Everyone Can Write Good Poetry

It just takes three steps. Praise. Practice. Production.

Oh yeah, and editing. But that one doesn’t start with the letter P. Still, it is an important fourth step.

I tested this idea at Laity Lodge last weekend. Mark D. Roberts was talking about the Psalms—the poetry of the Bible—so it is only natural that we would have a workshop to praise God through poetry. And I was lucky enough to lead it!

Some people like titles, and my workshop was titled “Light and Mirrors.” It’s a phrase that comes from C. S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce. (Great book, terrible title.) One of the characters in that book describes God’s glory in heaven and he says,

“The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light’s the thing.”

When we write poetry—anything really—we are like a mirror. God is the light, and he shines through our specific experiences. When we capture those experiences in our words and sentences, we glorify him. Our relationship with God is like light and mirrors, but the light is the thing.

And if you are like a lot of the people who come to our retreats at Laity, you might be thinking, “I can’t write poetry!” But you are wrong. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (paragraph 26), William Wordsworth defines poetry as “Emotion recollected in tranquility.” (Certainly, we have enough tranquility around Laity Lodge for anyone!)

In the regular world, like the buzzing suburbs that Al Hsu always write about, it’s a little bit harder to find tranquility. But don’t let that be an excuse. Slow down. Look around. Find it. Carve out a sacred place, a holy place. Then all you have to do is bring some recollections.

Everyone can write poetry. And with a little bit of praise and practice, everyone can produce meaningful poetry. Really. It’s just a matter of having fun with words. No one says this better than Billy Collins. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” he tries to make poetry fun again.

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

That’s really the purpose of this blog. I just want to help people turn the light switch on for poetry—or writing of any kind. Communication and language are the food of relationships. And relationships are worth some attention.

At the workshop, we spent the first five minutes in a pep talk. Then we hit the page with a no fail writing activity to ease everyone’s anxiety. For practice, we read some good models and talked about specific things they did well. Finally, we got to work on some poems.

And of course, I couldn’t resist helping everyone in the group edit their poems! Poets like forget the second part of Wordsworth’s definition:

…the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced.

He’s talking about editing his poetry, folks. Every good writer edits. This includes novelists, biographers, journalists, poets, and, yes, even bloggers. Good bloggers edit.