The why of studying poetry

So I had day one of the poetry course today. Afterwards I went to the Finders Keepers design markets, and now I want to give up my day job and just be all metaphorical and creative. The course was very good. Judith Beveridge, who is head of the school of poetry at Sydney University, taught us well about such things as imagery and lineation. Then the workshopping was all very encouraging but very instructive as well.

She also reiterated that poetry is a hard art form, that it’s difficult and has a high failure rate. Scary – but I think a lot of people believe that poetry should happen by magic, and doesn’t require earnest investment from those with the gift, which is simply not true. Granted there are those who will be poets and those who will never be, irrespective of training and effort, as there are those who will excel in pole vault and those who never will. But there is a skill and technique to poetry worth learning, which is precisely why I went to the course.

I came home to find this somewhat surprising quote from Christian Bok on the Poetry.org facebook page. You can read it in full here on facebook (the previous paragraph is amusing):

The more delicate components of the work pay attention to craft. I’m probably very technically oriented and it seems to me that among the poets that I know, many are very lazy and very dumb. I always joke with my students that poetry couldn’t possibly be as hard as they think it is, because if it were as hard as they thought it was, poets wouldn’t do it. Really, they’re the laziest, stupidest people I know? They became poets in part because they were demoted to that job, right? You should never tell your students to write what they know because, of course, they know nothing: they’re poets! If they knew something, they’d be in that discipline actually doing it right?: they’d be in history or physics or math or business or whatever it is where they could excel. I find this very distressing that the challenge of being a poet is in effect to showcase something wondrous or uncanny, if not sublime, about the use of language itself - that we tend to think that because we’re conditioned to use language every day as part of a social contract, we should all be incipient poets, when in fact people have actually dedicated years or decades of their lives to this kind of practice in order to become adept at it. And I think that craft and technique are part of that. If poetry weren’t informed by models of craft then nobody would need take a creative writing course. I joke with my students again that if it was simply a matter of saying, “You known you’ve written a good poem just because; you’ll know it’s a good poem when it happens.” To me, that’s tantamount to telling your students that “You should just use the force, Luke” in order to write a poem. I don’t think it’s very helpful. But to be able to say “Here’s a series of rules of thumb that always work under all circumstances and if you adopt them slavishly, blindly, you can always be assured of writing something, producing something of merit.” It’s important that students are at least reassured that there are some technical aptitudes that they can adopt.

Anyhoo. Practice, practice, practice. But I came home and for some reason decided to make the biggest mess ever rearranging my room. I like it though. It's more open, and now when I sit at the desk I can look out the window at those plants I lugged here from my moving friends and beyond.