme, para- or part-rhyme or take a traditional form such as a sonnet or sestina. 

Poetry can knock people out of their comfort zones.  It can also look like chopped up prose.  But if a singer sang an instruction manual or a musician composed a piece that involved playing household items, no one would say “that’s not a song” or “that’s not music” so why is poetry not poetry?

Poetry is a Vocation

Like being a parent: utterly thankless, incredibly intense yet very rewarding, unless you actually want to get paid for it.  However, I chose to be a parent.  I didn’t choose to be a poet and surely the world’s moved on from expecting artists to starve in a garret?

It’s true that a prize-winning poetry collection only selling a fraction of the sales a literary novel can command doesn’t reflect on the artistic value of the poetry collection, but it also means the poet isn’t earning to pay bills or put food on the table.

Wannabe Poets Do Not Read Poetry

Real poets read poetry because they know that’s the main way of learning how to write it. 

Wannabe poets thrust their work at anyone they think will read it.  They show no interest in actually reading poetry because they are only interested in promoting their own work.  Ironically they are harming their own work.  Poetry publishers need readers to buy their publications and poetry magazines need subscribers.  By not buying poetry books and not subscribing to poetry magazines, wannabe poets are killing the markets for their work.

Reversing the trend won’t be easy and joining the teach, perform and do residencies circuit won’t be for every poet.  But as long as the status quo continues, poets will continue to struggle to earn anything from writing.