The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century

Rishi Dastidar

The Craft is an indispensable guide to both the 'how' and 'why' of poetic craft in the 21st century, and essential writing-desk companion for poets at all stages.

The book covers practical techniques – the nuts of bolts of putting poems together, mastering poetic forms such as sonnets, sestinas, prose poems and golden shovels, how to choose titles for your poems and the art of long sequences. It also explores the idea of 'craft' itself - knowing how pentameters dance is important, but by no way is it the only dimension of 'craft' that the poet starting out today has to consider. What about sound and the skills involved in performing your work? What about truth and fabrication, and the ethics of using real life in your work? What about the politics of the word 'craft' itself?

With essays on poetry from Moniza Alvi, Dean Atta, Liz Berry, Caroline Bird, Malika Booker, Debjani Chatterjee, Jane Commane, Rishi Dastidar, Carrie Etter, Will Harris, Tania Hershman, Peter Kahn, Gregory Leadbetter, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Roy McFarlane, Harry Man, Claire Pollard, Peter Raynard, Roger Robinson, Jacqueline Saphra, Joelle Taylor, Marvin Thompson, Julia Webb, and Antosh Wojcik.

PART ONE

ON POETIC FORMS

I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines
and Keep Him There:
On the Sonnet

Jacqueline Saphra

I have so often wished with all my heart that there was another fixed form that could do what the sonnet can do: by which I mean, pretty much anything. The first passable sonnet I ever wrote was early in my poetry life: I’d been experimenting with free verse and was beginning to grasp the idea of the central importance of the line in poetry. But like a child in a superstore, I was overwhelmed by the lack of boundaries and too much choice.

When I came across The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, I was captivated by the chapter on sonnets and I pored for hours over the example poems. They all had a discernible magic in common that seemed connected with the form despite having been written centuries apart. Yet each was unique although all were bound by a commonality of structure and certain challenging rules. How could that be? From Milton to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St Vincent Millay to Mary Jo Salter, each sonnet hit me viscerally and emotionally before I began to consider the complexities of argument or progressions of thought. It was as if I’d started listening to a playlist of songs I had always known and loved without realising it. The iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one: dee-dum) sounded its heartbeat drum. The pentameter, of five iambs together, felt like a single exhalation blowing along the poetic line3. I was waking up to the possibility of an infinity of self-expression in one satisfying, neat little square of text with its inbuilt music. I wanted to understand how it was done, I wanted to do it myself, I wanted to be Prospero, I wanted the book of spells. I read sonnets obsessively from Shakespeare to e e cummings to Marilyn Hacker and I drove myself to distraction trying to make them work for me.

So my first proper sonnet emerged from a single image; it was that rare and welcome recipe of emotions that elicited a poem based on one sustained metaphor. I was standing in the kitchen with my oldest son who had just turned thirteen when I realised he was taller than I was.

Outgrown

Back to back we stand in ritual

of measurement. My first born, ticking clock,

my gangling hourglass, my wake-up call,

we stay, four-footed, steady as a rock.

Hold fast and then release. Now there’s the trick.

I see it still – your embryonic hand

waving through water in a magic lake –

you, fishlike, still a million years from land.

My long-limbed journeyman, my wayward friend,

as surely as the life-lines on my face

one more sweet story draws towards its end –

this new one leads you to a separate place.

Outgrown, I’ll watch you scale the dizzy heights

on giant feet, your face turned to the light.

This is a classic and obedient Shakespearean structure – a variation on the love poem – with its ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme; you can hear some Bardish tones echoing in some of those phrases. Looking at it now, it’s certainly grandiose in its diction, somewhat adjective-heavy and cliché-laden, but it already dares to let go of full rhyme and it feels solid enough in its construction. When I’d finished it, I felt as if there had been some discovery and surprise as part of the process, but I knew it wasn’t nearly good enough and I wanted to do it better.

Reader, I was hooked.

The sonnet is unique and exquisite in its capability to marry feeling and thought. This is not to say it’s easy to work with. Those rhyme schemes and the infamous iambic pentameter can trip you up. You can’t afford to let any syllable be unnecessary or forced; you have to watch excessive use of the adjective or conjunction as filler. You have to think about what kind of sonnet it is, its shape and trajectory. The Shakespearean sonnet, with its ladder-like rhyme scheme born of the rhyme-poor nature of the English language, demands the slow unfolding of an argument in four quatrains with its neat little couplet at the end, so unfashionable in this age of irony and lack of answers. And yet how satisfying when the poet offers us a conclusion, a summing up, a perfect insight:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

– Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.”

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

– Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘Sonnet Ballad’

Edna St Vincent Millay, an early poetic role-model of mine, born in 1895, and one of our greatest and most innovative sonneteers, would often use the final couplet with a clever feminine rhyme with comic and devastating effect:

Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

Millay excelled at the earlier, Petrarchan sonnet structure, drawing on its counterbalanced octave (eight lines) and sestet (six lines) which require a kind of proposition and answer, with that oft-vaunted volta – or turn – just beyond the middle point. Millay wrote hundreds of sonnets in her lifetime, charting her stormy love affairs and disappointments and the process of ageing, taking what had been essentially a form created for and dominated by the male viewpoint and writing from a female perspective. She constructed sonnets in her head, reportedly, sitting curled up in an armchair, before she ever started to write them down. Millay knew how to use the slow progression of the closing sestet in the Petrarchan sonnet to create a work so moving it’s almost unbearable to read. One of my particular favourites of hers is simultaneously a love poem and a meditation on the ecstatic challenge of the sonnet itself. I relish the volta exactly at line nine, where there is a temporal shift from future to present. In the octave, Millay announces her intention – and in the sestet, her intention is realised: “I have him”. The man was more tricky than she let on, but the form: she has the form.

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

And keep him there; and let him thence escape

If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

Flood, fire, and demon — his adroit designs

Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines.

Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,

His arrogance, our awful servitude:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less

Than something simple not yet understood;

I shall not even force him to confess;

Or answer. I will only make him good.

Embedded in your bones

When people say they feel as if form prevents them from expressing themselves, I counter with: what might happen if you set yourself the task of writing, say, an extremely tight, formal Shakespearean sonnet with full rhymes? What might you learn from working with regular pentameter, a rhyme scheme, that slow development of the argument over four quatrains and then the challenge of that final, ringing epigrammatic couplet? Have you felt the joy of creative constraint, the way an iamb might push you towards a certain word with the required stresses, rather than the word that first comes to mind? Have you experienced the jolt of discovery, when you have to find a rhyme – Rilke called rhyme ‘a goddess of secret and ancient coincidences’ - and suddenly the poem takes you in a direction you haven’t expected? Don’t you long for that feeling that is so rare and enlivening when your poem begins to write itself? Form can do that for you. You just have to practise.

Most of us have tucked away in our files many more failures of poems than successes; these are often just the rehearsals for poems to come. Think of yourself as an athlete practising a high jump over and over again, taking the falls and risking the blunders, until you know how to find your footing, how to balance your weight in the upward leap. Any skill is partly a matter of experience and partly a matter of trust. Let the sonnet work its magic on you and embed itself in your bones.

Once the sonnet is in your bloodstream, that may be the time to attempt the sixteen-line Meredithian sonnet, as in his coruscating sequence Modern Love or perhaps a curtal sonnet4, the thrilling invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins. If you’re feeling super-adventurous, give yourself permission to dispense with rhyme, or abandon the pentameter altogether. Not because you can’t write in iambic pentameter, but because you choose not to for good, poetic reasons of form and content needing to work in synergy. What about an acrostic sonnet of thirteen lines, as Frank O’Hara’s full throttle ‘You are gorgeous and I am coming’, written to Vincent Warren, love of his life, or one like Edwin Morgan’s ‘Opening the Cage: 14 Variations on 14 Words’ where the same words in a different order appear in each line? Or even go for a poem that simply pays tribute to the spirit of the form in its proportions but doesn’t necessarily conform to its rules.

Generally I’ve found the sonnet a particularly useful container for rage or extreme political polemic, as in my poem ‘Spunk’ from All My Mad Mothers in which I rewrite the creation myth from Genesis, or ‘Leda and the Swan’, my answer to Yeats’ poem of the same title in my collection Dad, Remember You Are Dead5. You can see how I’ve progressed from the obedient and somewhat derivative Outgrown: note the way I let the stresses wander just a little a bit along the line:

Leda and the Swan

‘How can those terrified, vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?’ – WB Yeats

It’s nothing new: beast of a man beats

a woman, traps her, skirt round her waist,

thighs pinned under the fake webs of his feet.

Come fist, come blade, this man is not the first

to claim a metamorphosis. The violence is here,

not in a bardic prelude to some greater war.

How can she reclaim the timeless tale of man

as god? ...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: ON POETIC FORMS
• PART TWO: ON MAKING POEMS
• PART THREE: ON BRINGING POEMS TO LIFE
• PART FOUR: WHERE POETIC CRAFT MEETS REAL LIFE
• CODA
• Giving Off Sparks: Writing Prompts
• FURTHER READING
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITOR AND THIS BOOK