Write What You Know

“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence

is enough for anyone.”

–John Ciardi

“Write what you know,” the saying goes. It was first said by famous literary editor Maxwell Perkins, and it’s now just about the most quoted line in creative writing, second only to “Show, don’t tell” perhaps. For beginning writers, there can be no better advice. Write about what you know. If you haven’t been to Saudi Arabia, haven’t participated in a flight to Mars, haven’t eaten escargot on a luxury yacht off the coast of Madagascar, it’s a bit hard to write a convincing story about these topics. It can be done, of course. Science fiction writers have certainly explored the flight-to-Mars plot with great realism. But, by in large, the writer needs to gain as much experience as possible before taking on a topic.  That’s why Hemingway went to World War I and the Spanish Civil War, hunted big game in Africa, and went deep-sea fishing off the coast of Cuba. To gain experience.

For you as a new writer,  too often writing about your limited life experiences can lead to a slew of cliches, rather than meaningful, profound and original poems. Consider the following, a poem anonymously submitted to a school literary magazine, signed only, “A very sad person.”

My heart is beating;
A constant beating,
No one hears it,
Should it?
It keeps me going;
Keeps me moving;
No one knows it,
Should it?

I want it to stop,
The constant “pop”;
I hear it!
It drives me crazy;
It all seems hazy;
All is white;
There is no shape, size or height;
The good feelings are out of reach;
Should I listen to what they preach?

My heart is still beating;
I yearn for it to stop;
I hate that never-ending “pop”;
It keeps me here;
Suspends me in this place of pain;
I was put here in vain.
All that was good is now bad;
Everything is gone, all that I had.

She said, “I like someone else”;
All turned to ice;
The “pop” stopped, skipped;
It re-started, “pipped”;
Why?  It had it right the first time,
To end that annoying chime,
The pain rips through it now, magnifying it;
I can’t take all of this shit;
The pain is pulling, pulling me down;
It will pull until I hit the ground;
It pulls, tortures, strikes at me;
Yet, I still can see. . . ?

He left, she left, how many more?
None, Death is fore.

Signed–A very sad person.

 

Let’s be clear from the start. Our purpose here is not to make fun of or to put down what is obviously a sincere statement from the heart, but which is, at the same time, a very poor poetic achievement. In fact, everyone has thoughts similar to those of this author. That’s what makes them clichés when they are expressed in the same manner as everyone else uses. But it is certainly not the feelings this young man has that are ridiculous. Nor is the manner in which he expresses himself the primary problem. There is nothing wrong–we repeat, nothing–with expressing your feelings of loss, depression, anxiety or whatever.

The problem is that our author has chosen to vent his frustrations in a literary genre that is entirely foreign to him–that of poetry. He has a vague notion that a poem is about powerful feelings–in his mind usually sad feelings–and so he writes what he believes is a poem whose purpose is to reveal himself to others. But is this really the purpose? Notice that the poem is anonymously written. The poet may be: 1) fearful of letting his pals know that he actually wrote a poem; 2) fearful of letting others know he actually has these feelings; or 3) so unsure of his poetic skills that he doesn’t wish to reveal himself as the poet.  Whatever the case, this anonymity suggests that a journal or diary would have better served his need for catharsis, the need to get it all out of his system.

It would not be a wild guess to assume that the poet behind “My Heart is Beating” has read very few poems himself. Thus he assumes that poems have not titles (”My Heart is Beating” is our title, taken, obviously, from line one), that poems must rhyme, and that “Death” or at least some depressing subject, must be in every poem.

All of this may confuse you. “What if I have strong feelings?” you ask. “Can’t I record them in a poem?”  The answer to this is “Yes, of course,” but with reservations. The poet William Wordsworth once described all good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility.”  The second part of this quotation makes the important point that while we may wish to spew out our emotional distress like a volcano, truly good poetry usually occurs only when we can control  these feelings well enough to craft a poem. With exceptions, most great painters don’t spew out a piece of art, nor sculptors spew out a sculpture, nor musicians spew out a musical composition.

O.K., O.K., we’ll take one baby step back from this stance. For some, great artwork is “of the moment.”  John Keats said that poetry must come as easily as leaves from a tree or not at all. Then he went and proved it by ruining one of his better poems, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”  (”The Lovely Lady Without Pity”) by revising it!  But Keats, who lived in the early 19th century, was a bona fide genius. He wrote all of his greatest poems by the time he was twenty-five (he had to; he died that year). Fine for him to say poetry must come easily. For the rest of us, well, we don’t know about you, but we know we’re not poetic geniuses. In fact, if you are a genuine, bona fide, one-hundred per-cent, without-a-doubt poetic genius, you have our permission to stop reading right now. In fact, what are you bothering with us for in the first place?  Go write a poem.

For the remaining 99.9 per cent of us, however, poetry is craft. We aren’t all born LeBron James or Picasso. That doesn’t mean we can’t try our best to be better ballplayers or painters.

Here, for example, is a poem that probably came easily.  It’s clever at times, uses some reasonable poetic techniques, and probably strikes a chord with many students. But it could likely have been much, much better.

Today and the Like

Today is like any other day;
Twenty four hours of boredom.
Eight hours of school.
Eight hours of sleep.
Four hours for work.
Four hours for myself.
I am tired.

Today, like any other day,
Will have many problems.
Some will involve friends,
Others will involve working.
Many will involve relationships.
Few might involve someone else.
But mostly just myself.

Today is like yesterday,
And that, the day before,
I’ve got a zit on my nose.
I’ve got a lot of debts to pay.
I might become friends with someone I knew.
I couldn’t study for a test.
Do I worry too much?

Tomorrow is another day,
But probably like this one.
Relations might work out.
Material possessions will fluctuate.
Nothing’s exactly my problem anymore,
But they’ll always find me out.
I worry too much.

Today is but an awful day,
Filled with my personal problems.
I’ve got my own tensions.
I’ve got my distinctive stress,
And I’m never far from pressure.
I know I can cope, all right.
It’s just that it’s hard to do today.

“Today,” which was published anonymously in a student literary magazine, has more redeeming value than “My Heart is Beating.” First off, it is clever. It makes good use of parallelism and repetition-and-variation in the “Today is . . .” sequence.  The poem attempts to be a generic look at “everystudent’s” day, but it is from this generic quality that the limitations of “Today and the Like” arise. The poem has but one clear, specific image, the zit. Otherwise, every line violates that cardinal rule of rule of writing, “Show, don’t tell.” The “Today” poet has made his poem general enough so that we all can understand what he is going through every day of his school life. But we get no real feeling for the personal as an individual.  And poems, however universal their appeal, always begin with an individual.  We, as readers, are people.  We are interested in other people, real, breathing, eating and acting individuals. You can make a point by presenting the reader with a cardboard figure, but it is in the fleshing out of that figure that the reader really starts to become interested.

We are told, for example, that our persona has problems, relationships, friends, and material possessions. But we get a sense of none of these things. What problems? Will his car battery not turn over on a 15-degree morning? Are his parents divorcing? Is he failing math? Specifics usually heighten interest in any narration. Generalities usually leave us uninterested.  Compare the next poem, written for a senior creative writing class:

Fast Times

Three minutes, before
the bus comes.  No time
to waste.  Pick up the paper,
scan the brief
summaries, the
eye-catching graphics, the
colorful layout, the
interesting graphs.
What is the weather going
to be like, today?
I wonder if there will be a nuclear
war, soon?
It doesn’t say.

Damn! Quarter of a
minute late!  And I didn’t
even get to see the
Sports section.

Though we can understand why some readers may prefer  “Today and the Like,” “Fast Times” moves us just a notch, perhaps, up the evolutionary scale of poetic achievement, especially if “show, don’t tell” is to be our watchwords. There are some fairly precise images here, so much so that we know the name of the paper the author is referring to, USA Today, without any specific mention of the name. There is a nice joke implicit here, too, in that the author is so rushed by the morning rat race that he doesn’t even have time for the fast news (on the order of fast food) of Gannet’s so-called “McPaper.” In this regard, “Fast Times” uses irony well. But there are weaknesses, of course. The idea itself is not entirely original, nor is the execution. While certain lines, “a quarter of a minute late,” for example, suggest well the morning rush, the poet might have employed more images of speed, or used sound techniques, alliteration and assonance and onomatopoeia, perhaps, to suggest aurally what he has expressed on the paper. Verbs, especially “comes” in line two, and “see” in the  penultimate (second to last) line might be stronger. All in all, “Fast Times” is a good effort, probably a C+ or B- in most teachers’ grade books. But the poem might have been improved with a few revisions, for like the subject matter within, “Fast Times” seems to have been dashed off.

Let’s move yet another step up the scale of student poetry.   Here’s the “hand poem” referred to at the end of chapter 1.  “An Overly Aggressive Football Player Punched Me And Now I Have to See a Doctor” treats that age old high school subject, bullying, and treats it with creativity and cleverness:

An Overly Aggressive Football Player Punched Me And Now I Have to See a Doctor

by Steve Paul

Man’s first tool.
My hands shout out like a baby without milk,
waving “stop.”
Your fingers are blabbering imbeciles clenched in a fist.
Your knuckles, ample and nosy, waste away for their real
use by crushing my jaw.
The way the nails of your man-fingers scrape
at my eyes,
excites me,
For now my features are cut and broken as you
stand triumphant.
You overly masculine jerk I’m bleeding.

The overly long title is one indicator of this originality. Here, it works. Notice also the line “Your fingers are blabbering imbeciles . . . .”  That’s just plain good. You certainly don’t see that analogy all the time, the way our first poem gave us the tepid line “I was put here in vain” or the second used the equally vacuous “Today is like any other day.”  Note also the use of bizarre irony in the line that begins, “The way the nails of your man-fingers . . . .”  The perpetrator of the violence, the macho man, probably thinks he’s cool because he can hit someone. This does not excite the victim, but he says it does, as if a person is supposed to be impressed by a mindless strongman. This is sarcasm, if said aloud to the bully and irony when used in a poem. Used ironically, “man-fingers,” contrasts with “baby without milk.” It undercuts the machismo, as if this tough guy picks on children, even infants. Nice touch. Even the absence of punctuation in the last line, poetic license, you might call it, is darn good. Forceful. Immediate. Different.

The next poem, “The Supermarket,” sort of has the feel of a poem that has been dashed off, but if so, it is the work of a very talented dasher.  he verb “walk” in line three is a clue that the poem could have found some stronger language, but it is nevertheless filled with vivid images and tight writing that suggests a more crafted effort than any of the previous works.  Notice the opening image, for example, which is immediately more vivid and powerful and original than anything in the first three poems:

The Supermarket

by Josh Okrent

 If I could lift up my legs
and stuff them inside my ears
and walk around inside my head for a little while,
what would I find?
Great marbled pillars
And ornate walls
and statues of statesmen?
Swirling reds and blues and yellows
dripping onto a mirrored floor?
A playground with
swings and slides
and a big hopscotch drawn
with chalk?
A rock Garden?
A carnival?
An office building?
Probably not.
I think I would find a supermarket
with rows of shelves filled
with egg cartons and canned chili and
rye bread.
Bulk food pipe dreams and paperback novel insecurities.
And everything on easy access shelves
with low, low prices.
Even the frozen peas.

 

We’re not sure exactly what the poet means by frozen peas, but then again, it’s probably not necessary to know. Suffice it to say that they add one more vivid image to our persona’s supermarket, one more specific example of the variety and abundance that the poet is using to support his theme.

Allow us to comment for a moment on the importance of using precise images in poetry. Our catch-phrase for this technique, one which is vital to almost all good writing, is “Write with specifics.” When you include an automobile in your piece, don’t say “car” unless you’ve got a good reason for doing so.  There is a huge difference between a white Ford Bronco and a pink Cadillac, between a sporty little Mazda Miata about the size of a vacuum cleaner and a lumbering Lincoln Navigator. In “The Supermarket” Okrent doesn’t tell us about “foods,”  he shows us “egg cartons” and “canned chili” and not just “peas,” but “frozen” ones.  He writes with specifics.

“The Supermarket,” composed in a high school creative writing class, is a nice piece of work.  But it’s time to move into the high rent district. You’ll notice that the professionals who wrote the two poems that appear on the following two pages are both far removed from high school. Dave Smith and Albert Goldbarth, two highly recognized American poets, have had a lot of time to think about what the high school experience meant and still means to them.

We don’t expect you to write as well as either Smith or Goldbarth. Not many people can, that’s why they’re so highly thought of as poets.  But we can learn some excellent lessons in writing from studying their work.  Here are three in particular:

            1)  As your read, notice how both these guys are reminiscing, looking back at their past, yet notice the feeling of immediacy they create by using vivid, concrete imagery that becomes metaphorical (the desks in Smith’s poem, the firetruck in Goldbarth’s).

An English professor at  SUNY Binghamton, John Hagopian, always says that all imaginative literature (prose and poetry) absolutely depends on the use of metaphor, or figurative language.  Both “Desks” and “The World of Expectations” must imply meanings beyond the literal significance of these two objects for their poems to take off.   The reader’s task is to infer those deeper meanings.

            2)  Look for what we might label “surprise.” That is, language so vivid, so colorful, so fresh, that you as reader are forced to take notice, to marvel, to open your mouth in an expression of surprise, even to say “wow, that’s amazing,” as if it’s fourth of July fireworks you’re viewing instead of a poem on a page.  As we have previously quoted Emily Dickinson saying, “If I feel as if the top of my head has been blown off, now that’s poetry.”

            3) You should, of course, always read a poem aloud, to hear its sounds. You wouldn’t listen to a Spotify with the volume off, now would you?  More than one poet has characterized poetry as “voice music” or “music for the human voice.” Listen as Smith artfully employs full and off-rhyme in each quatrain, or Goldbarth creates melodies out of oddly vivid phrasings such as “thick resilient straps.” These guys are good!

So now, read both poems, aloud, more than once.  Don’t be afraid, it’s only poetry; it won’t hurt you.   As W.H. Auden once said in another context, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” But open yourself to these poems.

Resist the urge to skim read them or to glance at each perfunctorily before going off to the refrigerator for a cola or turning on the boob tube.  Resist the (probably) overwhelming urge to resist these poems.  C’mon, go for it!

Desks

by Dave Smith

Piled on a loading dock where I walked,

student desks battered, staggered

by the dozens, as if all our talk

of knowledge was over,

as if there’d be no more thin blondes

with pigtails, no math, no art,

no birds to stare at.  Surplus now, those moulds

we tried to sleep in, always hard

so it wouldn’t be pleasant and we’d fall

awake in time for the one question

with no answer.  Quiet as a study hall,

this big place, this final destination,

oblivious to whatever the weather is,

hearing the creak of the wind’s weight.

The desks are leg-naked, empty, as if

we might yet come, breathless, late.

And all that time I thought of the flames

I hadn’t guessed, of a blonde

I had loved for years, how the names

carved one into another would

all scar out the same, blunt, hard, in blue

searing, like love’s first pain.

I stood there like a child, scared, new,

bird-eyed, not knowing why I came.

The World of Expectations

by Albert Goldbarth

What starts with F and ends with U-C-K? starts

another stupid high school joke.  We also

snapped the thick resilient straps of Maria

Alfonso’s bra.  I don’t know what we expected.

Annoyance, perhaps–though a kind of annoyance

that opened the way for attention–then maybe

intimacy, though we wouldn’t have phrased it that way.

We called it F-ing.  An alarm goes off,

the expectations are serial and easy: the clumsy

effecting of fire-drill practice, arrival of miles of hose.

And maybe Dennis or Leo or I would get to stand

near Maria, and maybe she’d even bend in her

provocative way that showed the first shadowy

rampway into her cleavage.  when I finally did get

effed, of course, it had nothing to do with the world

of expectations we mapped round and flat

where the condom ate wallet for years.  Now I hear

Leo’s divorced; drunk enough, it’s as if a large hand

crumples him like a Coors’ can.  the point is, even

Dennis’s happiness, what kids mean and a sexual

axis, never struck our daydreams.  The point is, not

even sex, necessarily–what did they see

in Station 19 when the bell went crazy?  Flames

like cartoon devils?  Their heroics, axe and ladder,

tested successfully?  Glory? Pain?  Some calls to glory

and pain are real, of course.  But back then

we pulled levers for hijinks, for stupid jokes.  And it came

long, red and clamorous.  Firetruck.

In the aftermath of reading these two school poems, let’s look first at the surprising language.  Did you identify any of the “fireworks” phrases?  In “Desks,” “fall awake,” “leg-naked” and “quiet as a study hall ” all qualify.  Notice expectation and surprise in operation in the phrase “fall awake.”   We expect, of course, “fall asleep.”  One surefire way to write better poems is to think of the usual word or phrase and then do something odd or clever with it.  That’s what the joke in Goldbarth’s poem is, after all.  Expectation and surprise.   Goldbarth also gives us fireworks.  “Crumpled him like a Coors can” is a great line and  “shadowy rampway into her cleavage” is equally  humorous and dehumanizing.

Then there’s the sounds:  “Wind’s weight” and the intricate internal/external rhyme combined with alliteration of the following sequence:

. . . how the names

carved one into another would

all scar out the same, blunt, hard, in blue

searing, like love’s first pain.

“Desks” gets much of its musical quality from the abab rhyme scheme, whether Smith fulfills it with exact or off-rhyme.  But “The World of Expectations” is free verse, and so Goldbarth needs even more alliteration,  consonance, assonance, etc. to make it flow.  Such phrases are everywhere:  “arrival of miles,” “crumpled like a Coors can,” “effecting of fire drill practice.”  You could go on and on charting them.

Finally, though, it all comes down to what these poems are saying, what they are about.  Some trendy postmodernist don’t like to admit that literature is about anything, that it’s only about itself, about words on a page or actions in time and space, but both of these poems do give us a message of sorts.

“Desks” is about knowledge.  The word itself is mentioned twice in the poem and alluded to several other times: “question with no answer.”   It is also about then and  now, what those desks represented when the persona was a student and how they finally became worthless piles of junk ready for the incinerator.  The narrator has obviously returned to his old high school for something, but after viewing the heaped-up desks that educational authorities once used to help to “mould” him and his peers, he’s not sure why he came.  This time, or ever?  What is education?  What is knowledge?  Why do we have this institution called school in the first place?  Smith is asking some of the big societal questions here.  It’s as if he has fallen awake at this particular moment to realize that, just as when the teacher called on him in high school,  he still doesn’t always have the answers.

Now, how about the implicit meanings in “The World of Expectations?”  Well, we know from the title that it is about how  high school kids view the world in comparison to the way a grown-up, former high school kid views it.   What is this comparison?  How does Goldbarth’s persona feel about high school hijinks and the world that lies waiting down the road?  See if you can come up with some answers to these questions, and, ultimately, arrive at the THEME of “The World of Expectations.”  You might have thought we were going to do that for you here, as we did with “Desks.”  But you were wrong.  Don’t expect too much!  Good mentors only show  their pupils so much, then set them on their own.   You need to learn to read actively!

There you have it.  A tour of high school poems from the ridiculous to the sublime.  If you’re not too overwhelmed, or maybe another time when your eyes are more rested, read each of these poems again, one after another.  Identify the weaknesses and strengths.  Understand why we have ranked them from weakest to strongest, and, if you think we are wrong about this order, come up with some concrete reasons as to why.

Now it’s your turn.  On the next page is your major poetry assignment for this course of study.