Throwing Words Together - 101 Poetry Making Exercises
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Transcript of Throwing Words Together - 101 Poetry Making Exercises
throwing words together 101 poem-making exercises
遣詞作詩101個創作練習
Christopher (Kit) Kelen 客遠文
ASM POETRYASSOCIATION OF STORIES IN MACAO
throwing words together: 101 poem-making exercises遣詞作詩：101個創作練習
Copyright © April 2011 by Christopher (Kit) [email protected], [email protected]
Chinese Titles Translations by Song Zijiang, Chen Peiyin, Najia Na, Cheyenne Zhang
Cover Picture by the Author
Cover and Inside Pages Design by Song Zijiang
Published by ASM
Association of Stories in MacaoGeneral Post Office, PO Box, 1507, Macao
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-99965-42-28-2
Supported by
contents
1 100 words, raw materials 10
2 here and now 12
3 haiku 14
4 a walk in the woods 16
5 the place poem 18
6 picture this! or seeing what’s not there 20
7 symbols 22
8 keep a dream diary 24
9 found materials and found poems 26
10 the absurd art of juxtaposition or the vocation of words for the impossible
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11 What do you want to write about? 30
12 repetition as rhythm, rhythm as structure 32
13 poetry as an art of theft, borrowing and playing back 34
14 repeat the beginning of a line 36
15 beginnings and endings for free 38
16 work and play 40
17 no blank page – flow is the go or you’ve always already started
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18 simplest is best 44
19 choosing an ending – the importance of getting a few words right
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20 definition 50
21 list poem 52
22 the riddletitle or untitled (kept or given away)
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23 another kind of I am… poem 56
24 the question poem 58
25 with a destination in mindwriting towards a last line
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26 hypotheticals 62
27 the poem of the nth degree 64
28 transformation poems 66
29 it’s personal, transformation and point of view 68
30 wishing 70
31 using a three-wishes story to give a poem structure 72
32 point of view in a story in a poem 74
33 find your own voice by writing from where you are 76
34 events in the everyday 78
35 revealing the unseen journey – a penny for your thoughts
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36 inside a ping pong ball 82
37 life at large – dreams of escape 84
38 portals – doors to other worlds 86
39 dreams for better and worse 88
40 ambivalent logic – non sequitur play 90
41 What do you want to say? 92
42 the pen is mightier than the sword 94
43 being a little god 96
44 one thing leads to another, cause and effect 98
45 bearing witness 100
46 resolutions and affirmations 102
47 desert island lists 104
48 nothing for the purpose intended 106
49 circles, arrows and crossings out 108
50 cut-ups – become a Dadaist 110
51 reaching into your bag of tricks 112
52 in the time it takes 114
53 apostrophe who do you want to talk to?
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54 life writing or telling a story that has to be told 118
55 tell a secret 120
56 earliest memory 122
57 a first time for everything 124
58 life event 126
59 fast forward biography or life’s flash and then you’re ash
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60 choosing a familiar form 130
61 writing from a model that works and which you admire 132
62 translation 134
63 the translation – response continuum 136
64 a poem about words themselves 138
65 into the forest of signs 140
66 innuendo – painting with words 144
67 the shape of the heart – image and symbol 146
68 the meaning of things, the voices under... 148
69 framing 150
70 the image and things themselves 152
71 colours 154
72 exquisite corpse 156
73 an art of knowing and not or writing without a destination
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74 a question of indirection 162
75 a poem of explanation 164
76 ambivalate! or contradict yourself creatively 166
77 Beethoven and Mozart methods 168
78 the snapshot poem 170
79 the poem is the moment 172
80 poems of the moment, poems of the season 174
81 experimental rhetoric – turning things around 176
82 metaphor 180
83 simile 184
84 extended metaphors, conceits – taking things to their logical conclusion
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85 de-automatising or metaphor – wanted dead and alive
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86 putting proverbial wisdom to use or fracturing a fairy tale 198
87 metonymy 202
88 anthropomorphism 206
89 grammar games, preposition play 208
90 poetry as a foreign language 212
91 perruque, poetry where it’s not supposed to be, let the poem go the way it will
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92 poetastings 220
93 the rant 224
94 genre and complexity 226
95 be influenced by everyone the annotation mode – in the presence, so a poem comes
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96 recycling – editingkilling your children and having a family
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97 scribimus – lectionem non damus we write em – we don’t explain em
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98 here be dragons 236
99 as wild as words will go 238
100 What is poetry? 240
101 DIY, give yourself instructions 244
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Fill the page opposite with one hundred words you like the sound, or the shape, or the idea of. Don’t try to make a tidy list, just write them anywhere on the page. It doesn’t matter if you like what the words mean, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what they mean. Write the first ten words straight out of your head. Let me show you – for example: saraband igloo abstemious orphan selectricbeset assassin jojoba minion such
Now choose ten nouns you like the sound or look of. And ten verbs. Five adjectives. Which are your five favourite prepositions? Your five top conjunctions (anything from so to howsoever). Ten best adverbs. Three favourite colours. Two delicious desserts.
Now use the dictionary and choose ten words you don’t know but like the sound or shape of. To prove this isn’t about what things mean, now add the names of the five diseases which sound the best to you. Lastly, let’s add some names.
Five countries. Five cities. Five rivers. Five seas. A man’s name. A woman’s name. A name for a pet. A good name for a rocket ship. A name for a new invention.
Choose one of these last three as the title for a poem to write, using some of these words you’ve collected.
What have you got on the page opposite now? Probably not a poem. Probably you’ve got what we could call a pile of words. A pile of bricks is not a building but the bricks will be very helpful to have on-site if we’re wanting to build some walls and so on later. So this is raw material. Words are the fundamental building blocks of the poem. Words make up lines and lines make up stanzas. Put a title at the top and you might have a poem. Word – line – stanza: this is the standard structure of a poem on paper today.
You can create a poem right now, from your hundred words, using a ‘cutup’ technique. Select a fixed number of words from the page opposite and write each on a separate slip of paper. Then shuffle the slips around on your desk to see if any fit together in an interesting way. If that procedure is too free for you then put the words in a hat and just lay them on the desk in the order they come out, so see what fate delivers. The idea of the ‘cutup’ comes from the Dadaists, who used to take scissors to newspapers and books with the objective of making some interesting nonsense out of them. Their objective? By re-arranging familiar words one could draw attention to the kind of meaning that goes without saying, in other words, one could think again about words and what they mean. This is one of the important functions of poetry.
Have you got some poetry out of this first exercise? How could you tell? Does anything of the words in front of you make you smile or sigh, feel proud or sad or like showing someone? If you have any of these feelings then it may be you’ve created a poem or part of a poem.
→ 50 cut-ups
1 100 wordsraw materials
在右面一頁寫下一百個你喜歡的，帶有聲音、形狀或意義的詞。
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集中精神寫下此時此刻你所經歷的一切。
Pen or pencil in hand, blank page in front of you. I hope things are calm where you are and that there are no distractions. Now, pay attention and write down what you are experiencing here and now. Make lists for each question.
What can you see?What can you hear?What can you feel?What can you smell?What can you taste?What can you sense? Is there something intangible you notice or suspect?
The purpose of this exercise is to get you to pay attention to where you are and to what is happening around you. On the page opposite, you should now have lists of answers for each of the questions above. Could any of these piles of observation become a poem or be part of a poem? The answer to the question has to do with how the parts relate to each other. The usual reaction to this exercise is to think – well I know this room well, so there’s no way anything poetic could be happening here. But poetry can come from looking again at something that’s very familiar. Poetry is about taking a second look. So please consider – what is surprising in the lists you’ve made on the page opposite? Or you could make a poem by contrasting the boring and obvious aspects of the well known place with something unexpected about it. Here’s an example:
Here and now, hoping for a poem
I can see my hand, writing this line which has already begun …I can see my hand…I hold the pen which touches the paper I hear that touchand I can hear the world outside which wants to be in a poem I can still smell the others who’ve been here just nowI can’t taste my lunch anymore, can’t even taste toothpasteI can tell that nothing will happen
Note that the last two questions in the list up above are already a little different from the rest. They seem to be a set altogether, they’re all questions about the five senses, but taste is different, isn’t it? If you’re sitting in a room trying to make notes for a poem then presumably you’re not eating and if you’re not eating then you’ve just got the taste that’s already in your mouth to record – and that’s something we usually don’t think about – but it’s still a taste, isn’t it? Hard to describe though! What can you sense? That’s a different kind of question, isn’t it? The sixth sense is beyond ordinary sensation. So the answer to that question is likely to give us an interesting contrast with the answers to the other questions (which are all about tangible things).
Things that are so obvious people usually don’t mention them are good raw material for poetry. Things that are hard to describe are good raw material for poetry. Asking the right kinds of question can be a great help in the making of a poem.
→ 45 bearing witness
2 here and now
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想象一個自然景觀，在俳句的第一行對其進行簡短的描述，第二、三行寫出的句子需出乎讀者的意料，程度遞增。
How long is a poem? How many words or lines or stanzas does it need? Poems come in all shapes and sizes. In this exercise we work with the shortest formal structure for a poem, the Japanese haiku.
Although it’s short (three lines), the haiku has a very particular shape. Its traditional seventeen syllables are usually arranged in lines of five, seven and five (or five, five, seven; or seven, five, five) syllables. Haiku are typically about the natural world and contain some indirect seasonal reference (e.g. a particular flower to show that it’s spring). In languages other than Japanese, the line-syllable structure is often relaxed so that the object of haiku writing becomes to create three lines of poetry which will be complete in themselves and which will have the effect of conjuring up a scene from nature and then making us look at that scene again.
The purpose of this exercise is twofold – firstly to get you to focus on a scene from nature; secondly to get you to write a complete poem (the shortest possible poem).
There are two ways you can focus on the scene from nature for the purposes of this exercise – one is to go there (to be in nature and make that your here-and-now), the other is to imagine the natural scene from wherever you happen to be. Let me help you do that. Here’s my translation of the most famous haiku ever written (from the seventeenth century) – Basho’s frog-pond haiku it’s often called (although haiku don’t have titles).
an old ponda frog jumps in plonk
In the original Japanese here’s what it sounds like:
furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto
Note the 5-7-5 line structure. (And note that I didn’t bother to copy it in English.) More importantly note what you can see in the poem and note what changes. The first line presents a still scene which seems a complete world as captured in a photograph; the second line brings motion into the picture, and the third line brings sound to a world that had been silent (or rather to a world in which we hadn’t been paying attention to sound at all). Those changes, line by line, are what make the poem work. They’re called turns because they turn the reader round. You couldn’t have expected those changes before you’d read them. So here’s a first rule of poetry – if you can guess in a poem what the next line will be, then the poem’s not doing its job.
Time for you to do your job now! Picture a scene from nature (or from the city if you prefer, or from your here-and-now observations in the previous exercise). Make a very short description of that scene the first line of your haiku. Or choose a first line from this list if that’s easier:
3 haiku
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a dead tree a star rising breezethrough long grass the winter river
monkey scratchingclothes on a line dragonflies
Now, in a second line, make a turn which will disturb the expectation of the first. Now in a third line, turn from the second.
With two friends you can play a collaborative game, each making lines for haiku the others start. This is a traditional poetry pastime in Japan.
→ 6 picture this!
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想象樹林裏的一條道路或小徑，並對其進行描述。
Describing nature has been important for poetry for a very long time and some of the most famous poems ever written are famous because they have the power to make scenes of nature live in a reader’s imagination. Take for instance, Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, my favourite line in which is – ‘the woods are lovely, dark and deep’. The persona in this piece interrupts his journey for a simple purpose – the pleasure of watching the woods fill up with snow. But in the end he has to go on because the call of the ‘real world’ and its tasks draws him away. He tells us he has promises to keep and ‘miles to go before I sleep’. The poem in this case is a moment of reflection in an interrupted journey. Words themselves are a journey. How they’ve come to us will always be mysterious. Where they go when we’ve used them no one can say; but the way in which we join them together – that’s a journey we make ourselves.
In the previous two exercises we’ve had some practice at observation – describing scenes and our sensations, taking note of where we are. It’s time now to move along. So let’s use those skills from the previous exercises to describe the simplest way of going anywhere – on foot on a track.
Picture a track/ a road/ a path.
Which way does it go? Describe it. Draw a picture if you like, if that helps you to find the words.
Now here are some sketchy details of the journey for you to fill out.
The road goes through a forest. What’s the forest like? Describe the forest. Describe the trees. Describe the way the road goes through the trees.
In the forest you come to a house. What’s the house like? Describe it. You enter the house; there’s nobody there. On the table you find a jar. Describe the inside of the house and the table and the jar. You open the jar. What’s in it? What do you do with it?
You leave the house and keep following the track. What’s the track like now?
You come to a river and you have to get across. How do you get across?
On the other side of the river you come to a wall. Describe the wall.
What do you do next?
→ 7 symbols
4 a walk in the woods
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選一個你知道的地方，並去那裏做一些筆記。
The walk in the woods gave you some practice at imaging places in detail. To describe those places you had to use your memory and imagination because you weren’t actually in the woods when you were describing them. In this exercise we focus on describing a real place – hopefully a place that is a part of your daily life, but a place where you wouldn’t usually be writing. What you need to do is to choose a place you know – a place which has a name or which can be given a name – and you need to go to this place and make notes. This is poetry field work. What to do at the place you’ve chosen? Observe. Write down what you can see. Write down what you hear. Write down what you can smell, what you feel. On the page opposite (or on another sheet of paper if that’s more convenient) write down anything that happens in the place you’ve chosen, and anything you think might happen.
Then bring the notes home. Look over them. Are there the makings of a poem here? A haiku or something a little longer? Possibly not. And if not, then don’t despair. What you need to do is to return to the scene of the crime. By going back to the chosen place a number of times you can collect several sets of notes from which to find material for a poem. The best thing is not to look at the old notes on the new expedition; try to go back to the place with fresh eyes, and then, after four or five visits, you’ll have a range of impressions. Of course people may look at you like you’re crazy for making notes on a streetcorner; if you were painting with oils and an easel they’d be even more curious. But you can’t afford to worry about what passers-by think of your work or the fact that you’re working. Just get on with the job. And hopefully the contrasts and different viewpoints in those notes you’ve jotted down will give you the makings of a poem.
Sometimes a place poem won’t work until you feel you’ve got something in the way of a plot or a story. In other words, the poem may be about picturing a place but it needs some action to make it go. Think of Basho’s frog jumping into the pond. In your case, the action you need might be an aeroplane overhead or two people chasing each other down the street or someone going into a church. It could be cockroach making its weary way home. Sometimes, for a place poem, you need to draw a contrast between the things which are going on in the background (which provide a setting) and what’s happening in the poem, that is – what the poem is actually about. Poetry is everywhere and it’s in the smallest corners of the day; it’s just a matter of your being there to receive it when it comes to you. You can train yourself to be poetically receptive through practice at observation.
There are many famous examples of place poems, and studying some of these, once your own poem is underway, could be very helpful. Take a look at Blake’s ‘London’ or William Wordsworth’s London poem ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ or George Mackay Brown’s poem ‘Hamnavoe’, about the Orkneys town of Stromness. Or compare Carl Sandburg’s and Lew Welch’s poems, both titled, ‘Chicago’. For an extended experience of a Welsh seaside village, read Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’, a play which is really a poem.
→ 78 the snapshot poem
5 the place poem
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列出一百個你期望讀者能想象出的事物。
In exercises we’ve tried so far we’ve observed places by being there – places in the here and now – and we’ve also imagined places; that is, we’ve used our imagination to conjure up places where we weren’t at the time. The imaginative function is one of poetry’s most important and it probably is the most important effect a poem has on its reader – a poem makes you see (or hear or feel) things which are not there. These things which are not really physically present but which the reader experiences are called imagery – the images – the pictures or scenes – in the poem. In Basho’s frog pond haiku, the frog and the pond are the images. The need for effective imagery in a poem reflects one of the most essential demands on imaginative writing, as expressed in the principle: Don’t tell me! Show me!
The poet can do fieldwork to collect imagery, but for the reader of the poem it’s always a matter of having to imagine the place from the words on the paper or the words heard out loud. The reader has to be shown what he or she cannot see without words. This imaginative function of poetry points to one of the most fundamental rules of poetry – call it the surprise element. A poem needs to make you see (or feel/hear/touch/smell) what you wouldn’t have (felt/heard/touched/smelled) without reading the poem.
In Exercise 1 we listed words we liked the sound or shape of; on the page opposite now list down one hundred things you would like your reader to imagine. They have to be things that can be seen or felt or smelt or heard – they have to be tangible things.
It is one of the most fundamental skills of the poet (in fact of any writer) – to use words to make people imagine things, places, people. The question is – what kinds of things do you want your reader to imagine?
→ 66 painting with words
6 picture this! or seeing what’s not there
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把練習4中，對樹林小徑的描述改寫成一首詩；並選取當中的一個象徵，試寫一首關於此象徵的短詩。
The walk in the woods (back in Exercise 4) is actually adapted from an old psychological test (or a game really), the object of which was to understand your unconscious attitude to some of the big issues in life. The exercise does that using symbols. That’s to say, each of the things you had to describe in the walk in the woods exercise was a symbol. So what were the symbols?
the paththe forestthe house
the jarthe river the wall
What does each of these symbols stand for? And looking back at your descriptions for each stage along the path, what does your treatment of these symbols tell us about your attitude to life? Do the symbols have alternative meanings?
It’s the fact that the meaning of each of these images is symbolic that connects our use of them to the unconscious. In other words, to take the first example, when we are describing the path – any path – we may be describing our own path through life and the way we see or feel about that. You didn’t know you were describing ‘life path’ when you started describing the path, so, now that you do, looking back on your description, it might tell you something interesting about your general attitude to life. The point for poetry is that when you use one of these symbols or archetypes, your readers can’t help connecting the image with some very general ideas they already have in mind. Many animals have archetypal qualities. Think of a snake or a sheep or a bull. Each of these animal images stands for something we imagine together, something we imagine about the way that certain kinds of people are.
Symbols are helpful for writing in the sense that they help you to give a reader something readily imaginable. If you say, ‘the house you grew up in’, everybody will be able to imagine this and everyone (even brothers and sisters) will imagine something a little different from everyone else. A symbol works for the reader because it demands the reader do a special kind of imaginative work.
A poet should know when s/he is going into the symbolfold. That’s the mindspace where things or images in particular have a general meaning and so conjure up individual experiences-in-common for readers.
Choose one of the symbols from the walk in the woods and try to write a complete short poem about it. Or try to turn the whole of the journey from Exercise 4 into a poem. Or choose another archetype to write. Examples could include:
the face the moon the hands
the grassthe winda rose
Working with symbolic material, it’s good to bear in mind that things which can be taken symbolically may also just be things – or as Sigmund Freud famously said, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.
→ 65 into the forest of signs
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夢日記——用一本新的筆記本把夢記錄下來。在右邊的空白頁上寫下你最近做的一個夢，或預留位置記錄下一個夢。
When things in poems (or stories) are symbols, they demand the reader interpret them; in other words the reader has to make an effort to understand what they ‘really’ mean, or what their ‘hidden’ meaning is, or what’s ‘under the surface’. Implied here is that a text has layers of meaning, that it works on several levels at once. How to control several levels of meaning at the same time? The best way to get started at this is to study how other people do it. Books or films or poems for children are good places to begin. When you write for children you’re always writing for adults as well. That’s because it’s parents who buy books for children and take them to the movies and read to them in bed.
Of course we can’t completely control all of the meaning we make when we make a poem or in fact when we say or write anything. But to make a poem usually requires better than average control of the meaning resources of one’s language. So it’s useful for a poet to have some experience at interpreting what texts are about, on the surface and deep down and anywhere in between.
Dreams are important for writers and for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is that dreams require interpretation. In other words, what a dream presents on the surface usually can’t be the real or the most important meaning of the dream. You have to work to make a dream make sense. Dreams are a kind of imaginative work we can’t help doing and in this sense they are the model for all kinds of imaginative works – poems, stories, plays and also for paintings and for other artforms. Imaginative texts require interpretation much in the same way that dreams do. Dreams are also an important source of inspiration for poets and artists. That’s because in dreams our unconscious is processing the difficult stuff in life, the stuff that’s often too hard to work out rationally in the daylight hours. So dreams are a way through confusion, and art and poetry can be like that too. Getting in touch with your dreams is a very important way of getting in touch with your native poetic impulse – the art that is effortlessly in you. How to get in touch? Keep a dream diary – a book of blank pages for writing down dreams.
But let’s start right now. On the page opposite write down the last dream you remember, or if you prefer, wait till tomorrow morning and write down your next dream…
Two important points to remember – firstly, the more you think about dreams and dreaming the more dreams you will remember; secondly, most of the content of a dream will be forgotten within the first ten or twenty seconds of waking up – so you need to keep pen and paper (or a voice recorder) next to your bed – and you need to use it! Don’t be lazy – record your dreams.
→ 39 dreams for better or worse
8 keep a dream diary
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帶著這本書，去一個人來人往的公共場所，並寫下你聽到的一百個字詞。
Back in the first exercise we started accumulating words for later use. You collected them just because you liked the sound or the shape of them. In the sixth exercise, on imagery, we collected images on the same basis – the kinds of sights and sounds you’d like to have in a poem. All these words and images are useful raw material. Another important source of materials for use in a poem is the words we hear and see around us every day. A commitment to using everyday language in poetry was a Romantic innovation; William Wordsworth wanted to use ‘the real language of men’ in his work. In fact, the relationship between everyday and specialized poetic language has been an issue all around the world for as long as poetry has been written down.
We see words in books, in newspapers, on the street, on the television screen. We hear words spoken on stages, in songs on the radio and just about everywhere we go. What you hear and see said is the immediate context of everything you yourself say, of all the meanings you yourself make and for whatever purpose. And it’s also an important document of your time and place, your here-and-now. Along with what we see in the way of image-material, poetry’s most essential raw material is what we hear in the way of words (and how they’re put together). From the reader’s point of view, the anchoring of those words and images in time and place is a key to the understanding of any poem.
Sometimes everyday words are thrown together by accident in interesting and unexpected ways. You walk out of one room and into a next and the conversations you’ve just overheard can be like a comment on each other. Often words thrown accidentally together are interesting because they’re incongruous – that is, because they don’t make sense – or because they show some unexpected contradiction or irony.
This is a very simple collecting exercise. Take this book with you to a public place where people are coming and going and write down the first hundred words you hear said. A bus or a train will be the best place because the coming and going of people will make for the maximum disconnection and incongruity. It will be best if you can find a seat! At the same time you might overhear some quite coherent speeches which are really excellent material for a poem or for a story.
The way in which everyday things don’t make sense is important material for poetry. But it’s not necessarily easy to draw the attention of the reader or the listener to what’s interesting about those words or the connections to be found in the apparent disconnectedness. When something is put in a frame and hung in an art gallery it becomes a work of art. Gallery-goers will pay attention to it and expect it to have meaning and be important because it’s hung on the wall of a gallery. Conceptual artists have played for a long time with the idea of putting just anything in a frame in order to make a comment about art galleries and people’s assumptions about what art is. Carefully choosing a slice of everyday life – for instance speech heard on a bus – can produce a really interesting poem and an important document of a time and a place. Such a poem is called a ‘found poem’. The text was there all along and the poet simply had to put a frame around the words, that is, simply had to put it in a poem.
In the seventies, the English rock band Roxy Music wrote a song called ‘Do the Strand’, which consisted of a list of signs seen walking down the Strand, one of the main streets in London. Anyone
9 found materials and found poems
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hearing the song would have reproduced for them a version of the experience of walking down that street at that time. Maybe there’s something similar – or interestingly different – you could be doing with the signage in your town?
A paradox of culture is that, while its survival depends on communicating from one time and place to another, culture that feels as if it comes from nowhere or anywhere seems pointless. But poetry that can’t communicate to people in other places and later on won’t survive. Think of it this way – you collect materials from your here-and-now to send to someone else in theirs.
→ 20 definition
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把自己的字詞無規則地摻插在一起，讓它們聽起來不具意義。
Juxtaposition is the putting together of things, the putting next to each other of words or images or ideas. In everyday language – in fact in just about every kind of language – words fit together in ways that can largely be predicted. When words go together in the way we normally expect, then no one notices them very much – they’re just doing the job they’re meant to do. Things are different with poetry, at least they have been since the twentieth century. For poetry to work, it has to make a difference to words and in words. Call this the surprise factor. A poem has to make us notice the way that words are fitting together; poetry makes us think about the meaning of the way words fit. A haiku makes us imagine a scene and then look at it again, but poetry in general makes us reconsider words and juxtapositions which we usually take for granted. Poetry is a kind of re-arranging of the expected. In pages you’ve written to get to here you’ve recorded a lot of words and images and ideas. Your job now is to make some choices and to throw them together in interesting and unexpected ways. Let’s make the instruction clearer. Using your own materials, throw words together so that they don’t make sense. We can call this process absurdification. You take words which ordinarily would fit together with other words in a sensible way, but you disconnect them. Let’s take an example:
an elephant in pjyamas
But a banana in pyjamas is more impossible, isn’t it? The problem is that once you’ve seen a banana in pyjamas jumping around excitedly in your television, then it’s no longer impossible for you. This is a problem for the surprise factor in poetry. Things repeated – no matter how striking to begin with – won’t stay surprising for long. But let’s think of ten impossible things to get started. Impossible things should be surprising. For instance:
a day that’s inside out the flock of hammers’ holidays a moon dissolved in my cupthe sky is running down the draina stove with ten chins ten dollars swimming across the lake the chimney barking
In fact these things are not so impossible, are they? It may be a bit of a stretch but each of these things can be imagined. It’s interesting to see what kind of sense lines like this don’t make. Compare the next two lines and you’ll see that they involve different ways of not making sense:
of up to and through in between by the way
is silly in quite a different way from
goat horsing doggedly donkeys beehive
In later exercises we’ll look at and we’ll experiment with all kinds of ways in which poetry can challenge the expected ways in which words fit together. Right now, on the page opposite, let’s just try to make things as impossible as possible using the raw materials we already have.
10 the absurd art of juxtaposition or the vocation of words for the impossible
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What good poetry does is to put things together so that they make a new kind of sense, a kind of sense that couldn’t have been expected before you put things together in the new way. William Blake’s aphorisms of hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are an interesting example – ‘the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’. Think about it!
→ 22 riddles
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你喜歡寫關於甚麼東西的詩？把它們列出來。
What is a poem about? This is a tricky question. As we’ve seen in the last few pages, whatever else a poem is about, it’s about the time and place it’s from. Through the exercises in this book so far, you’ve been accumulating raw material for later use and you’ve been learning some arts of observation. All of this activity is getting you ready to write poems. But what are those poems going to be about?
Let’s tackle the question head-on by making a list of topics or themes on the page opposite. Don’t write down what you think poems should be about, or what poems you can remember were about. Write down a list of things you’d like to write poems about!
Once you’ve got your topic list, you can begin to match the materials you’re developing with ideas for particular poems.
→ 21 the list poem
11 What do you want to write about?
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完成五個以“每天我…”開頭的句子:每天我……
Repetition is fundamental to poetry. It’s the basis of the three best known sound techniques in poetry – rhythm, rhyme and alliteration. Sound is of great importance to poetry. As Alexander Pope wrote ‘the sound must seem an echo to the sense’. Words have a shape, in sound in the air and in letters on paper. Poetry is a marriage of sound and sense, of shape and meaning; as in fact all language in use is. Rhythm is in all uses of words – you can tap your foot to any kind of speech and, on paper, writing has a black and white rhythm. Rhythm in poetry is the alternation of stressed and unstressed sounds you’re able to tap your finger to – ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’). Rhyme is the repetition of the same syllable, always including a vowel (‘how now brown cow’) and usually combining a vowel and a consonant (‘methinks I wear cufflinks’). Alliteration is the repetition of a consonant (‘Sir Stephen slew seven slippery serpents.’). Handling repetition in poetry (as elsewhere) is always a challenge for the obvious reason that repeating things can be boring. So using repetition in poetry has to be done with care and with skill and the best way to develop the skill is through practice.
In Exercise 2 (here and now) we started on some structural repetition to get a poem underway (I can see… I can hear… I can smell… I can feel…). Rhythm gives a poem a sound structure. If you can match that sound rhythm with a rhythm in ideas then… well… you might have a poem. Let’s try a simple example. Finish the following line five times:
every day I … every day I …every day I …every day I …every day I …
There are many things a poem with this structure could be about. But what you’ll need to make it work is some kind of turn, for instance a difference that sets the last line off from the others.
On the page opposite, choose from one of the following line-starts (or another), repeating it as many times as you need to, to try to make a poem.
Tomorrow, I’m going to…This is the…There are… In the beginning…Once upon…Go…By the time…In my heart…
→ 14 repeat the beginning of a line
12 repetition as rhythmrhythm as structure
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從詩集，圖書館或互聯網上找你喜歡的詩，在右面一頁抄下詩中你喜歡的字詞，短句或者詩行。
In exercise 9 we used found materials, in this exercise we’re actively looking for materials which are already in the form of poetry.
Words are from somewhere and poems are from somewhere too. The miracle of language is the potential to create limitless new meanings from a finite number of words. Poetry is the art of expressing the maximum freedom of words to do whatever words can do. So the unlimited potential exercised in the way we combine words is especially important to poetry. You might argue that the new meanings aren’t really limitless and that everything’s been said before. ‘To speak is to fall into tautology’, Jorge-Luis Borges writes. But surely that’s a little pessimistic? Apart from anything else, the world is constantly changing and so there are always new experiences to be expressed. In every form of art and culture, novelty is valued. And tradition is important too. In fact, poetry succeeds by balancing these two demands – let’s say the need to come from somewhere and the need to have its own destination. In this exercise we focus on the first of these demands. This involves reading with a purpose – and the purpose is borrowing. Let’s borrow words, phrases and whole lines from other poems – famous or not so famous – for the purpose of making our own poems. So right now – get the poetry books down from the shelf or find them in the library or find poems you need on the internet, and, on the page opposite, write down the words, phrases and lines, you like. Here’s the rule to follow – borrow a maximum of one line only from each poet. So let’s have material from at least twenty different poets altogether.
Balancing reference to the familiar with originality is one of the great challenges in creative work of any kind. Using the successful and familiar ideas of others can be a great help with work of the imagination but we have to be careful to be original enough (that is, not to plagiarize)! That said, many of the greatest works of literature – and especially in the last century – have their origin in other great works, James Joyce’s Ulysses (based on Homer’s Odyssey) would be the most obvious example. But Joyce paid back very amply for what he borrowed, and that’s what you too will need to do if you make use of the words and ideas of others. You have to transform those words and ideas in a way that makes them new for your reader, and in a way that makes them distinctly yours.
→ 73 writing without a destination
13 poetry as an art of theftborrowing and playing back
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重複詩句的開始部份。
Repetition gives rhythm and rhythm gives structure – out loud and also on the page. Repeating words from line to line gives you a fixed and automatic rhythm for a poem. Getting the rhythm of the line more or less decided can help you to stay focused on making a difference in meaning; for instance showing the reader what the reader didn’t expect to see. This is a common and easy technique for making a poem. The difficult thing is to make something which will surprise the reader in this way. Here are some starts to choose from:
I am… birds…the blue… time is running out to…he looked at me as if I knew…if it were to…when the lion escaped from the zoo…life’s too short to…
Some of these starts suggest a series of reflections (or different ‘angles’) on a particular topic or idea, some may suggest a pattern of images, and some may suggest the beginning of a story. If a story suggests itself to you, then go with it – write the story! Many poems are also stories and a story provides its own structure for a poem. But poems and stories equally require surprise to keep a reader in. In the case of the poem, that need for surprise means that there needs to be some kind of turn at least once in the piece. The last place that turn can happen is in the last line. And that is often where it happens.
Beginning every line of a poem with the same words will be a strain if the poem is more than a few lines long, but the same pattern can be used by beginning each stanza of a poem with the same words. Try one of the following line-starts:
a mouse ran up the clock…the lake was completely frozen…a single plane flew over the city…I filled in the form…she felt she’d been standing in the queue all day…it was three o’clock in the morning when… there were two of them and they were both wearing masks…we could see it on the horizon…and when I woke up…then the rain began…
One of these line-starts could provide a suitable pattern for a longer poem in which you’ll probably need some kind of turn in each stanza. It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting every line or every stanza with the same words, without some kind of turn a poem will be flat. The longer a poem of this kind, the more turns – the more surprises – it needs.
→ 31 using a three-wishes story to give a poem structure
14 repeat the beginning of a line
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選一行作為開頭，再選另一行作為結尾，在右面一頁上作詩。
It’s often said starting any piece of writing is the hardest part. The reason for that in the case of a poem would simply be that when you start a poem you’re actually starting many things all at once. A poem is about something, it has a form, a style, it’s coming from somewhere, it’s going somewhere. Just as every cell in the body contains the DNA of all the rest, so the first line of a poem has to somehow hold the potential that the finished poem will eventually express. How to do all of that? Well the easiest answer is to say that you need to know what you’re doing when you start writing a poem, much in the way that it will be handy if, when you start driving a car, you already know how to steer and how to use the brakes.
Listed below is a mixture of first lines and last lines. Can you guess which is a beginning and which is an ending? No matter. Choose one line to begin and another to end your poem on the page opposite. This way you know from the outset, both where you’re coming from and what your destination will be.
The year’s at the springI know that I shall meet my fateIf design govern in a thing so small Hog butcher for the worldNobody heard him, the dead manA pattern of your love I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madnessTo see a World in a Grain of Sand Earth has not anything to show more fair I was angry with my friend
And while we’re in quiz mode, do you know whose lines these are? They’re all from famous poems by famous English language poets. Poetry does come, in large part, from the tradition of poetry that has already been written, and often poems written today are full of rhythms and cadences and echoes of famous poems from the past. The more poetry you read, the more of this past wealth of famous poems will be available for you to draw from. That’s helpful because it’s always easier to speak when you feel that you’re already in a conversation.
Most poems actually have two beginnings. They have first lines and they usually have titles as well. You might think that makes getting a poem started twice as hard as it needs to be, but another way of looking at things is that this gives a poet twice the opportunities. Take some time to look at a wide range of poems to study the relationship between titles and first lines.
Here are some examples:
The Solitary Reaper – Behold her, single in the fieldDaffodils – I wandered lonely as a cloud The Eagle – He clasps the crag with crooked hands Jabberwocky – Twas brillig and the slithy toves Musée des Beaux Arts – About suffering they were never wrongThe Ballad of Reading Gaol – He did not wear his scarlet coat
15 beginnings and endings for free
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And don’t forget to give a title to your poem.
→ 73 writing without a destination
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不作思考，無意識地亂寫一通。
By this stage you’re probably getting the idea that writing poetry is fun but it’s also hard work. True! Producing art of any kind is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. But let’s turn that around – poetry writing (like any kind of art making) is a labour that ought to be enjoyable. And this is one of the great secrets of life – if you can make your work play then you’ll have a good time. Sadly, not many people make a living out of poetry. Or to adapt Robert Graves’ famous words slightly, ‘There’s not much poetry in money but there’s even less money in poetry.’ For the maker of poetry though, there’s a simple work rule we can apply – if you’re not playing then you’re not getting the job done. The interesting thing is that children seem to have got this right from the outset but somehow adults have lost the plot. Seriousness has taken over; worries about things like money. Look at kids in a playground – their job is to learn and to grow up and they do that by playing – that is, by engaging imaginatively, with each other and with the world around them, and of course with themselves. The 1% inspiration on which poetry depends is what we can call the spirit of play. And as with kids, so with poetry, a certain amount of naughtiness is essential. That’s what doing the unexpected is all about – doing with words what words haven’t done for. Kids do that kind of thing all the time. They don’t know the rules yet so they find them out by breaking them. They break them just in the very natural process of trying to mean what they want to mean. That’s what you need to do in this exercise. Just doodle with words. Go where they take you. Write anything. Try to have no intention.
→ 90 poetry as a foreign language
16 work and play
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在前面的練習中找出你還未用到的字詞、句子。看看它們能否作為新詩的內容。
Not having an intention is harder than it sounds when you’re trying to put words down on paper. Many of the exercises in this book so far have been more about making parts of a poem than about making a poem complete. If you succeeded even a little in the last exercise then you’ll have still more materials for later use. Or maybe you got a whole poem or a run of lines from trying not to bother with trying to do something in particular? The point of collecting raw material in so many different ways is to make sure that you always have points from which to begin; that way it’s simply a matter of choosing. People talk about ‘writer’s block’ and about how hard it is to get started or about how one reaches a certain point in the work and there seems to be no way on. When it comes to the work of the imagination, the biggest problems for the maker are imaginary. Still, for every artistic process it’s important to have a way of getting started and it’s important not to get stuck. Having the material always ready to use is a large part of the answer to this problem. That way, there’s never a ‘blank page’ staring you out, daring you to put down a first word. There are always words there already; you just have to choose which ones to use and an order in which to place them. This kind of preparedness should be a principle for anyone wishing to derive satisfaction from writing.
Another principle is that nothing need be wasted. So this is a very simple exercise. Collect here, from previous exercises, lines, words, ideas that you’ve not yet used in a poem to see if you have a beginning or an ending or anything in between. Try to arrange them where they might fit in the structure of a poem to be: title, first line, last line, stanzas and lines in between. With a little bit of luck you’ll be able to join the lines and then you’ll have a draft of a poem.
Don’t forget to keep writing your dream diary (and making the effort to write dreams down as soon as you wake up) – this will provide you with plenty of poem material for free.
→ 77 Beethoven and Mozart methods
17 no blank page – flow is the go or you’ve always already started
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選擇以下一個短語，作為一首短詩中一段思緒的開始。
Playing at making poems may be hard work but there’s no need to make it any harder than it has to be – either for yourself or for your reader. There are all sorts of games poems can play, with words, with grammar and with logic. But many poems – and especially short poems – make very simple straightforward points. Here’s an untitled example from the German poet/playwright, Berthold Brecht:
And I always thought: the very simplest wordsMust be enough. When I say what things are likeEveryone’s heart must be torn to shreds.That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourselfSurely you see that.
Let’s look at these words as prose. And I always thought: the very simplest words must be enough. When I say what things are like everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself. Surely you see that. It makes just as much sense when we focus on the sentences but somehow the words and ideas have a different weight when the line structure’s gone and the sentence structure is allowed to dominate. Prose seems more reasonable, poetry more heartfelt. But one of the functions of poetry can be to make reasonable what is heartfelt or to make heartfelt what is reasonable.
Use one of the following starts to express in a poem of just a few lines a single train of thought. There’s no need to use capital letters or full stops but make sure that you don’t have more than two or three sentences altogether:
it seems to me that…it’s only right…anyone can see that…for once and for all… let there be no mistake…show the world…
→ 42 the pen is mightier than the sword
18 simplest is best
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請幫我完成這首詩，並用最後一行詩句作為自己的詩的題目或開頭。
Plenty of poems start well but never get finished because it’s just too hard to live up to the promise of the idea that was in the opening lines. In this exercise I offer you a poem titled ‘in the time it takes a leaf to fall’. You only have one task. Write the last line. Or think of a few alternative last lines and then choose which you think is the best. Here’s the poem. Please help me finish it.
in the time it takes
a leaf to fallthe clock to tick sun to set a tear to comeprayer to be called the heart to know surrender…
in time it takes a flag to rise a mist to clear eye to twinkle or to blinkthe dream to lose itself in waking the waking in the dream
in time it takes to brush the teeth the tea to pour to pull a tooth turn stars chord strike to touch first once to swallow pillfor head to fall from block to basket
one raindrop landing square to breathe in and breathe out again the bullet entering departing passing mirrored in shopwindows
in time it takes scatter of ashes wave ashorelust to dust one bucket to take out the fire a corner turneda page dog-eared
19 choosing an ending – the importance of getting a few words right
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a sidelong glance a coffee sip a pawn one square
in time it takes fate to turn to aim and miss the kiss which is the truth betrayal hem to mend curtains down a moon to pour across the lake
in as much time as we were made…
The difficult thing about getting a last line right is that the end of a poem needs to resolve all that came before. If a title foreshadows what’s in a poem (in a way that should not be predictable) then a last line sums up and resolves what that poem was about (and likewise in a way that should not be too predictable).
Now – on the page opposite – make that last line you’ve chosen either a first line or a title for a new poem of your own. Alternatively, think of a better line than the one you made to end my poem and write your poem from that.
→ 25 writing towards a last line
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把一系列字詞組合成一首诗。
One of the functions of poetry can be to define or, more likely, to re-define – to give us a new idea of something we thought we already knew. That definition could be short or long, detailed or cursory. Try to define the following in a new and unexpected way:
the sky breakfast light my friend an elephant
It might be easier and more interesting to give a series of definitions. For this purpose we can use a repeated line-start model. Try repeating one of these lines above (or another of your choice) to see if you can make a poem. When a word has a number of meanings then throwing those meanings together can create some interesting juxtapositions. For instance, here are some definitions of the moon found in on-line dictionaries:
the moon is…
the natural satellite of the Earth any object resembling a moona monthto daydreamlight of the Earth’s natural satellitethe smuggler’s enemybright enough to read byto idle in a listless way a religious leader to expose one’s rearany natural object revolving around a planet
Almost a found poem! Though that’s not much of an ending as yet, so more work is required. You could try doing something similar with:
the day is… God is…a mirror…doors… terror…time…
Or put a series of definitions together to make a poem. How much work will the reader have to do to connect the different things or ideas defined in the poem? How much work will the defining do for the reader?
→ 24 the question poem
20 definition
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試著以一種不明顯的方式合併開頭兩個（或更多的）條例作一首詩，那麼，讀者就需要花些力氣才能看出它們當中的聯繫。
Following on from the idea of a poem which is a series of definitions, we can also make a poem in the form of a list. The lines of the poem are like a list of ingredients for a cooking recipe but with a different kind of goal in mind.
Here are some lists you could make which might help you to find a poem.
a list of things I need to doa list of what should have happened yesterday a list of things on the floor which I should pick up a list of apologies I need to make a list of demands a list of things to do only once in lifea list of things never to do no matter how long one lives
Try to make a poem by combining two (or more) lists in a way that will not be obvious at first, so that the reader has to do a little work to see what the connection is. For instance:
a list of feelings and a list of body parts a list of animals and times of day or events in a calendar a list of common verbs and brief descriptions of flowers a list of legal terms and definitions of cloud types a list of x and a list of y
So what is the connection you’ve made? What’s the point of it?
To return to the recipe analogy with which we started – poetry in the form of recipes that could be used for cooking would of course be very useful. Writing reci-poems would be an interesting challenge. Think of it this way: How to make a recipe poetic enough to be a poem? How to make a poem practical enough to cook from? Is it possible to combine these two genres of writing in a single text that works?
→ 94 genre and complexity
21 list poem
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在右面一頁用“我是……”的句子結構來創作謎語。
Riddling is important to the original spirit of poetry in the English language because Old English (Anglo-Saxon), like related Norse languages emerging from the Dark Ages, placed a value on this kind of word puzzle. Let’s take some very old examples of solved riddles or kennings:
the sea is the whale’s way the bench is the tree lain down for sitting water made bone is ice a bone house is a bodychainmail (armour) – a suit of rings waits for a sword’s kiss a storm of swords – a battle
In imitation of this kind of thinking, here’s a riddle by J.R.R. Tolkien, out of the mouth of Bilbo Baggins:
What has roots as nobody sees,Is taller than trees,Up, up it goesAnd yet never grows?The answer is – a mountain.
The easiest way to make a riddle is to
think of the image you want to be guessedlist a number of different ways of looking at it – e.g. synonyms, metaphors for
it, idioms related to itpersonify the image (make it your poem’s persona) – I am… then treat each line as a clue and order the clues so that the evidence for the
correct answer accumulates gradually
It’s important the riddle shouldn’t be too easy to guess but it doesn’t really matter how hard it is to guess – as long as when you’re told the right answer you’re happy to admit that that answer makes sense. Use the I am… form to create your own riddle/s on the page opposite.
Consider some variations on the basic riddle idea:
an untitled poem in the form of a riddle but which actually has no solution (why would you do that?)
a riddle poem where the title is the solution (so the surprise at the end is that there is no surprise (why would you do that?)
a negative riddle (list of things the thing is not)
→ 65 into the forest of signs
22 the riddletitled or untitled (kept or given away)
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選擇某個事物（或幾個事物），在右面一頁以“我是……”為開頭造句，句子數量不限。
One starts writing a riddle by knowing what its answer is. So, with a riddle, from the beginning, there’s a big difference between what the reader knows and what the writer knows. In a riddle, the reader’s job is to guess the right answer from clues the poet has supplied. But imagine writing a poem where you can’t know what the answer is. Imagine writing a poem to find an answer, for instance to a question about who you are. This is another poem we can write by repeating a line beginning with I am…
For inspiration, let’s take a stanza of Henry David Thoreau’s famous poem, ‘I am a parcel of vain strivings tied’:
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their links Were made so loose and wide, Methinks, For milder weather.
There is a riddling quality to this poem but its purpose is something much more subtle than getting the reader to guess who I am. Thoreau’s poem is based on what we can call an extended metaphor. The one metaphor which runs through the whole of the poem involves seeing the persona as a flowering plant. The poem is devoted to understanding what that kind of analogy can tell the reader about the persona. Thoreau’s poem has a happy ending one could say: the persona was worried s/he’d been plucked to put in a vase and wither, but it turns out a kind hand has brought him or her to a strange place alive. So, through a single analogy the poem develops, in outline, a complete philosophy of life. An impressive achievement for a page of writing, and that’s why it’s famous!
Choose something (or things) you can be on the page opposite. Start as many or as few lines as you like with ‘I am…’ Go where the spirit takes you!
→ 84 extended metaphors, conceits – taking things to their logical conclusion
23 another kind of I am… poem
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在右面一頁盡可能多地寫下各種各樣的問題。
The problem with finding answers is that this sometimes leaves us having to work out what the right question should have been. One of the best things a poem can do is to show you the importance of a question you hadn’t thought to ask by yourself. Children ask some questions adults usually wouldn’t think of asking. This can be annoying, especially to the adults they’re asking. When I was a kid I thought the information number in the telephone book was a number you could ask to find out things like the height of Mt Everest. Back then, that was a silly idea (and a waste of money for my parents), but nowadays you can use the internet to ask pretty well any kind of question you’d like.
Children are finding out how the world works, how language works, how they work. The answers are all up for grabs in the child’s mind and that’s why it’s the child’s style of question that often suits the purposes of a poem. If a poem is going to make us see things in a completely new light then it has to ask some fundamental questions of the who am I? who are you?, what’s happening in this place? kind. The question an adult has a good reason not to entertain – why do I have to go to school? – could be very useful for a poem. Some children’s questions seem to be about things but they’re really about words: Why is the sky up? Some are about an apparent mismatch between facts as told and what can be seen: Is the world really turning? Some are about who to be: do I have to wear that?/say that?/do that? Some are the same metaphysical questions which adults have given up asking or trying to answer, because they either know the answer or know that there isn’t one: Is puppy really in heaven? Is granddad? All of these kinds of question can help to make a poem. The question is – how will you throw them together? On the page opposite, throw down as many different kinds of question as you can.
How to convert these materials into a poem? Underline the line that could be the title of the poem. Throw a circle around the first line. Using arrows, see if you can chase your questions around the page until they make a poem.
Gertrude Stein’s last words were reportedly, ‘What is the answer?’ When her companion didn’t give an answer, she went on, ‘In that case, what is the question?’ The whole of a (famous literary) life can point towards the question of what the question ought to be. Good poems often begin by asking you a question you wouldn’t have thought to ask; and good poems often end that way too. And probably they’re not the same question. Neither is necessarily in question form with a question mark at the end to show us. Will it be the same question at the beginning and the end of the poem? From the poet’s point of view – from the point of view of the writing process – it will be useful to distinguish between the question from which a poem comes and the question to which a poem leads. Origin and destination – poems come from somewhere and they’re on their way to somewhere. Getting from one of these to the other is a process of exploration for the author; it should be a process of exploration requiring effort on the part of the reader as well.
→ 49 circles, arrows and crossings out
24 the question poem
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已給出最後一行詩句，請你你完成整首詩。
There’s a question from which a poem comes and there’s a question to which a poem leads. Some readers will find the idea of writing from question to question worryingly indefinite. To help with the writing process, it might be easier to write a question poem if you know what the last question is before you start. That question could be something practical/ philosophical, like What is to be done? Or it could be something more rhetorical, like And why would that be so? Writing to an ending you already know can take a lot of pressure off you as a poet and allow you to focus just on getting to the destination. This exercise is the opposite of Exercise 19; there you were trying to find one line to finish a poem. In this exercise you need to write the poem to get you to a last line which you already know. Here are some last lines to choose from:
to call it a daybest bluelet’s see what’s under that beard a dripping tap this world has a fine set of teeth over the hills away silence of snow
Or make up your own last line and work to get to that. Or use the last line you already made up for my poem. If you’re into a serious challenge then try to write the entire poem backwards, line by line, from the end.
→ 73 an art of knowing and not
25 with a destination in mindwriting towards a last line
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寫幾個跟“如果我……”句子相反的假設，並圈出最好的一句。
This is a very simple exercise where you write a consequence for a hypothetical situation. That imagined consequence then becomes the new hypothetical condition. And so you create a next situation and so on. The first line gives the if, the second line gives the chosen result. For example: If I had a million dollars …I’d travel round the world; or a little more interestingly if the earth were flat… I’d stay away from the edges. Of course, there’s no need to use the I…form for the consequence line: If the sky were made of water, then fish would swim with stars.
Try starting a few lines opposite with ‘If I…’ hypotheticals. Now try to fill the page. Go back and circle the most promising ideas.
This exercise, like a number to follow in the book, is about taking a logical structure and disturbing it in an interesting way. It’s a little like practising the rules so you can have the pleasure of breaking them. This sounds easy, but usually, after inventing about three or four situations, it becomes difficult to think of a consequence and a next link that will really be surprising. One way is to back up the logic by entailing assumptions – If I had a broken wing I’d have to be a bird. Another way would be to give up on any kind of conventional logic; that is, aim directly for nonsense. Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ are a little like this – The gnat that sings his summer’s song/ Poison gets from slander’s tongue. It will be easier to be surprising (and so less of a challenge) if you give up on the idea of linking the situations directly.
It’s also a challenge to end the hypothetical poem; but one trick for doing so will be to change the mode of address, for instance from monologue to dialogue – If I were you… Is that what you’d do too?
→ 30 wishing
26 hypotheticals
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把想出的主意全部誇張化，極端化。
Questions and hypotheses are less definite than statements and for this reason they can have the effect of weakening the impact of a poem. They can water down a poem’s imagery because the make the reader less sure that things mentioned are there. (The same is true of simile compared with metaphor.) Ideas presented in these various ways have a different status from fact. It’s a little like text that is grey instead of black on the computer screen; something’s needed to activate it. That kind of doubt-creation has its uses in a poem though.
Look at the moon and bring it downhold it in your palm and swallow
Now to anyone who’s read a lot of poetry, this won’t be very surprising because it is the kind of surprise poets have been aiming for for quite a long time and all around the world. Back in the Tang Dynasty Li Bai found the moon in his cup of wine and so a drinking companion. Poets have been trying to do new and surprising things in poems for a very long time, so surprise is always more of a challenge. Sometimes, you need to push things along a little further. And the readers of poetry largely expect this. They are prepared to, as Coleridge described it, suspend their disbelief, in other words, to allow in the literary work things they would not accept as true if they were to read them in the newspaper.
The aim of this exercise is to take a thought further than it would normally be allowed to go. Try taking the following ideas to their ‘nth degree’ or logical conclusion, or beyond:
I declare war on socksinvisibility creamit’s very cold so I put on all of my clothes everything with legs starts dancing all the worlds windows are wings and they flyeveryone’s head comes off I can’t stop laughing all the world’s a stage
If you want to see some good examples of poems which take things to and beyond their logical conclusion, read Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘My Shadow’ (from A Child’s Garden of Verses), or Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Or in a completely different vein again, read Gregory Corso’s fifties beat poem, ‘Marriage’.
→ 82 metaphor, 83 simile
27 the poem of the nth degree
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創作一個故事，試順著故事的邏輯作一首詩。
Stretching the imagination is probably poetry’s chief vocation. A large part of that work has to with imagining that things are other than as they are. It means making changes to the world and to things in the world. We all know Franz Kafka’s story ‘The Metamorphosis’ – about a mild mannered clerk who wakes up one morning to find that he’s a big insect. This makes it hard for him to get out of bed and a little embarrassing for him to face the world. You can read a lot into this but it’s important to recognize that bizarre transformation is not something Kafka or the twentieth century invented. They merely gave it a new flavour. In the classical world, the Roman poet Ovid set the standard for stories and poems of this kind with his bumper book of transformations, the Metamorphoses. Metamorphoses is a work of myth; it explains how the world came to be the way it is as we know it (well, as it was known to the Romans two thousand years ago). It explains the changes (people turning into trees and stars and wolves and cows) which tell the story of the gods and of their interactions with humans and the world. It explains why heaven and earth are as they are.
In this exercise your aim is to make a poem by creating a story following through the logical consequences resulting from a transformation. Here are some examples from which you can choose.
I am becoming…
a big insect of unknown make a flea a fish a feather a lamp a car a computer
or
I become a telephone my life as a television – I follow you round the house
More in the spirit of Ovid, you can write a poem to observe rather than experience transformations.
a star comes down to earth in the year of the rabbit only rabbits can speak a penguin turns into a seala whale becomes a donkey (or, thanks to Joni Mitchell) a flock of dead planes turns into butterflies
→ 82 metaphor
28 transformation poems
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用“我會成為……”的句子結構，把自己變成帶有個人性質和互動性質的事物，包括變成他人的事物。你想成為甚麼？诗甚麼？
In this exercise we take the I am becoming… style of transformation we began with in the previous exercise and we use this start to develop something more personal and interactive, something that involves other humans.
I am becoming…
a vegetarian a cannibal a believer in…a callous bastardan addict… a rake…a whale…an optimist a misanthrope
Or, if you prefer something more amorphous and more atmospheric:
I am dissolving … into air… into music …into smoke … into wine
The objective is simple – say what you’re becoming and why. And perhaps explain some of the consequences. Are you wanting to change back again or are you happy with what you’ve become?
29 it’s personal, transformation and point of view
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許十個願，以“我希望……”的形式來造句。
Transformation and wishing are closely related imaginative activities. The difference is that wishing is more personal and usually more positive. A metamorphosis (think of Kafka’s!) might be your worst nightmare; wishing is about what you want. So by writing down your wishes you can get in touch fairly directly with what’s motivating you. This is very helpful for a writer because it helps you to see what you’re interested in doing and being and, perhaps also, what you want to write about.
Let’s start by making ten wishes, just by writing ten lines beginning –
I wish …
Will one of these wishes – or some combination of these wishes – give you a poem?
You can use wishes to imagine a perfect place, a better life for yourself, a better world in general. Wishes can be noble or naughty, monumental or devastating, temporary or permanent, secret or shared. And wishes can go awry as well. Try starting a poem:
Here’s how I wished my life away…
Or here’s a type of poem pioneered for expressing wishes by C.J. Dennis in his A Book for Kids:
I’d like to be a baker, and come when morning breaks,Calling out, ‘Beeay-ko!’ (that’s the sound he makes) -Riding in a rattle-cart that jogs and jolts and shakes,Selling all the sweetest things a baker ever bakes;Currant-buns and brandy-snaps, pastry all in flakes;But I wouldn’t be a baker if ...I couldn’t eat the cakes.Would you?
The turn in a wishing poem will often involve some kind of disappointment, but that might be a way on to other, and possibly better, wishes. The wishes are the most important thing. Wishing is about who you are and what you’d like to have and how you’d like things to be; it’s also about who you’d like to be.
30 wishing
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用自己的三個願望為內容，創作故事，並把你的故事寫成一首詩。
While bodily changes or metamorphoses could be for better or worse, apart from the jealous vindictive kind, wishes tend to be positive. Very often the moral of the transformation story is that you were better off the way you were before you changed, so it’s better just to be who you are. Wishing stories can teach that kind of lesson too.
This is a book about poetry writing, not about story making. But poems often do tell stories, or tell about stories, or have a background that is in a story. Telling a story in a poem is an easy way to create a working structure. The crises in the plot, and the climax and the resolution, provide natural turns for a poem. One of the simplest stories you can tell is the three wishes fairytale. Here’s an example that’s easy to remember.
A woodcutter gets three wishes from an elf who is rewarding him for not cutting down his tree. The woodcutter gets home and tells his wife who, in her eagerness, accidentally wastes a wish by wanting a lot of sausages. The husband, angry at the waste, wishes the sausages up his wife’s nose. He stops himself just before he wishes his own tongue cut out for having been so stupid. The two of them try to tug the sausages out of the wife’s nose but with no luck. The magic is too strong and there is nothing for them to do but to lose the last wish in getting the sausages out of the wife’s nose.
This exercise has a straightforward objective, with two steps. Firstly, create your own three wishes story. The principles to follow are simple. You have three characters, one has the power and a motive to give away three wishes. The other characters make what they will of the wishes which are exhausted by the end of the story. Now turn your story into a poem. In making this conversion, add detail to the setting and character description and try to make challenging turns from the crises in the plot (the wishes and their consequences). Use the line structure of the poem to create a work focused, not on plot, but on a succession of images telling a story.
31 using a three-wishes story to give a poem structure
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改寫上述詩歌，先以第一人稱改寫，再以詩中每一個人物的角度來改寫。
Take your three wishes story-made-poem from the previous page and now rewrite it, in the first person, from the point of view of each of the characters in the poem. Is one of these poems for some reason more interesting than the others? Could these texts be combined in some way? How much of the original story structure do you need, or want to show? How much work do you want your reader to have to do to figure out what the story really was? Or has changing point of view given the material a better interest than the original story/poem?
32 point of view in a story in a poem
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對以自己第一人稱改寫的詩歌發表意見。
A poem can be a story. A story can be from an unexpected point of view. One of the ways of making a poem surprising is to have it told from a surprising angle, from a point of view the reader wouldn’t have anticipated. As a poet, you can create as many voices as you like. You can throw your voice around. The dangerous thing about doing this is that by trying other characters’ voices you might actually lose (or fail to find) your own. Finding a voice of your own is an urgent job for anyone serious about writing poetry.
One of the difficult things for the beginning writer to recognize and accept is that your own point of view can be different from that of others, and that you can have a voice worth hearing. Throwing your voice (trying out characters) is a good way to find the ways with words which will be comfortable for you. But there are more direct methods which might be useful too. One way is to write about where you are, about where you’re from. Back in Exercise 5 (the place poem) we wrote about place but from a more or less objective point of view. The idea was to say what you could see and hear and feel and smell in a place that was familiar to you.
This time let’s have opinions. Let’s start with your opinion about your place. What makes you happy and what annoys you about it? What’s the best thing and what’s the worst thing about this place? Is there something that really needs to be changed? How could yours be a better place… to live, to work, to play?
Next, ask yourself – what do you disagree about with the people around you? (It doesn’t matter that you’ve never told them – a poem is perfect venue for things you can’t bring yourself to say). How you think differently from others will be an interesting source of voice.
Of course you needn’t restrict the topic to any place or anything in particular. Any opinion will do for the purpose of finding your voice. Think of a poem titled, ‘How I think differently from others’. Fill up a page with possibilities, then toss out this terrible title I gave you and think of your own. Use your voice!
One of the difficult and dangerous uses of poetry is to allow you a space that’s your own, in which to find out who you are and in which to be who you want to be. Paradoxically, one way to do this would be to create in poetry a voice which definitely is not yours. Make up a pen-name for this poet who is not you, get a new notebook for the purpose and keep in it poems and jottings and ideas to which you would not wish to put your own name. Knowing what your own writing is different from is one way to find out what it should be.
But the important point is to be who you are! That’s the way to find your voice.
→ 50 cut-ups – become a Dadaist
33 find your own voice by writing from where you are
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描寫一個日常情景。它發生在一個常常被忽略，但你每天都會去或經過的地方。描寫一個非同尋常的情景。
Poets come from somewhere, somewhere in particular. There’s a problem with pretending we’re all from New York City or Paris or Rome or some famous centre that’s cool and groovy to write about and to write from. If you have the inclination to pretend you’re from somewhere else, like in the movies, then give yourself a good slap. Where you are right now is worth hearing from – and even if your basic message is that you don’t want to be right here and right now. It’s very difficult to find your own voice if you’re pretending you’re from somewhere you’ve never been. Borrowing the voices of others where you are will be a much safer method. A fundamental principle of art from the heart is that it has the solid foundation of a context known from personal experience.
People often think that their own places and the things they’re familiar with are a little dull and not really worthy poetically or artistically. It’s somewhere else that’s romantic. And some people have a similar feeling about the detail of their own lives – that their own experience couldn’t be of interest to anyone. But in fact poetry comes from the least likely places – and sometimes as we’ve seen with Basho’s frog pond haiku – from the least crowded, the least popular places. It’s the poet’s vocation to see the poetry that’s everywhere around us and in the least important things. And if you don’t bring this spirit of poetry with you, you’re not very likely to find any, no matter where you look.
This exercise has two parts. First, write about an everyday event happening in a place you go to or pass by every day, an event that would normally go unnoticed. Try to understand its importance, how it fits together with everything else that happens in the place, in the day. Consider different points of view from which this event could be seen. Consider how it might need to be explained to an outsider. Craig Raine’s ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ is a helpful model for this kind of poem.
The second part of the exercise is to write about an event that doesn’t happen every day. That could be something human generated, for better (a party, a procession) or for worse (a robbery, a fire). It could be something natural imposed on an urban environment; Consider the title of Les Murray’s ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’. Or it could be something unnatural imposed in a pristine place – the chainsaws coming to take down a tree.
Which of these two sets of materials will make for a better poem? Or can they be combined in some way?
→ 80 poems of the moment
34 events in the everyday
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想象你是一個錢幣。
This is another point of view exercise, helping you to see the world from a view distinct from, but related to, your own. Imagine you’re a penny – think of all the pockets you’ll be in, of all the hands that will hold you. Think of the things you’ll be exchanged for, how you’ll be treasured by some, by others disdained. Will you fall out of pockets? Be lost down drain grates? Make that a dollar or a euro today. This exercise was – after ‘a day at the beach’ – the creative writing exercise of choice in my early schooldays. Why was this exercise popular with teachers? Simple. It was an easy way to activate the imagination. It’s not so hard to imagine that you’re a coin and to see the world in motion around you from that point of view. This kind of journey story tends to be readable too – it offers the particular journey that anyone can relate to.
Staying with the idea of a local setting, a local flavour, give the story of the coin’s travels the character of your place and you give it some of your character and your voice. And of course there are alternatives to the coin or the dollar note. Why not write of a dog’s travels in the day, or of a cat’s. Why not write from the point of view of a cockroach or a bee? Or of a stolen phone trying to find a good home? It’s not too difficult to imagine the coin as a character. After all, coins usually have heads on them. And it’s not such a stretch of the imagination to put words in the mouth (or the head) of an ant or a mosquito. They do have heads and mouths after all.
Poems themselves come from somewhere and have their own destination. That ‘from somewhere’ isn’t just about other great poems or what you’re seeing or overhearing on the bus. One of the places poems are from is… call it the heart or the soul, the special thing or place or whatever-it-is that makes you you and that makes your experience and opinion different from everyone else’s. Everyone has unique knowledge, and this kind of difference from everyone else is an excellent subject for poetry. The problem is how to make it speak interestingly to others. From particular experience to the general reader… that’s the usual way a poem needs to go.
→ 88 anthropomorphism
35 revealing the unseen journey – a penny for your thoughts
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想像“我”在乒乓球裏的生活。
The other exercise – which was used for punishment purposes when I was young – but which frankly has always fascinated me, was ‘my life inside a ping pong ball’. The idea comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who opined that he could be bound in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space… were it not that he had bad dreams. The idea is simply that of being contained (a prisoner somehow) and of being left to one’s own meditative resources. The fantasy is of a place that is pure mind. Or you can think of it as solipsism – the creation of a world in which only you exist.
What words can you find to describe the experience of finding yourself ?
inside a ping pong ballunder this skyin the coffinon the moonover the moonin a cheap little hotel room at the end of a rope down a well up a tree in the first circle of hell peering out of a coffee cup
Of course some of these places are proverbial and can be taken symbolically. But try nevertheless to imagine the reality of the situation.
→ 85 de-automatising (literalising)
36 inside a ping pong ball
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如果你現在可以扔下所有事務，你會去哪一個特別的地方？
Time to get out of the ping pong ball, to climb out of that whiskey tumbler and breathe fresh air again. Fresh air! That’s what the words in poetry can be after the stale round of language served up all around us day in day out without much care or attention. Here’s another paradox. Poetry’s two main sources are in tradition and in the everyday use of words. And yet both of these can be dulling influences; it’s their dullness that makes poetry both necessary and possible. Without the ‘other uses of language’ how would poetry be different? It’s been a popular idea in ages past (for instance for philosophers like Vico and Herder) that the first languages of humans were what we would call poetry. Certainly, the first literary forms are poetry and what we call prose fiction is a relatively late developer. But poetry today is, by and large, quite different from what people are speaking on the street or what you read in the newspaper.
Poetry makes things new. It makes new words and collocations (groupings) from words that have been dulled in everyday use. As the Russian Formalists said, poetry makes the stone stony again! Here’s another paradox – poetry is grounded in the here-and-now but it’s also a convenient way with words to organize your escape from the here-and-now. To speak or write poetically is to transport a listener or a reader out of their present into another place and time, or perhaps to somewhere out of time and space as we know them. A lot of poems and songs focus quite directly on the idea of escape. Take for example, Bob Dylan’s ‘Any day now, I shall be released’, or Bob Seger’s, ‘If I ever get out of here, I’m going to Kathmandu’.
Back in Exercise 30 we thought up wishes and some of those were doubtless wishes for escape, for adventure, to be in a better place. In this exercise, we focus on the other place. W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, begins with the line, ‘I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree’. Yeats’ persona then goes on to describe how ‘peace comes dropping slow’ in such a place, in nature and out of the cares of everyday life.
Where’s the special place you’d go, if you could drop everything, right now? Use the skills you’ve developed to make your reader’s experience of that place as powerful and as poetic as possible.
→ 98 here be dragons
37 life at large – dreams of escape
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描述一個“入口”。
How to get to another world? In fantasy fiction the way is usually through some kind of a magic door or portal. Sometimes the description of that portal is the most fascinating and poetic part of the experience. The portal often shows us the way between a world which resembles our real world and a world which is clearly of fantasy. Portals can take all sorts of forms and be found in all sorts of places. In the Alice novels of Lewis Carroll, our girl protagonist dreams herself through. Or that’s one way of looking at what happens. From the point of view of the waking world, Alice is asleep. But inside the dream world there was a way Alice came. In Alice in Wonderland that portal is a rabbit hole, in Through the Looking Glass the portal is the mirror Alice steps through. In the famous 1930’s children’s film The Wizard of Oz the protagonist, Dorothy’s, means of getting to the other world is a cyclone. A cyclone might be a convincing method for sweeping a character unexpectedly away, one wouldn’t want to rely on a cyclone to bring that character home. And so it is with Dorothy. Her whole story is – like the journey of the ancient Odysseus, in the famous story named after him – motivated by the desire to get home. She eventually does it with a magic spell, just clicking her heels together and repeating three times, ‘there’s no place like home’. She’s able to do this because she’s learnt the lesson of the story.
In this exercise, describe a portal. It could be a door leading down into the earth or a staircase that disappears in clouds. It could be a cave which opens and closes with a boulder at its mouth, perhaps with a magical command. It could be a phone box or a magic chair or an extra platform at a railway station. It could be a painting you walk into. Describe the portal in as much detail as possible and describe the world it leads you to. Describe how you get home.
→ 69 framing
38 portals – doors to other worlds
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著手寫一個“白日夢日記”，幻想你把白日夢都放在一個飛毯上，任其自由飛翔。
Wishing is about what you want and so it’s closely related not only to what motivates you in life more generally but to one of the great motors of the imagination – the dream life. That’s probably why dream has two meanings in English, as in many languages – there’s the kind of dream you have when you’re sleeping and there’s the kind that’s to do with planning the future. Your dream in this second sense is what you want to do, it’s a kind of well-made wish. Between these two there’s the day dream, in which Sigmund Freud was very interested, and which is really the result of a failure to concentrate when you should be sitting up and paying attention (for instance in the poetry class). The daydream is a drifting off but where some of the rules of daylight still logic apply. According to Freud the main function of dreams is to fulfill our wishes, wishes which might not so easily come true in real life. That’s how dreams can sort out for us what needs sorting out in everyday life.
Your dream diary (started back in Exercise 8) should now have quite a few entries and these should be very useful for making poems because dreams are full of the unexpected things – combinations of words and images – which can make a poem work.
In this exercise you start a daydream diary. Whether you keep that in the same book as your other dream diary is up to you. But let’s practise on the page opposite first. Pen in hand, let your mind wander wherever it will. Allow what’s called a stream-of-consciousness. Put your imagination on a flying carpet and let it go where it will. And write it all down as you go! That’s a hard thing for many people to do at first if only because writing – of any sort – seems to them a supremely conscious activity. How could you possibly write in an unconscious way? Probably you have some experiences to help you. The memory of dreams is one such experience, but another is the fact that sometimes when you’re sleepy you don’t make much sense. The hypnagogic state is something people often experience when they have jetlag. It’s when you can see dream imagery, imagery which you cannot control, but you’re conscious enough to be able to describe. If you’re able to experience a hypnagogic state, then you might find yourself receiving some poems (or parts of poems) for free. The words (or images) will just present themselves to you. It’s just a matter of remembering them long enough to write them down or to record them in some way. It might be annoying to wake yourself from the reverie in order to write down what you see, but you’ll thank yourself later for the effort if something good comes of it. Consider writing a poem titled, ‘journey to sleep’.
→ 91 perruque
39 dreams for better and worse
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作一些大膽瘋狂的聲明，把它們寫下來。
In her thesis Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva wrote about the logic of modern poetry being different. The logic we use in an essay or in daily conversation when we think we’re being logical, is what can be called the logic of yes or no. It’s a logic where either one thing is right or the other thing is right. Kristeva calls this bivalent logic. But poetry, for Kristeva, uses what she calls ambivalent logic, where two things can be right at the same time or where it just doesn’t matter or make any sense to talk about what’s right or wrong. There are some great examples of ambivalent logic in popular literature. Take for example the beginning of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities – ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. Keats thought that, for the making of poetry, an ambivalent state of mind which he called ‘negative capability’ was a necessary stage. Keats defined it as ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.’ One could think of this as a phase of active receptivity in which the raw materials of poetry are not disturbed by any effort to make judgements about what works and what doesn’t in a poem.
This pre-judgemental stage in the making of art has much in common with the logic of dreams which don’t make sense when you tell them back after waking. Dreams are full of non sequiturs – things which logically don’t follow. You’re walking down a hillside path and then you’re on a train. You didn’t get there, you’re just there. There was no problem about this when you were in the dream though and often the same thing is true in the poem. In a poem, as on a cinema screen, sudden changes of scene and of imagery are acceptable. No doubt dreams are the model for this kind of thing. As in the dream logic, so with the logic of the poem; and this idea is useful both for reading and for writing poetry because it helps us to stop judging our own and other’s poetic ideas by the daylight waking standard.
Make a list of wild claims. For instance:
one day the rain will never stop writing is the work of devilsthat the earth is a bubble and it will burst
Make a list of pedestrian claims. For instance:
spiders have eight legsNeil Armstrong was the first man on the moonthe Pope’s Catholic
Find ten very different images or scenes from poems you’ve written so far. Now throw in some plot from one of your story poems. Is there a way to connect the wild and the pedestrian in a way that seems to make some kind of crazy sense?
Now, take one of the following two line starts and, using the material you’ve developed above, write an ambivalating poem. (See Exercise 76 for more on this.)
I love you, I hate you…It’s the truth and it’s a lie…
→ 73 writing without a destination
40 ambivalent logic – non sequitur play
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列出你想說的事情，你想做的聲明，你希望和別人分享的信條。列出你需要說或揭露的事情。
Exercises like the last one can leave you feeling confused and frustrated. They can leave you feeling as if the dictionary and the daily papers and everything in life and everything in your head had been poured into a blender and pulped – and you were the one with the job of cooking whatever it was that came out. Sometimes you wonder – what’s the point of it all? A very good question in general, and one on which poets will generally disagree. I’ll stick my neck out here and say that the purpose of blending and pulping and pouring is precisely to shake things up, to see what there is needs shaking up in this world, so to see the world with fresh eyes. A poet’s purpose is to get others to see the new vision, the new world, she’s been able to dream up through the skilful use of her imagination. Still, the idea of shaking up might in itself be a little too vague to be useful. And doesn’t the shaking up need to have a purpose, some direction, a goal?
Back in Exercise 11 we made a list of topics, of things you wanted a poem to be about. Now it’s time to make a list of things you’d like to say, claims you’d like to make, beliefs you’d like others to share. This isn’t so much a list of what the poem’s about as of what the poem is there to show or to prove.
So – what do you want to say? What do you want to prove? What’s the point you need to make? What’s the message the world needs to hear from you? On the page opposite make a list of things that need saying, of truths to tell.
41 What do you want to say?
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寫下十個你不喜歡的事實。
Remember the don’t tell me! show me! principle we established back in Exercise 6? The danger with telling the world what the world needs to know is that you can end up writing a sermon instead of a poem. Now it’s true a poem could take the form of a sermon and a sermon could be in the shape of poetry. But it’s probably a good idea to keep these genres separate if you can. Preaching works because the people who come to hear a sermon want to be convinced of the kind of thing they expect to hear. They’re the converted, they’re already in agreement. The better sermon is one, which like a poem, will be challenging and surprising for the listener. But a poem could be about anything and it could be from any point of view. So part of the work of a poem is to persuade by means more subtle than a sermon would usually use. A successful poem leads you to a truth you hadn’t known before. It doesn’t bash the truth into your head with a sledgehammer. Or as Louis Zukovsky wrote in his book A Test of Poetry – ‘poetry convinces not by argument but by the form it creates to carry its content’.
Karl Marx is said to have claimed that with twenty six tin letters the world could be conquered. With the printing press ideas could be spread that could change the minds of people everywhere. Percy Shelley claimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He meant that poets are the ones who create visions of how things could be – they make things possible through the process of invention. Changes come to be only after they have first been imagined; and it’s the poets who do the imagining. That kind of imagining can be a lot more useful (and much more fun) than simply complaining about the way things are.
Write down ten true statements about the world today which are not to your liking. Now cross them out and replace them with positive statements which you wish were true.
Take a map of the world (or your part of it) and cross out the names of the countries whose governments you think are bad. Rename those countries to fix the problem.
In the new countries you’ve created distribute the new facts you’ve invented. What kind of ending could you make for a poem like that?
Now, in this poem, you may be creating an ironic version of the world – a world which isn’t at all. But that kind of irony can be very helpful in getting people to see what the problem is. Seeing the problem is always a large part of the solution. And much more subtly persuasive than bashing anyone over the head with a heartfelt opinion.
→ 45 bearing witness
42 the pen is mightier than the sword
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讓我們做一回上帝，開始創作：“第一天……”
No better way to see a world with fresh eyes than to make it your work to make your own world. In a sense that’s what free will is in life – we make a world to suit ourselves. Vicente Huidobro’s ‘Ars Poetica’, ends with the line, ‘The poet is a little god’. This sums up the story nicely – the poem is a world of its own and the poet is its maker. Consider the example of Miroslav Holub’s famous poem ‘In the Microscope’:
Here too are the dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song.
Here too are cemeteries,fame and snow.And I hear the murmuring,the revolt of immense estates.
Huidobro writes: ‘Oh Poets, why sing of roses!/ Let them flower in your poems’. For Huidobro poetry should be a key to open a thousand doors. Why bother preaching at people, when as we saw in the last exercise, you can go direct and simply make your own world. That world could be paradise on earth (or elsewhere) and it could be hell; it could be a combination of both – a Frankenstein’s monster of a place patched together from times and places known and from lived experience. Fantasy fiction is the most obvious venue for such world making – Narnia, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea are just a few well known examples.
There are all kinds of ways of making worlds and of changing worlds. In Judith Wright’s poem ‘Legend’, a boy goes out with a rifle and with violent intentions but comes back with a rainbow slung over his shoulder as a trophy. In this poem, it’s as if a tale has turned and the rite of passage that would normally involve killing has become a celebration of peace. This is because the poem’s boy protagonist acknowledges the truth of what his heart foretold.
For your poem which is the world of which you are god – let’s start with creation. On the first day…
Or draw a map of the world you want to make. Name the continents and seas. Create a kingdom. And a poem that explains it all.
A world doesn’t have to be round or spinning through space; it needn’t be represented by a map. It could be any shape at all; it could have any kind of motion, or none. How to represent it? Imagine the world is something written and/or drawn on a piece of paper and – using a pen and paints or coloured pencils – just make it whatever you like.
Or let’s imagine a few of Huidobro’s one thousand doors. Poetry is the key. You’re the god of the poem. Describe three of the doors and what’s behind each. Or perhaps we’ll never know?
43 being a little god
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In making a world in a poem, remember the only limit is your imagination, but if your poem is to be read and understood – if the poem is to communicate – then you also need to take into account the limits of your reader’s imagination.
→ 90 poetry as a foreign language
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用這個結構寫一首詩：“如果我沒有……那麼我就會……”
We make a world to suit ourselves, but we make it from the materials available to us. In poetry, we make something new but with the words we have inherited from humanity’s great conversation up until now. We make what we can but we can never be sure what the consequences of our efforts will be. Poems are worlds in themselves and so they can run by their own logic, as is the case in dreams. In dreams normal relations of cause and effect frequently do not apply. Everything seems reasonable to the dreamer while she’s dreaming, but when she wakes up, she wonders how it could have made sense. As we’ve seen with Kristeva’s ambivalent versus bivalent logic, the sense of dreams is different from what one might call common sense. But it’s interesting that the dreamer never really asks why. She just accepts the story as we tend to do when we watch a movie on a television or on a cinema screen. Still, dreamers are the most credulous of readers. Poems can have some of the hypnotic effects dreams have but it’s important to remember that poems are read by people who are awake.
In dreams many events seem to have no cause and no consequence. The normal chains of logic are broken. In waking life, one makes one’s way in the world but causes do have consequences. There are reasons why things happen. Those reasons are however often concealed, for instance by other things which seem more important, by powerful interests, or by the passage of time. A poem can witness those unseen causes. Let’s take an example of a chain of consequences in a simple anonymous children’s poem:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.For want of a shoe the horse was lost.For want of a horse the rider was lost.For want of a rider the battle was lost.For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.And all for thw want of a horseshoe nail.
The moral of the story? If you don’t take care of the little things then don’t be surprised if the big things go bung. The poem gives us a model of a logical progression from small to great. It’s a natural turn in a poem like this for the last line to close the circle by taking us back to the first line, to neatly tie up the story. Write a poem on the page opposite with this form:
If I hadn’t … then If I hadn’t … then (for as many lines as you need) … if only I hadn’t…
You needn’t stick with I – you could use any pronoun (you, s/he, they) or agent (the company, the party, the uncles).
Cause and consequence are fundamental to the logic of daily events and of the beliefs of people participating in them. They’re important in religion (karma in Buddhism, ‘do unto others…’ in Christianity), they’re important in law (crime leads to punishment). A poem needn’t make sense the way an essay or a news report has to, so take a look again at what you’ve written and ask yourself, is there much of a challenge in these ideas for a reader? If the answer is no, then rewrite and make it a
44 one thing leads to anothercause and effect
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little stranger and more surprising than what you’d originally written. Does what you’ve written this second time round still make sense? Does it make the point you’d wanted to make starting out? Or are you now telling a different story? Then which of the two ideas is the more interesting and which is the more important thing to say?
→ 73 an art of knowing and not Write here ↓
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世界上有甚麼被忽略了？甚麼事物需要人們多看一眼才能被發覺？甚麼事物需要被闡明？
Thinking back to Exercise 41 (what do you want to say?), one realizes that a lot of what poetry has to say has to do, not with dreaming, but with waking people up – waking them up in the sense of making them realize what’s happening all around them. Poetry is the perfect vehicle for revealing what’s been called the ‘boiling frog scenario’. Here’s how that story goes. Try to throw a frog into a pot of boiling water and it will do all it can to jump out and away as quickly as it can. Put a frog in tepid water and heat it up gradually and you can boil it alive. If the change is gradual enough the frog will simply go along with it all until it’s cooked. Now this parable has been used to explain what’s happening with pollution and environmental destruction worldwide. Global warming brings disaster weather but somehow at election time politicians manage to distract voters from what’s happening so people go on voting for whoever they think will tax them less. Describing a ‘boiling frog scenario’ is just one example of the way a poem or a story can witness important stuff that otherwise goes unseen.
Traditionally, and in many cultures, poetry brings revelation and epiphany to its readers. Haiku often presents a reader with what’s called a satori – the slap in the eye realization prized in Zen Buddhism. Epiphany and satori both mean suddenly seeing what was staring you in the face all along. It was there in front of you but somehow you weren’t paying attention or you didn’t know how to see it.
Poetry has a vocation to witness what’s otherwise missed in the world. One thread through this book has to do with paying attention to where you are and what’s happening around you. In the haiku and here-and-now exercises we practised observation as an art. But now we can put that art of practice to a specific use – bearing witness to events, situations, stories which people don’t know or understand but should. So, for this exercise, ask yourself – What goes unnoticed in the world? What do people need to look at again, to notice? What needs to be explained? What needs to be shown?
Start with something bad or wrong, something you feel strongly about – something that happened to you or to someone you know. Or something that you read about and think people should know about.
The more reality and the less preaching there is in your testimony, the better. Let your reader make up her own mind about the picture you present. And do some fieldwork. If your aim is to uncover injustice, then go where it’s happening. Go to a demonstration or a rally, sit in the public gallery of the law courts where the injustice is taking place. Make notes if they’ll let you. Or maybe you don’t have time to do this? Then another great source of human interest stories is the newspaper. Cut out the story that interests you, paste it in your notebook, and make notes around it. Try out a few different voices to choose the one that will be best for the poem.
But remember, you’re not writing a news report. Perhaps you’re writing the sort of thing the news wouldn’t or couldn’t report, or you’re writing from a point of view that wouldn’t get into the news (for instance, the victim’s or the criminal’s or the fly on the wall’s point of view). Or you’re writing in a way a journalist wouldn’t think to write. That’s because you’re getting your reader to see what she couldn’t see before she read your poem.
→ 68 the meaning of things – the voices under
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給自己一個關於寫詩的座右銘。
Before we get carried away with making new worlds or witnessing the problems of this one, let’s take a look at ourselves, at our own immediate situation. One of the functions of poetry writing is to help you think through things in a way you wouldn’t normally. This re-visioning process, of taking a second look, can be a healthy way to get a better perspective of your situation. If you can’t help yourself with poetry then how can your poems help anyone else? In this poem you make some simple resolutions or affirmations for yourself. It’s called instructions for myself or everyday mantra. Choose one of the following line starts to repeat, or choose a selection:
I am…I am going to be…every day I will…every morning…before I go to bed…before I have breakfast…tomorrow I will… I should… I can… I must… If I’m still able tomorrow, I’ll… I know I have to… and the day after… and the day after that…
Now finish the poem with a reason why you are doing these things which you’ve resolved to do.
→ 93 the rant
46 resolutions and affirmations
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假設你知道自己將會被困荒島，列出十樣你會帶上的東西。你會怎樣利用它們？
One flipside of being a little god making a poem is being stuck inside the ping pong ball. But there are lots of places where one can feel like a prisoner. Sometimes one can escape (or plan an escape) and sometimes one simply has to focus on making the best of a bad situation. Now let’s imagine a situation where you really need to help yourself.
Let’s say you’re stuck on a desert island. Make a list of the ten objects you’d bring with you if you had a choice. What uses would you make of these things?
Now make a list of ten things you can find on the island and the kinds of uses you make of these. There have never been any humans on this island, so nothing you find was meant for human use. So what things do you find and how can you use them?
Try to combine objects and uses from the two lists to make a poem. That poem could tell a story of survival, or of the failure to survive, or maybe the story won’t have an ending yet.
Naturally the same rules can be used for a poem about any situation in which you are isolated and so have to make do without the equipment you’d usually take for granted. Space travel and time travel would be obvious story genres to consider. There are plenty of examples to choose from for models for stories of this kind – from Homer’s Odyssey or Sheakespeare’s The Tempest to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Science fiction commonly replicates the kinds of problems those stories present. The idea of finding unintended uses for objects helps to mirror a core function of poetry – the recycling of words for purposes which could not have been anticipated before their new environment was built. As the great theorist Roman Jakobson wrote, poetry’s functional focus is on the message itself – that’s to say, unlike every other use of language, poetry’s job is to play with itself. This kind of play requires space and time and even if these have to be imagined.
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收集及排列被世界丟棄的事物。
Imagine a shop in which none of the things for sale could be used for an intended purpose, but all could be used for something else. It wouldn’t matter why you bought anything, when you got it home you’d find something else to do with it. Likewise it wouldn’t matter why an inventor or a manufacturer produced the item; when you saw it on the shelf you would have a different idea of the object’s value, place, use.
This exercise has four steps:
create a shopping listdescribe the objects you find in the shop and say which you buy what do you do with these objects when you get them home? compare these uses with the shopping list you made to begin with
Of course you might prefer to write a poem about the shop itself, perhaps a monologue in the voice of the shopkeeper? Or perhaps you’d like to describe a house equipped entirely in this unpredictable way? Whichever way you choose to go, you’ll be writing a poem that is at least partly reflexive – that is a poem that is about the process of poetry or of art more generally. Art that survives from generation to generation survives because it suits the present conditions of those who appreciate it or make use of it. Poetry is makeshift thinking because language is the sort of tool with and of which you can’t be completely aware while you’re making use of it. The sportsman doesn’t decide how to hit the ball or which foot to put after the other. S/he’s done these things well or indifferently before s/he’s had time to think of it. The poem – like every other use of language – has to make do with the techniques for meaning which are in the reader’s and writer’s repertoire. Because – especially modern –poetry is up against the limits of what’s possible and also the limits of awareness of the possible, readers are struck by its improvisatory manner. Being just about at the point where words fail us, poetry – however beautiful and apt it may be – retains a quality of making do with words, making do with how they can mean together.
We’ve looked at a lot of things poetry does and discussed already quite a few functions for it; but it’s true poetry lacks a purpose in the sense that a speech or a newspaper article or an advertisement has a function, has something specific to achieve. In poetry things are freer than that. In poems, the pre-determined purposes of words are put on hold while we find out just what it is they’re capable of. That freedom is like the collaboration of the sea and the beachcomber: to wash and smooth and gather and arrange (sometimes beautiful) objects the world has discarded.
→ 100 what is poetry?
48 nothing for the purpose intended
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寫出你想用在詩中的字詞，完成詩歌後，劃去用不上的，圈起用得上的，並用箭頭把圓圈連起來。
We’ll save the deep and meaningfuls about what poetry is or can be for later in the book. Let’s practise some gathering and arranging now. In several exercises so far (1, 9), we’ve focused on selecting words for use in poems. Now it’s time to play a little with practical methods of organizing the words you’ve chosen. The purpose of this exercise is to help you practise being brave with a pen. On this page add to the list of words below words you’d like to use in a poem. Then cross out words you don’t want, circle words you do want and draw arrows to show where the words should go.
donkey bounce into suntan
deliver green surround
courage as muck
of breath balloon by gone
vermillion the the the so much so that
retract a in the end
over mind as much as common tell
blue far lap go run see make
sea sky wave into myself
beyond yacht happy horizon
sand shell sail climb cup carry
a terrible gunwale just as into on
o’clock before water paper scissors
stone agree sun blessing very more than
jump no matter grief definite laugh
host fancy dog hello eyes abrupt ink
all dark set some sweat bell tower
On the page opposite, now try to write out your poem. Don’t be limited just to the words on this page. Let the lines and the ideas flow!
→ 96 recycling / editing
49 circles, arrows and crossings out
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找出你想要的文章，把你喜歡的字、短語或句子剪出來。然後在桌子上或白紙上整理這些資料，直到你認為可以排出一首詩為止。
This is basically the same exercise as the previous one, but this time you need to select your own sources for the words you’re going to use. You have to decide which kinds of words would like to throw together. The whole thing will feel more authentic if you use scissors to cut up words the way the Dadaists used to when they made their cutup or collage poems early in the twentieth century.
The procedure is simple. You find the texts you want. You cut them up into words or phrases or clauses or whatever units of text suit your purpose. Then you play with arranging the cut-up words on a desk or a blank piece of paper. Keep playing until you think you’ve got a poem. You might want to photocopy the texts you’re using, rather than actually cut up pages out of books. If you want to be eco-friendly about the whole thing, then just do it paper-free on your computer. The act of physically cutting up words from paper need only be an example of how to get going on a technique we might more generally call collage – the bringing together in a new work of diverse elements from others. How random that process can or should be is another question, one for you to decide on, case-by-case in the circumstances.
What to cut up? Think in terms of genre. The more varied the texts you use, the greater the chances are that the results will be effortlessly surprising. So maybe poetry or work from several poets, a newspaper, an encyclopedia, a letter from a friend, the next thing that arrives in your mailbox.
How likely is this technique to result in the creation of a poem in which anyone would be interested? Let’s take an example. One of the most famous literary hoaxes of the twentieth century was the creation of the recently deceased poet, Ern Malley, a scam perpetrated in the 1940s by two Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart. To cut a long story short, these two young poets were unhappy with the direction Modernist poetry was taking. They thought it was becoming incoherent rubbish. So they decided to write some incoherent rubbish of their own to parody what was being published at the time and to make fun of the people who were publishing it. They used parts of their own poems they’d thought unsuccessful and they cut up words from the Oxford dictionary, Shakespeare’s works, a book of quotations and a rhyming dictionary (they were trying to find the worst rhymes). With these materials they set to work to make the worst poems they possibly could. Result? Their poems were accepted by the sucker-publisher they’d selected to send them to, the hoax was uncovered and everyone involved was instantly famous, none more so than the fictional Ern Malley. McAuley and Stewart were each to become well known poets in their own right, but neither has achieved the lasting fame of their fictitious creation. Ern Malley is universally acknowledged one of the most important Australian poets of the twentieth century. The moral of the story? Good poets can’t help but make interesting poems, the kind that speak from one generation to the next. Trying to write rubbish makes them even more interesting.
→ 97 scribimus lectionem non damus
50 cut-ups – become a Dadaist
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翻看以往的練習，在右面一頁列出你你認為最好的作品，做成目錄。
Congratulations on reaching the halfway point in this book. You’ve come a long way. Probably at this stage, you’ve got a lot of raw material and a lot of practice poems, a lot of lines and stanzas and titles you like, beginnings and endings – but perhaps you’re not entirely sure which poems they are for. Probably you’re worried that what you’ve collected so far seems a little chaotic. What McAuley and Stewart were probably most worried about when they set up their Ern Malley hoax was that modern poetry had descended into senseless chaos of the kind you’re producing – no rhyme and no reason. Poems like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with its many sources and languages and plots, they saw as pointlessly pretentious – work that went nowhere. But Eliot’s famous poem reflected the pointlessness of a world going nowhere; as such it was a mirror of its immediate context. The century went on to revere Eliot and Ern Malley. That doesn’t mean McAuley and Stewart were wrong. But as Nietzsche said, out of chaos comes forth sometimes a dancing star. It’s understandable that, Eliot’s The Waste Land, being about the chaos of Europe after the Great War, paradoxically finds its organizing principle in chaos. The art of every age is, among other things, a mirror.
But let’s move on to the dancing star which we hope might come from the chaos. Many of the poems you’ll have made in this book so far are artificial in the sense that they’re very dominated by structure. You won’t find too many poems published that consist entirely of questions or where every line starts with the same words. So while these ways of working are convenient for exercises to get you started, it’s difficult to make a really good poem from such strict limits. You have to find your own style and your own voice as a poet by connecting in your own way the various tricks you’ve got up your sleeve. Remember Felix the cat? Whenever he had a problem or a puzzle to solve he reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out just the right thing. Felix was a visual poet of the highest order. Felix did it with two dimensional black and white objects on a flat screen. You need to use words to give your reader colour in three dimensions. And you need to have enough tricks up your sleeve to have the right one for the job at hand.
So what is the job at hand? Try to think beyond the drafts and odds and ends you’ve collected so far – to think what you could write a book of poems about. No need to be too ambitious to begin with. Think in terms of a chapbook – that’s a small book of say twenty to thirty poems, which could be loosely or tightly connected, depending on what you’re wanting to do.
Look back over the pages of this book and collect the best titles and poem ideas on the page opposite. Make a draft contents list. Is there an order in which the poems ought to go? Or are you actually writing one long poem in sections?
Have you got a possible title for the book? Is there a line which sums up what the book’s aim would be? If so then that will become the title poem of the book. Your job now is to work on that title poem and to get it as complete as you can. That may be the guide to helping you finish the rest of the book.
→ 60 choosing a familiar form
51 reaching into your bag of tricks
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一首詩已給出開頭和結尾，你只需在詩中重複以“它所需的時間……”為旋律結構，完成詩歌。
Starting on putting a whole book together can be a little scary, especially if you feel that you haven’t really got many or any poems finished yet. So let’s do something about that right now. Let’s use the skills and materials you’ve gathered so far to make a quite straightforward poem, one which has already been modeled for you and for which you’ve already written an ending.
Back in Exercise 19, you had what seemed like a relatively easy job – just to write the last line to my poem, which had the repeated line-start in the time it takes… Now go back and find your end line (and feel free to change it if you like). Ignore everything I’d written. Now your job is to write your own complete poem. Find your own way. You’ve got a beginning, in the time it takes… and some rhythm-structure out of that repetition, you’ve got an ending of your own, so now you just need to write the lines in between. That’s what the blank space opposite is for!
Let’s take this particular form a little further. This practice at making a complete poem is a portable exercise. In the time it takes… is a start for a poem focused on the moment and attention to its possibilities, but you could do something similar with a place idea – in this chair where she sat… There are many possibilities. Now you’ve got your own model, try some variations. Here are some examples to consider:
in the space a postage stamp takes up…in these few words I want to say… in this garbage bin… in this tiny mind of mine… in this one hand I hold…
Note that the repetition structure you have in the models I’ve given may not be necessary at all to your poem. It’s just a rhythm to get you started.
→ 89 grammar games, prepositions play
52 in the time it takes
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贈詩與詠物詩都有一個自然的形式。讀者會知道你想說甚麼。
Let’s try a few more exercises designed to maximize your chances of producing a whole poem draft in a single sitting. The first of these is the apostrophe. An apostrophe is simply an address in the form of a poem. It could be (like a letter or an email) to a person, usually absent, or it could be a text addressed to God or your dog or a headache or a cloud or a star. The apostrophe is usually a form of monologue with an imagined audience of one. And it’s often the case (as in the list above) that the one member of the imagined audience is in fact for some reason or other unable to listen. The poem which is an address to someone or something has a natural form. You know what you want to say. Or at least you know how you want to start, what your message to begin with is. Here are a few examples:
Listen sun, you’re too hot for here. My advice is…Can’t you take yourself for a walk? You’re a dog, you’ve got legs.
Throw yourself a stick…A little brighter please moon, I’m trying to write a poem to you…Stop pounding head, I’m trying to think…O computer – give me my time back – I’ve waited too long for you…
Now you just need the words to go on to find the rest of what you want to say. Here’s a list of some famous apostrophes you can easily find to give yourself some models:
‘Milton’ by William Wordsworth‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ by Lord Byron‘O Captain! My Captain!’ by Walt Whitman‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne
And here are some poem starts you might find useful for your own apostrophe:
Or to bring things a little more up-to-date, consider, Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem, ‘America’.
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war?
Why not address your nation. I’m sure you have some good questions which deserve an answer!
53 apostrophewho do you want to talk to?
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敘述你人生中最重要的轉折點。
Exercises 31, 32 and 34 suggest ways of telling stories or relating events that could provide materials for a poem. Many other exercises in this book encourage you to imagine situations to generate a story. The point of these exercises is to provide you with a ready structure for a poem in the form of a narrative. Easiest of all to work with though is the story only you can tell. It might be painful but the specialness of your knowledge gives the telling added urgency. And you already know all the details. In this exercise tell the story of:
a fire a flood a famine a fight an escape
It could be the story of a crime – like a rape or a robbery or a murder or some other kind of violent attack. Writing (or talking) about these things can be a way of working through troubling memories so as to find some kind of resolution (or closure). And writing through troubles can also be a way of producing some excellent poetry. Much of Sylvia Plath’s later work is in this category. Or there is the poetry produced by victims and victim/survivors of the WWII Holocaust. The poetry of Paul Celan, of Miklos Radnóti, of Primo Levi provides powerful examples. War poetry of soldiers like Rupert Brooks and Wilfred Owen likewise crystallizes personal torment into experience that lives on as a warning to all who think war might be the answer. Increasingly the poetry of refugees and other displaced persons provides the world with a mirror of an ever more common and terrifying event – the loss of home.
And you can tell a good news story too, or at least a story that has a happy ending. Many survivor’s stories are harrowing and yet they are tales of hope. Tell the story of the most important event in your life – of an event which was a turning point for you. Tell the story that you yourself need to tell and which the world needs to hear. You might say, ‘well I’m nobody and my story isn’t very interesting’. But making poetry, as we saw back in Exercise 33, is about finding a unique voice. However mundane it may seem, your own life experience is uniquely yours and so must be a large part of your personal voice as a poet.
Now, once again, this book isn’t about story writing and still, stories have structure; in order to work a story needs suspense for instance. Suspense is usually generated by conflict. At the end of a story conflict is usually resolved. A story has a highest point, known as a climax and the resolution of the story proves something which we can call conviction. These are fundamental principles of fiction. A story told from your own life, like a story out of the newspaper, is apt to lack some of the necessary structure a reader expects of fiction. When we hear a story on the television news, we don’t complain, ‘but there’s no proper resolution’ or ‘that event wasn’t properly foreshadowed in the preceding action’. But usually we can see where the conflict is and usually we can understand how there is or was suspense. Very often true-life stories are as yet unresolved. That’s why there’s still suspense in them and that’s actually why we’re interested in them.
54 life writing or telling a story that has to be told
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And so it must be with the story you tell. Telling the story in poem form allows you licence in terms of observation and description. It allows you to give detail that might be difficult to justify in a prose narrative. At the same time the short lines of a poem press you to be as economical – as concise – as possible with words. But the key to remember with every story, and told in whatever form, is that it’s suspense that keeps the reader in – we read to find out what will happen next, and next and in the end.
→ 75 poem of explanation
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洩露一個秘密。
It can be your secret or somebody else’s. It can be told in your voice or in anyone else’s. The secret you tell needn’t be true – in fact it could be a vicious rumour. Or perhaps it would be better to write a poem exposing a rumour, as such? The secret told in the first person will be more immediate, more personal and so more suspenseful than the secret told in third person omniscient style (the ‘normal’ style of narration in fiction). It’s difficult to imagine how a secret told in the third person could be very suspenseful at all. Some third person narration might be useful for framing the secret though, for establishing a setting or context in which a character can tell what she has to tell. Try starting with a line like:
I never told anyone but…Don’t tell anyone but…
A good turn to end a secret poem might be to disclose some aspect of the secret’s framing which couldn’t have been known from the outset – for instance, whose secret it is or why it’s a secret or why it’s being told. Perhaps the secret is being told by a ghost? Or perhaps it’s a murder story being told by a murderer?
The genre of poem closest to the telling of a secret is the dramatic monologue. The Victorian poets were fond of this kind of poem and some good examples are in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ and in Browning’s – ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’. In the twentieth century, the confessional style for which Robert Lowell is famous provides examples worth studying, for instance in his book Life Studies. Another great postmodern example would be Allen Ginsberg’s poem, ‘Howl’. And Sylvia Plath crops up again; take a look at her poem, ‘Daddy’. Or there’s another kind of confession altogether, in Gregory Corso’s poem ‘Marriage’ (mentioned in Exercise 27), really an inner monologue on the pros and cons of getting married.
→ 93 rant
55 tell a secret
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你所記得的第一件事。
Poetry and memory are intimately related. Poetry is – individually and collectively, for writer and for reader – a way of remembering, a way of preserving what might otherwise be forgotten. Poetry is also the form in which some of humanity’s earliest cultural memories have been preserved. So for this exercise, your goal is – in the form of a poem – to answer one very simple question.
What’s the first thing you can remember?
That first thing could be an image, an event, a situation, a story, the lack of something, a punishment. Going back to an absolute beginning is useful if only because it is so difficult to do. In history there is no first event. Our own lives are like that. Memory, at least conscious memory, does not go back to birth. In a story narrated in the third person there’s no reason not to go back before a character’s earliest memory. People don’t remember being born but third person narration of a life often does start at the beginning, or even generations earlier.
Some people will say, ‘but I can’t remember anything’. But this excuse won’t cut it, will it? Everyone has memories and one of those memories is as far back as you can go. This exercise sometimes helps people to think back further than they’ve thought before. The tricky thing about it is that, for many people, as they think of what they think to be their earliest memory, they realise there’s something before that. And so on. This isn’t really a problem, unless you’re troubled by the idea that you’re not doing the job you were meant to be doing. In fact, going back and further back in this way could provide an interesting structure for a poem – a poem based not on one, but on a series, of memories. But it’s also true that memory is notoriously unreliable, even deceptive, and that it’s difficult to protect memories from corruption. Perhaps memories themselves are in a sense the corruption of events. Things happened in the past, sensations were had. But all that we have left of those sensations and events now is memory. How can we tell the real experience apart from the memory? How can we tell the difference between real memory and the memory of a memory? Don’t worry about it. You’re not giving evidence in a court of law, you’re trying to write a poem!
→ 90 poetry as a foreign language
56 earliest memory
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凡事都有第一次，這些記憶對作詩很有用。
There’s often a good reason not to start things at the beginning in a story or a poem; that’s because it could be a little boring (not much happening to begin with). It’s generally better to begin, as the Latin poet Horace suggested, in media res (in the midst of things); this is where the action is. Earliest memories are always in media res because it has to be something pretty significant that will stick in the child’s memory. Trying to retrieve an earliest memory may well set off lots of other poetically useful memories. There’s a first time for everything in life. Try to answer the following questions and see if any of the answers suggest ideas for a narrative (or some other kind of ) poem.
What are the first words you can remember in English / in another foreign language?
Is there a story behind that memory? What’s the earliest question you can remember asking? What’s your favourite story from childhood? Can you remember discovering that peoples were different from each other?
That there were different languages? That boys were different from girls? Can you remember finding out that people could still see you when your
eyes were closed? That Santa Claus didn’t really exist? That your parents could make mistakes?
Who are the most memorable people from your childhood? Which faces from the past can you and can’t you remember?
Can you remember when you first lost faith in someone? Can you remember finding faith? Can you remember the first time you felt someone didn’t trust you?
The following topics might lead you more directly to an idea for a poem:
the first things you remember owning/having/keepingthe first thing you remember losing or breakingthe first time in a car/on a plane/on a boat the first time you regretted something the first day at school
We can tackle the exercise negatively too:
What things can’t you remember from your childhood? For example: can you remember learning to tie your shoe laces? Can you remember learning to get dressed? Learning to read? Learning to cook?
The turn for a first things poem? This could involve speculation on last things in life. Or reverse things and write a poem completely about last things in life – never say never again.
57 a first time for everything
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記下人生中重要的事情。
There’s a first time for everything in life and there are also many life events which only happen once (like being born) or which are generally meant to only happen once (like getting married). More importantly, there are key events in every life, which for better or worse, provide a focus for later memory. And there are events to look forward to, and which therefore cannot be known, but which are a source of anticipation. At either end of life we have an event which cannot be remembered and an event which cannot yet be known. The fact that these events cannot be properly accounted for as individual experience makes them especially fascinating as a source of poetry. Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy deals largely with events surrounding the birth of its persona protagonist, who, several volumes into the story, has not yet been born.
In this exercise, choose one life event to record. Here are some life events from which to choose, most of which will be relevant to most people.
on the day of my birth… on my first birthday…the day I fell in love…on the day of my wedding… on the day of my divorce…on the day I found out…on the day I wrote…on the day I died…on the day of my funeral…
There’s no need to confine yourself to speculation about your opinions or feelings on the day in question. You could be writing entirely about the behaviour of others or about unrelated events or about the weather. The more the reader has to work to make the connection between the life event in question and the material of the poem, the more interesting the poem will be.
→ 78 snapshot poem
58 life event
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把人生歸納為一連串意象，用這一連串意象來作詩。
It’s said that in the moment before death your life flashes before your eyes. It’s people who’ve almost died, or people who’ve ‘died’ and been revived who’ve told such stories. For our purposes in this exercise it doesn’t matter whether you believe such tales or not; the idea of a quick succession of images summing up a life is what’s of interest. Think of it as life on fast forward or on rewind – it’s up to you which way you go. The point is that you’re writing the whole of a life.
Some of the material from the last three exercises might be of use for this one. And you might wish to add events like a first:
kiss feelings of loveboyfriend/girlfriend break-upthe first time you took something back to a shopyour first job interview/ your first job falling out of lovelosing a job/ changing jobs travel health issuesloss of loved ones triumphs in life
And there will be other – more particular – life events to add to the list in the last exercise. Your objective is to sum up a life through a series of images that can fit in a poem that will fit on the page opposite. It doesn’t matter whether that life is yours or fictional or that of someone you know.
→ 80 poems of the moment, poems of the season
59 fast forward biography or life’s flash and then you’re ash
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選擇一個你熟悉的結構，試運用你熟悉的字詞寫出出人意表的句子。
Poetry is in all sorts of places where we don’t expect it. Today we think of the art of words we call poetry as a rare and unusual attainment of a talented few. In fact the traces of poetry – of best (most challenging) past expressions – are with us in our everyday words and in the texts we routinely bring to mind without any effort to be poetic. Poetry, or more particularly, its greatest hits, fall into cliché for a very obvious reason – the best words are memorable and if they’re repeated often enough they will lose their value and even the meaning they originally had.
Take pop songs, the national anthem, advertising jingles – these are all either poems in their own right or at least they are poetic uses of language. Sometimes we might think of them as debased forms of poetry. But if that’s what’s become of them then it’s your duty as a poet to revive them, to bring them back to life, to help them live up to their potential. Try working with a text from one of the following genres.
prayer (apostrophe to God)hymn national anthem lawjoke advertisement health warninga fortune telling reading
Your aim is to do something surprising with words that are over-familiar to you and so to your readers. For instance, imagine prayer, written not as monologue (you haranguing God) but as it’s supposed in theory to be – a dialogue. Leave God’s lines blank so your reader has to infer what advice the deity is giving. Or take the words of your national anthem. Perhaps you’ve heard some of them already parodied in some way? Is the parody worth developing? Turning a fortune telling reading into a joke might not be too difficult. But how could you make a joke more surprising? No punch line? But a joke that wasn’t funny could seriously misfire.
The questions you’ll need to ask yourself are – Why am I choosing this particular genre to work with? And – What am I trying to say about it (for instance about my national anthem or about anthems in general; about my relationship with God or about prayer in general)? Getting the reader to re-think the meaning of over-familiar text types is a good idea in general, but what are you trying to prove by doing so?
→ 94 genre and complexity
60 choosing a familiar form
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選擇一首你非常喜歡的詩，自己另作一首來與之對應。
Plagiarism may be a crime but imitation is the highest praise. In this exercise, choose a poem you love and make your own to match. Write out the original poem and then write your own poem. Taking the time to write out the words of a poem by hand helps you to take in the rhythm and the flavour of the work. How many words to change? How different should the idea in your poem be from the ideas in the original? How recognizable from your poem should the original poem be? I’ll leave these questions to you and your conscience. At the end of the day though there’s just one question you’ll need to answer: Am I alluding in a properly respectful manner or am I stealing and pillaging someone else’s work? If you need help though to work out how much to borrow and how much to change, there’s a technique from foreign language teaching which might be helpful for the purpose – it’s called the cloze. A cloze is a text where every nth word is left blank for you to fill in. The usual purpose of clozes is to test comprehension and grammar/vocabulary. In other words a cloze is usually a test of your language proficiency. In a standard cloze every fifth to seventh word is left blank for you to fill in. But for poetry making you could vary that number from anywhere between every seventh word and every second word. Chances are you’ll find the technique annoying pretty quickly but in the process you might discover what level of borrowing will work for you (or at least with a particular model).
How much do you need to change to make a poem yours? How to be original while under the influence? There are many examples of famous poets who have relied heavily on ideas and lines and phrases borrowed. T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land is one example we’ve noted, but Shakespeare is the classic example. For his plays, he borrowed hugely in terms of plot. But let’s take an example to work. Take the line ‘though I sang in my chains like the sea’.
I sang in my chains …I sang like the sea…the sea sang…the chained sea sang like me
Now all of these variations would be recognizably derived from (or alluding/referring to) the last line of Dylan Thomas’ famous poem, ‘Fern Hill’. And each would be, in its own way, an acceptable allusion (in other words the kind of reference that should not be regarded as theft).
Another way, apart from direct quotation, to allude to poetry you respect and wish to respond to is through the epigraph. An epigraph is a line or a stanza borrowed from a poem and placed, acknowledged as someone else’s work, at the beginning of your poem, or your book. It’s best when the material and/or style of the epigraph is not too close to what you’re trying to do in your poem. Your reader should have to do some work to find the connection between the two. That creative reading work is in itself a kind of response. More on this in the exercise after next.
→ 91 let the poem go the way it will
61 writing from a model that works and which you admire
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選擇一首詩翻譯成英文，或者把一首英文詩翻譯成你的母語。
Translating is one way to get past the feelings of guilt and lack of originality associated with plagiarism. When you translate someone’s poem you’re copying in a sense but you’re copying into a new language. So what you make has a very different form and substance from the original. To succeed at translating a poem means making a new poem. So much bad poetry translation is produced by translators who would never imagine themselves capable of writing a poem by themselves in any language. It takes a poet to write a poem and so training in poetry writing (as for instance in this book) will be helpful for anyone who is interested in translating poetry. Looking at things the other way round, translating poetry is brilliant training for poets in general. When you translate a good poem you’re working with a form which already works. Choosing a poem and then translating it is closely related to the activity in the last exercise – it’s working from a model that works and which you admire. Working this way allows you to focus more than you usually might on the detail of expression in the poem you’re making.
In this exercise, choose a poem from any language that suits and translate it into English, or translate a poem from English into the language of your choice.
Consider the nature of the problems you face (the choices you have to make) in making the translation. Consider, what, in your translation, will amount to a really original idea.
When you translate, your impossible objective should be to keep the poem in the target language as open to interpretation as was the poem in the original language. This means that you have to resist a temptation to interpret (that is, to tell your reader what you think the poem really means). But here’s the paradox – in order to not interpret in your translation you have to interpret as a reader; that is, you have to try to understand the range of meanings the original poem could have, in order to try to keep your new poem as open as the original.
Translations can make better or worse poems than the texts they come from. Sometimes in moving ideas from one language to another they will naturally take on a different kind of audience or fall into a different genre. How far should you fight those kinds of changes in order to be faithful to an original poem? Once again, these are matters of conscience. Sometimes when you’re translating you will have a brilliant poetic idea that could not be considered a translation of the original at all. Don’t be disappointed – this is a great stroke of luck! It’s material for your own original work and (as with ideas from dreams) it’s important that you don’t lose it.
Now some readers will be saying, ‘well, I’d love to translate but I don’t know any other languages, or at least I don’t know them well enough for the purposes of translation.’ Fortunately for you, in this day and age, the internet will provide you with machine translations, results of which may be so mad, you’ll feel like Ern Malley in no time at all. What’s more you’re not limited to a single translation of one poem into one foreign language. You can translate from any language into any other and as many times as you like and back and forth and so. The mistakes that translation machines make won’t be universally poetic, but some of them will be interesting and it’s your job to pick those ones and find something good to do with them.
→ 95 be influenced by everyone
62 translation
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創作一首詩，與上一個練習所翻譯的詩進行對話。
The machine assisted translators of Exercise 61 weren’t really translating at all; they were playing poetically with the aid of that amazing word machine we call a computer, and which is now an important part of pretty well every poet’s life. Translating a poem is the most thorough way possible of realizing the goal of Exercise 60 – that is, using the whole of an existing poem as a model for your own. But as with machine translation there are many possible ways of responding to a poem without actually translating. In other words – and this is good news for the poet who enjoys translating – there are many ways to create your own original poem by interacting with someone’s else’s poem written in a different language.
Here are some of those ways of responding to a poem from another language:
variation – change some key aspect of the poem (plot, voice, tone)adaptation – give the poem a completely different setting
(for instance bring it up to date and set it in your town or home)annotation – write about the poem in a new poem of your own true response – treat the original poem as a turn in a dialogue,
and now it’s your turn to answerobliteration – cut it up, do dada to it
Now, there are two approaches to this exercise. For the translators, take the poem you translated in the last exercise (or another if you prefer) and choose a way of responding to it, so as to create your own poem, in one of the categories mentioned above.
For the non-translators, just find a poem which you like which has already been translated into English, and respond to that.
Needless to say, all of the modes of response mentioned above are available for poems written in your own language as well as for any other.
→ 90 poetry as a foreign language
63 the translation – response continuum
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我想讓自己文字做甚麼？
After all this playing with words we’ve been doing, maybe it’s time to write about words themselves? In this exercise we speculate about what words can do and about what words can be. This is part of the reflexive thread in this book introduced in Exercise 48 and which you will see more of in the final exercises. The idea here is to help you think about what you’re doing and what you want to do with words.
We can start directly with a title like – ‘what I want my words to do’. We can answer the implied question with lines beginning:
I want my words to…
You could finish that line with something very serious – to tell the truth the world must know. Or with something whimsical – to sing and soar and skirt the sky. Or with something silly – fry my eggs, bring bacon in. Or with some thought-provoking combination of these.
The problem with taking on words as a topic for poetry is that it’s been done so often before, it’s difficult to be original. Just about every serious poet who ever lived made some observation about the nature of poetry’s most fundamental raw material. So … you’re in good company when you’re writing about words!
Try making a list of verbs describing what words can do. Words can
sing brew fly hum bleed breed crow crumble tangle tumble numb jump grow blow
Each of these ideas conjures its own image and makes a word a metaphor for the power language holds over the imagination. A number of these verbs also bring words to life, as humans or as animals, and so make them possible characters in a story.
Or we can reverse roles with words. The writer is always trying to find the right word. Let’s turn that around – words find us just wherever we are, on the way to work, or waking…
Or you can write a poem asking for the words you need. That kind of poem is an invocation – a request to a god (commonly, one of the nine muses – those daughters of Zeus who were in charge of inspiring artists). You can study examples by reading the openings of any epic poem – for instance Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid or Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Let me leave the last word on poems about words to the American poet, Anne Sexton, who wrote, that we should be careful of words, even of the miraculous ones:
Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
→ 100 what is poetry?
64 a poem about words themselves
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選擇以下一個象徵並試著用它表達某一系列的聯繫和意義。
Back in Exercise 4, we took a walk in the woods, and without noticing any signposts at all, we met and made some symbols there. For instance, when we wrote what the path and the forest were like we were writing about our world and the way we make through life. The river was sexuality, the wall was death. How we coped with the symbols suggested something about our unconscious attitudes to what was symbolized by the objects in the story.
So much for the primitive psychoanalysis. An observation to make here is that words in poetry (and in many other places) are often more than they appear to be. To basics then – words are signs, they suggest things or ideas beyond the sound they have or the marks they make on paper. In the origins of Chinese writing we see some relationship between words and the things they represent. The character for sun originally looked something like the sun, the character for person like a person. A sign points to something so we look or we think in that direction. Any image in a poem could be a sign pointing somewhere else. So in poems we have words and the words represent things and the things could in turn represent something beyond their obvious or surface meaning – a wall could be death. But a wall would still also be a wall.
This is the serious fun of poetry. There are levels of meaning in a poem. Poetry plays with differences in meaning, with the different ways in which words can be read. It’s the possibility of levels of meaning which opens onto the possibility of interpretation – a poem is open to interpretation because it can be read in different ways, or on different levels. A reader can always make mistakes, for instance wrong assumptions, but there isn’t one right way to read a poem. What this means in practical terms for the poet is that all of the images in a poem have the potential to be more than they seem to be; and they might equally well be only be as they seem. Is a bird in your poem one bird or every bird? Is the moon just tonight’s, or could it be any moon, everyone’s moon? And what would a moon mean anyway? There’s a lot of potential for surprise for the reader in deciding how words and images and symbols make the poem’s meaning. The poetry of one of America’s great modernists, Wallace Stevens, was very interested in the relationship in poetry between things and ideas. To read Steven’s work is to study an unending game run around the question of what it is the words in a poem represent.
Signs point the reader in a particular direction, but all images in poems make the reader do her own work of imagining. Write dog or forest and every reader will see a different dog or forest. And yet these words can easily be symbolic, they can represent an archetype (the individuated dog or forest each reader is able to share). Symbols give depth to the imagination because symbols make use of the simple fact that different images can have different meanings to different readers/listeners and at different times.
Choose one of the following symbols and try writing about it to convey a particular set of associations and meanings. You could start each line or stanza with the same words, or alternatively you could return to the symbol periodically through the poem, or alternatively just at the end:
65 into the forest of signs
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circle – in the circle… map – on the map… mirror – through the mirror…maze – in the maze…sea – at sea…ladder – on the ladder…machine – in the machine…
What does your symbol mean? Or, better still, what’s the range of possible meanings which you can imagine for it? For instance, a circle might be represented by a line in the dust or by an underground railway line (the city circle). A circle could be symbolic of a mindloop (an idea you can’t get past or get rid of it), or it could suggest a story that ends where it began, or it could be an image of God or of creation (the divine circle as opposed to the human square).
Now let’s reverse that procedure. Remove the symbol-word from what you’ve written and – something in the style of a riddle – try to get your reader to conjure the symbol from everything else that you’ve written.
→ 75 a poem of explanation
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描述一個你覺得的有意義的地方景觀。
A symbolic landscape is one where parts of the scenery have symbolic meaning. In this exercise, make your own landscape of meaningful places. Decide which features of the scene stand for what.
Mountain, river, forest, valley, fields, beaches – what is it each of these places is associated with? Who goes to each place and who doesn’t go there, and why?
Use your descriptive to powers, in as few words as possible, to make particular places:
paradisal – puretraditional – unspoiled pleasurable – sexual industrial – demonic lyrical – a place for the imagination
Don’t use any abstract terms or judgement adjectives (terrible, scary, enchanting) to give away your intention. Use objects and colours and people and events to show or to imply how places are.
Now let’s try to do the same things with houses. Make a house (or parts of a house) homely, terrifying, dull, ordered, chaotic.
Do the same with a character – make characters good or evil without having them say a word.
Now, put one or more of your characters in your landscape, give each a motive, and set them off on a journey.
→ 98 here be dragons
66 innuendo – painting with words
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描寫一個事物或者一個原型象徵，讓讀者和你一起玩。
The heart is probably the easiest way to understand the difference between image and symbol. If you draw it, the heart has two shapes – one is an image of a part of the physical body, the other is the symbol of something to do with affections, to do with how we feel, to do with the way in which we commit to each other or expect others to devote themselves to us. You can have a lot of fun by having the reader do some work to understand whether the poem is presenting a symbol or a particular image (or a bit of both). For instance, Les Murray’s poem ‘The Gods’, starts with the line ‘There is no Reynard fox. Just foxes.’ The poem goes on to play very interestingly with the idea of the archetype and the particular of experience. Wislawa Szymborska’s poem ‘In Praise of Self-Deprecation’ goes to the heart of the problem: ‘The killer-whale’s heart weighs one hundred kilos/but in other respects it is light.’ The physical heart and the symbolic each have a different weight and the point is that humans are unique among animals in suffering from the abstract feeling we call conscience.
Choose one of the following titles for a poem:
the human heart the foxbones a ladderthe house I grew up in the city wintera portrait of the river her face the ticking
Your objective is play with the question of whether you’re presenting a thing in itself or an archetypal symbol. Play so that your reader will have to play with you.
→ 73 an art of knowing and not
67 the shape of the heart – image and symbol
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完成下列數行，並看看它們能否給予你靈感。你會如何用文字回應它們的深層含義？
Words point us to all sort of things – to images, to symbols. But as things in themselves words have no meaning – they are merely sounds or marks on paper. However beautiful they may be as such, it’s mainly for their meaning we value them – for what they point to and for the way they point. A word like tree points us to the picture of a tree, the word camel to a camel, the word rose makes us wish to guess which colour the petals are and it makes us wish to smell the rose the word has put in our heads.
Whether through symbolic or other means, poetry points to meaning under the obvious – call it a kind of true meaning, meaning you have to dig around for. Poetry has many means of pointing a way under what’s visible on the surface of things. Complete the following lines and see where they lead you –
the window of the shop means…under a smile…the rain means …the hand and the alarm clock – together they mean… behind the poker face…the stars in their dark quilt all say…the river whispers…the dogs are telling me…from under the earth, I hear…the speech of the…the message of … is …in the fine print…the blood in my veins says…the tale the ghost tells…
A turn to finish such a poem? That could be your turn in the conversation. What do you say in reply to any or all of these messages you’re receiving from behind or from under the way things apparently are?
→ 88 anthropomorphism
68 the meaning of things, the voices under...
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用文字來描述窗外之景。
The French symbolists were poets who were more than a little disgusted with how grubby world had turned out to be. Art could be an escape for them. Hence the idea of art for art’s sake. Like their contemporaries in Victorian England (though generally less respectable), they were interested in a higher realm, somewhat abstract in nature. What Mallarmé, one of their ringleaders, wanted to do was to give a ‘purer sense to the words of the tribe’. The Symbolist project was very much about a world that could be conjured up with writing, and their aim, as poets, was to create a symbolic Book, which would contain all earthly existence, something like God’s house of many mansions in the Gospel of John in the Bible. In Mallarmé’s poem, ‘The Windows’, a hospital patient, longing for escape, gazes out of his ward, into the blue of the sky:
I see myself and see an angel! And I die and I love —Then the window may be art, may be mysticism,— To be reborn, crowned with my dream, In that sky where Beauty has already flowered!
In this exercise, let’s simply do what Mallarmé’s patient did – look out of the window and use words to paint what you see. Or, we might broaden the task a little. Use any kind of frame – a window, a doorway, a television screen, a gap between buildings. Simply paint what’s in the frame.
Now step back and describe the frame. Of the frame and the view, which is more interesting? How can the two fit together in a poem?
Or here’s a de-framing exercise. Wander round the art gallery and collect characters in paintings you like – then as in Night in the Museum – have those characters step down out of their frames to interact when no one’s looking, or to venture forth in the city. (If you don’t have an art gallery handy, you can do the same thing with an art book or with pictures from galleries on the internet.)
→ 78 the snapshot poem
69 framing
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作一首完全由意象組成的詩，使讀者樂於將這些有趣的意象連接起來。
So what was out your window when you looked? Did you see what you would have expected to see? Were you surprised in some way?
The Imagists – those early modernists of the turn of the last century – were in a way the opposite of the Symbolists. The Imagists’ emphasis was not on symbols, but rather on the things in themselves which words could represent. We can say that imagism was really a reaction to Victorian sentimentalism. The imagists wanted to use language in a clear and precise way; they wanted to give their readers things to see; they wanted the reader to focus on the object presented. The Imagists wanted to eliminate distraction and abstraction. So the Imagist’s idea of purity was quite different from the Symbolists’. Perhaps ironically, the Imagists’ ideal was the clear plane of glass through which Mallarmé’s patient was looking when everything went symbolic. There will always be arguments about truth and reality and which kind of glass best reveals them. W.H. Auden wrote, ‘The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but unlike the rest of us, he does not build one.’ Here’s an early example of Imagism from Ezra Pound, titled ‘In a Station of the Metro’:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.
In this haiku-like form, it’s the reader’s work, not to interpret the content by working out symbols; but rather to imagine connections (or the nature of disconnections) between the quite different scenes each line seems to present. Let’s take a later and equally famous example from another American poet, William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’:
so much dependsupon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rainwater
beside the whitechickens.
The objective of this exercise is to make a poem which consists entirely of images, images which it is the reader’s work to interestingly connect. Perhaps you found those images looking out of the window? Or perhaps they’re already in the back of your head? Or maybe you need to go and find them now!
70 the image and things themselves
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練習寫出能讓讀者把顏色和物體互相聯想起來的詩歌。
It’s been claimed that Wallace Steven’s colour symbolism was as follows:
blue stands for the imagination green – for the physical red – for reality gold – for the sun purple – for delight in the imagination
That’s to say, in Stevens’ poetry these colours had these symbolic meanings. In other words, you could read many of his poems and get the sense of a created world in which colours had certain consistent connotations. These colour symbols are a part of Stevens’ trademark style. Or you might say, it was characteristic of Stevens’ voice that he used colours in this way.
This is a reversible exercise. Its purpose is to help you practise having a reader imagine colours from objects, and likewise imagining objects from colours.
First, let’s try to write so that the reader has to work out the colours of/in the poem from the named objects to which they pertain
the bird through itfish in letters swimming over across sun, cloud and storm so lightning to sign the eye is all these colours
Perhaps we can be a little more subtle, even a little more riddling perhaps:
The bird is the colour of…Words have the hue …Grass runs with the river’s lilt
Let’s reverse things now. Let’s have the colours connote objects:
blue and I swim in it green and I climb gold shieldingpurple from the vinered tread my weary way a mournful howling meansnow night
And continue playing till you’ve filled the page.
→ 87 metonymy
71 colours
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在一首詩的下面再寫兩行。當你傳給下一個人時，把紙折起來，讓他只看到你寫的最後兩行。按照同樣的方法傳閱下去。
The exquisite corpse was a game invented by the Surrealists, first for play with words and later with images. It’s probably easiest though first to understand how the game can work with images. Imagine a group of people want to make a picture of a person. A sheet of paper is folded into five, so that as the paper is passed the first person will be drawing the head, the second the shoulders, the next the chest, the next the middle and the last the legs. The paper is folded each time the paper is passed so that as you draw you can’t be aware of what the others have drawn; or maybe you can see one other part, but not the rest. With words there are many ways the game can go. Let’s take one example.
You write two lines towards a poem. Fold the paper when you pass it on so that the person you pass to sees only the last of the two lines you’ve written. And so the paper goes on around a circle in this way, each person seeing only the last line before adding their own two to the composition. The result will be a piece of writing with interesting continuities and discontinuities. The continuities can be promoted. For instance, every line has to contain an image from a dream or an allusion to a famous poem.
Another variant would be to do the same as described above but with words instead of lines. Another variant would be to pre-specify what part of speech each of the words in the sequence written would have to be, for instance: adjective ^ noun ^ adverb ^ verb.
To promote continuities in the result, the game can be limited in specific ways as well; for example – all of the nouns have to abstract or none of the nouns can be abstract; or every noun must be of a landscape feature but every adjective must be for the description of the human body. And so on. One way to play the game is to invent a new rule for each turn or each round.
Now all of these exquisite corpse games are intended for groups of people to play; that’s to say they’re collaborative games (similar to what was suggested for haiku-making). The resulting work – whether it’s made of image or of word (or even a combination) – is a group effort. To play such a game by yourself you have to simulate the spontaneity of always starting by forgetting what it was you were doing earlier in the game. This would probably be easier to do word by word than it would be line by line. Or you could work on several sheets of paper at once; you’d need to trick yourself by testing just how good your memory is.
One of the pressures of the exquisite corpse game is that you’re always having to think of a first line – at least every second line will be a first line from the point of view of the person who has to think it up. So this is an excellent practice for anyone who has trouble facing the blank page.
In every case, the exquisite corpse will produce a collection of ideas that is apparently random but in which there are also organising principles of some kind. The challenge for the reader will be to get some sense out of what appears to be largely nonsense. As with the cut-ups we tried out back in Exercise 50, here the aim is to cultivate an attractive madness, and the hope is that there’s some method in it.
→ 99 as wild as words will go
72 exquisite corpse
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問問你的詩從何而來，它指出了甚麼問題？
There are a number of ways to play the exquisite corpse game. By covering up the lines above where you’re to write, you can play so you don’t know where you’re coming from. And of course you never know quite where you’re going (especially if you’re doing it as a game with other players). Does a poem need to know where it’s going? The exercises in this book so far have balanced making raw material with practising simple structures which could support a poem or part of a poem. Many of the exercises encourage you to write lines without much in the way of a goal or any end-point imagined in advance.
To write a good poem you have to know what you’re doing but that doesn’t mean you have to know where you’re going. The French poet, René Char asks, ‘How can we live without the unknown in front of us?’ You find a way to go by going, you find out where you’re going by being on the way. That might be a good way to explore what poetry can do and be, it might be a way to collect useful raw material with which to make a poem, but is it a good way, generally, to actually write a poem?
The easy answer to that question is that, if that kind of method works for you, then it will be a good way for you to create a poem. Let’s take an example. The idea of the desert island text and the objects it makes use of (in Exercise 47) is about dealing with a situation that could not have been predicted. That’s what makes it surprising and so worth reading about. If you started writing every poem knowing exactly where it was going and all that you’d see along the way, well… what would be the point of the journey?
In a book about poetry writing, The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo writes:
A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or ‘causes’ the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing.
Hugo goes on to give a concrete example of the relationship between these two types of subject. He writes of the young poet who has set out to tackle the subject of autumn rain:
The mistake he is making of course is that he feels obligated to go on talking about autumn rain, because that, he feels, is the subject. Well, it isn’t the subject. You don’t know what the subject is, and the moment you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain start talking about something else. In fact it’s a good idea to start talking about something else before you run out of ideas about Autumn Rain.
Hugo’s two subjects correspond to my question from which a poem comes and the question to which a poem leads (in Exercise 24). If you knew (as in Exercise 25) from the beginning what the poem’s final question was to be, then what was the point of the journey? It’s easy to see how Hugo’s two-subject formula can be true for the reader. You start reading a poem with an idea of what it’s about.
73 an art of knowing and not or writing without a destination
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You might get that idea from the title. In the course of the poem, if it’s worth its salt, something turns, so that you end up with a subject you could not have predicted from the outset. The questions with which one begins and finishes reading a poem are not only different from each other; they’re different for different readers. That’s because it’s the openness of the poem to interpretation that makes it worth spending time with, worth re-reading. So you could say the more different the questions the poem asks the more worthwhile the poem.
Whether you’re reading or writing, time spent with a poem demands the exercise of a lack of knowledge. If, as a writer, by the end of the poem you haven’t managed to ask the reader what neither she nor you could have predicted you’d ask, then there wasn’t much point in writing the poem. Asking truly open questions (ones which cannot have been known in advance), asking the next questions which need to be asked, getting the reader into a dialogue with something as lifeless as a piece of paper: these are demands only met with great skill. Work which is open to interpretation is a work not fully controlled by its maker. Its range of effects cannot be predicted. Once out of the maker’s hands the work survives or fails to survive on the basis of the questions it asks, the effects it has.
In this exercise, find the question your poem should point to by first asking where the poem comes from. Use the from question to get to the to question; make a journey in images from this Point A to Point B.
Now, is it possible to say anything in a poem – to convey any message – when you started out writing it not knowing where it would go? The answer is yes and the point is that writing poems is a way of finding out what it is you believe, and what it’s important for you personally to say.
→ 97 we write ’em – we don’t explain ’em
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問一些看似毫無道理，也無法回答的問題。
There haven’t really been many rules so far in this book. I’m sure that’s disappointing to some readers – so here now is a kind of a rule – to write poetry you have to not know where you’re going – and you have to go there in style – and this is an art that can be learned. But you have to teach yourself because you have to go your own way.
Poetry is associated with ambivalent logic and it’s also associated with what’s been called indirection – or let’s say, not going the way that would usually be expected, with words and with ideas. Throwing words, one might say, using them in a new way, or using words to throw the reader a little off balance.
Every amateur astronomer knows that when you look at the night sky, if you’re trying to view a dim object with the naked eye (a comet for instance), you’ll do better by looking not quite directly at that object. Poetry too works by not approaching things too directly. Its method has to do with looking at things from an angle other than the normal line of view.
In this exercise we hark back to the idea of the question poem in Exercise 24. Children’s questions are often unexpected and, while they’re sometimes annoying, some of them can really make you think. The objective of this exercise is to make questions that create doubts or disconnections, questions which one way or another are not quite answerable. There are several classes of such questions available, some more or less absurd, some more or less profound. Let’s consider some question types and why they might be off balance:
Too big: Why is the wind?Referent missing: What colour the cloth? How many days? Grammatically odd/logically challenging: How many is God?
How few am I? Are I another?Specific too context: Why aren’t the sauces next to the sausages? Too serious: Why aren’t the skeletons strung over the highway
where the blackspot is?Too personal: Are your feet sore now? Ridiculous: Why does the strawberry not speak to me today? Not ridiculous and yet ridiculous sounding in most contexts:
Is the antelope a vegetarian?Rhetorical/portentous: Whose feet are these below my knees?Assuming knowledge that cannot be assumed:
Why is the world ending tonight?
These are all what we might think of as indirecting questions. Many more categories are possible. As you’ll observe from the little list above it’s easier to have assumptions go unchallenged in questions than in statements. That’s because questions, in demanding answers, are a step further along the road to uncertainty, from the assumptions underlying them. They are demands for a next turn in a dialogue based on what’s assumed. By using questions that are unviable – questions with doubtful assumptions – you can call whole systems of thought or belief indirectly into doubt in a far more effective way than you could by directly challenging a statement.
74 a question of indirection
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How to get from these questions to poems? Tangling with the logic of the illogical in one question may be sufficient content for a poem in its own right. In other words a complete poem could be devoted to answering questions like those above.
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作一首詩來解釋——比薩餅如何跑到天花板上了。
With their own (sometimes crazy) logic and with their own indirecting questions, poems explain the craziness and the hidden meanings of the world all around us; they get to the truth under things, as discussed in Exercise 68. In classical poetry and in oral traditions, poetry has had a role in the telling of myths – that’s to say in the big picture explanation of why the world is the way it is. For an example of a modern explanation poem, let’s consider William Carlos Williams’ famous work ‘This Is Just To Say’.
I have eatenthe plumsthat were inthe icebox
and whichyou were probablysavingfor breakfast
Forgive methey were deliciousso sweetand so cold
This poem is really a personal explanation in lieu of an apology.
In this exercise, create a poem to explain –
how the pizza got on the ceiling why the man has no pants who the hell you think you are why it happened at five in the morning what caused this bankruptcy who the murderer was open heart surgerywhich way the robbers went why dinosaurs are thin at both endshow long a piece of string is why there was a grin on her face how we came to be eating human flesh life, the universe and everything
Now write a poem which makes your reader do the explaining for the event/s you point to.
75 a poem of explanation
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用現在時寫一首關於你自己的詩，盡可能具有創造力地進行自我反駁。
Back in Exercise 40, we looked at the idea of ambivalent logic in poetry. For most purposes in writing, we use a logic of yes or no, in poetry there’s a logic of yes and no. In Exercise 40 we tried to juggle wild and pedestrian claims to see if we could make something poetic out of the contrast between them. In this exercise we take some practical steps to generate ambivalence by writing about ourselves in the first person. How to ambivalate? It’s as simple as thinking two conflicting things at the one time (the sun rises over the earth but the earth goes round it), as simple as having two conflicting desires (to eat the chocolate but to lose weight), as simple as being of two or more minds at once – like Wallace Stevens’ tree of three minds in which there are three blackbirds. Actually, you can read the whole of Stevens’ ‘Eighteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ as a study in ambivalence.
Ambivalating could be the expression of a failure to decide. Or it could be the result of a conflicted decision, of having decided two opposite things at once. There are many kinds of ambivalence. There’s personality ambivalence for instance: not being quite sure who you are, being several people at once. This doesn’t mean having a personality disorder. It’s what people mean when they say that they’re wearing several hats, or they’re of two minds. That kind of ambivalence is there in the range of roles people play and decisions people make everyday. Of course it’s there over a lifetime as well. You start off small, you get to be big. Somewhere in corner of your head you’ll always still be small. Think of how Gulliver must have felt about himself after Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Perhaps every day you think and feel one way as a parent, another way as an employee, another way as a consumer. These roles or personae needn’t conflict. Personal crises sometimes arise when a decision involves different roles in different orientations towards a decision: that’s when you’re in two minds about something. Without that kind of conflict within, a poem lands in the dull realm of the already known.
The way things are always already is what poems are written against. The openness of the possible is about a doubt as to all of that. Engaging that doubt, poetry gets to be decided and not at the same time. Look at the way ambivalence is expressed in Sándor Weöres’ poem, ‘Orpheus Killed’:
Stone I am and metal I amon a slave’s cross. The corpse is staring wide-eyed, grief rolls from the drum and I dance. I am everything and I am nothing: oh, look at me. I am everyone and I am no one…Cain I am and saint I am: kneel at my feet.Leper I am and clean I am: touch me. … Mindless I am and wise I am, ask no questions, understand in silence. Dead I amand alive I am, a dumb face. A wax-facesacrifice turns skyward, ringed by staring horror, griefrolls from the drum and I dance.
This is a poem about not knowing who you are or how to be. If you can see things from another point of view, if you can see the other side of the story, then often it’s hard to get your mind made up. Affinity with ambivalence is what makes most modern poetry more or less the opposite of an argument. Which is not to say that it can’t be persuasive.
76 ambivalate! or contradict yourself creatively
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The present moment is a kind of ambivalence in relation to the past and the future. The present is full of the undecided, full of potential, full of not knowing how things are going to work out. In this exercise your goal is to contradict yourself creatively. Following the grammatical structure of Weöres’ work above write a poem about yourself in the present tense. Contradict yourself as much as possible. To get from a question to a question allow ambivalence to be its own vehicle.
→ 85 de-automatising
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從前面的練習中找出有趣的詩句，構思如何把它們連接起來，寫一首新的詩。
Different people work in different ways and you won’t know which ways are best for you until you’ve tested a few. One of the aims of this book is to get you to try different approaches to the problem of making a poem. The English poet, Stephen Spender wrote a wonderful essay, ‘The Making of a Poem’, in which he contrasted what he called the Beethoven and the Mozart methods of creative effort. Essentially the difference is that Beethoven composed from fragments whereas Mozart worked organically. Beethoven jotted down ideas and then later assembled catches of tunes and ideas for orchestration into a whole work. Mozart, by contrast, seemed invariably to begin with a complete conception of a work and then to fill in the details as he finished it. This book tries to strike a balance between these two methods. It encourages you to collect raw material and to try out techniques with words and lines and images for later use; but it also encourages you to think of a complete idea for a poem. Now’s the time to bring the two methods together in a conscious way.
In music, there’s what’s called a leitmotiv – a melodic passage or a phrase that gets repeated so as to suggest or remind us of something – what might be called a riff these days. For instance in opera there might be a phrase of a few notes that recurs when a particular character comes on stage. That helps the audience to know who’s here. For this exercise, look for some possible leitmotivs in your notes, among the mountain of raw materials you’ve scribbled down already. Find five phrases you haven’t yet used but you think would be interesting to repeat in a poem. Look in Exercise 72 for instance. That’s the Beethoven side of the job. Now to the Mozart. With those phrases in mind, glance back over your notes to try to find an idea for a poem. Exercises 1, 14, 15, 17, 21, 24, 25, 41, 44 and 51 would be good places to look.
Now see if you can bring one or more fragments and an organic idea to together in order to make a poem.
Different people are comfortable working in different ways. You have to try different ways to find out what works for you. And then there’s the possibility that you might actually write better poetry when you’re feeling a little uncomfortable!
→ 96 killing your children and having a family
77 Beethoven and Mozart methods
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挑一張照片或研究一張圖片，從中捕捉一個瞬間，並用文字把它描繪出來，寫成一首完整的詩。
Let’s come back to the idea of the poem of the moment. Our first exercise in presence to the here-and-now was in Exercise 2; in Exercise 3 (haiku) we looked at a specific form for this purpose, and in Exercise 52 (‘in the time it takes…’) we worked specifically with the idea of simultaneous events taking place over a short period of time. In this exercise your objective is to capture a moment in order to paint it with words. There are several ways to gather materials for this exercise. You can find a place to sit and from that vantage point watch the world. This is more or less what we were doing, looking through the window in Exercise 69. The problem with this approach for our purpose now is that what’s out that window is either moving or it’s more or less a landscape. Both good subjects for poetry, but not what we’re trying to do today. Luckily, we live in an age where there’s some great technology available to get around this problem. To capture a moment of action, just use a still camera. Just go to a place of interest to you and take pictures there. Among crowds or in busy places, a series of photographs will show you things you couldn’t possibly have noticed at the time you were taking them. You’ll see detail and you’ll also see simultaneous events – things happening in the one frame just by coincidence. You’ll see coincidences that would go unnoticed were it not for the camera. By the same token a short video could be even better because it might provide you with events that will constitute a plot. Belonging to the same moment is potentially a very important and interesting kind of thing to have in common. It’s what makes a generation see things to some extent in the same way. (Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down, or when 9/11 happened in America?) Capture the right moment in the right place and there will be a poem for you to find in that frame.
It’s also possible to write a poem from somebody else’s photograph. And there are much older technologies for arresting the moment – for instance painting. Consider the meditation which begins W.H. Auden’s poem, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, written in response to Breughel’s painting ‘The Fall of Icarus’. This is a painting about that famous moment in mythology when Icarus falls into the sea, because he’s failed to follow his father’s advice on how to fly with the wings he’s been given:
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along;
What interests Auden’s Breughel in this poem is the irrelevance of the event depicted to the lives of its possible witnesses. The ploughman might have noticed but to him it was ‘not an important failure’; the expensive ship in the picture just sails on, because it has somewhere to go.
Or along similar lines, consider Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem ‘In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see / the people of the world / exactly at the moment when / they first attained the title of / ‘suffering humanity’/ They writhe upon the page /in a veritable rage / of adversity / Heaped up / groaning with babies and bayonets / under cement skies / in an abstract landscape of blasted trees / bent statues bats wings and beaks / slippery gibbets / cadavers and carnivorous cocks / and all the final hollering monsters / of the / ‘imagination of disaster’ / they are so bloody real / it is as if they really still existed…’
Words can bring to life again the amazement of images made dull by their afterlife on the gallery wall.
78 the snapshot poem
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想象你在一支行刑隊前面，你有機會與上帝做一筆交易換取更長的壽命，你會在延長的生命裏做些甚麼？
Fall asleep and a century can pass. Time in dreams is not the same as it is in the real world. Time in heaven is not the same as it is on earth. Rip van Winkle fell asleep when America was still a British colony but when he woke up George Washington’s portrait was hanging where George III’s had been. In many cultures there are stories like this, and dating back to ancient times. In Jorge Luis Borges’ story, ‘The Secret Miracle’, a condemned man does a deal with God. He’s condemned to die but he needs to finish writing a play so he prays to God and – led out to face firing squad – he gets a year to live in the moment between when the bullets are fired and when they find his heart. In this exercise, imagine yourself in front of the firing squad, imagine the deal you would make with God, and imagine what you would do with the extra time you were granted. Or, if you prefer a more general arresting of the moment – imagine what you would do if time stood still and you were the only one awake and aware, able to go where you wanted and do as you wished.
Terrible things happen just in a moment. Some such moments are fatal but often they are survived. In a single lifetime some of us survive many terrible events. Sometimes afterwards we see them happening over and over again. Writing down such experiences may not only help us to get over them, this process of recollection may create great material for a poem and help to teach everyone with what would otherwise only be one person’s experience.
79 the poem is the moment
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挑戰不公，從世界的混亂中創造藝術。收集當天發生的事件，把它們寫成詩。
Terrible things happen just in a moment. Crazy things happen at the same. And it’s not hard from the facts as presented to come to the conclusion that the world – as presented – doesn’t make much sense at all. It’s the job of poetry (of culture more generally) to make some sense of the crazy world. Paradoxically, part of that work involves showing just how things don’t add up. In this exercise we take a daily newspaper and use it for Dada cut-up purposes. In other words, we collect events of the same day and we try to make them into some kind of poem.
One way to play with these materials is to let the news formats give you as much of the poem structure as possible. Start with just headlines; cut them up and see if you can get a title from them. Then look for a first line and possibly a next, or look for the last line and work backwards or towards it. How is the simultaneity of events reflected in where the poem’s coming from and where the poem’s going? Is there a question (obvious or concealed) from which the poem begins and another to which the poem leads?
The poem of the one day provides a convenient model for all sorts of time interval poems or poem sequences. Consider writing a sequence of poems for the seasons or for the months of the year. They needn’t be long poems. Remember a haiku is a kind of seasonal poem; it should contain some kind of reference to nature which places it in the year. Consider writing a calendar of poems or keeping a journal of some kind in poetry form. You could have a waking diary of daily observation to keep beside your dream and day-dream diaries. Maybe you can find your poems by finding a way between these diaries?
The world is full of incomprehensible events. The steady passage of time and the reliability of nature may provide some comfort in an otherwise mad world. The madness and the order are equally fit subjects for poetry. The poet – witnessing reality – provides an anchor in the storm of events. Challenge order which is unjust and make art out of the chaos of the world – this kind of work brings sanity to the maker and to the reader alike!
There’s another kind of poem of the moment worth noting, and that’s what’s called an occasional poem – a poem especially to celebrate a wedding or a birth, or other event, happy or sad (for instance a eulogy for a funeral). The occasional poem performs one of poetry’s ancient functions – to mark an event in a memorable way and to provide a fitting record. Is there an occasion for which you should be creating a poem, for public performance or for private reflection?
80 poems of the moment, poems of the season
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用反向的意象觀察世界上缺少甚麼。用逆向思維挽救這個世界和世人。
Through many exercises in this book we’ve seen how a poem can question or challenge, can perhaps be an antidote, for the madness of things as they are. Attention to the present, the absurd art of juxtaposition, the question poem, bearing witness, hypotheticals – these are all ways of casting doubt on the apparent necessity of things as they, or as we’re told. All such status quo challenging poems are political acts of dissent, they express the fundamental human right we all have, as users of language, to make our own way in our own words. In poetry we express our right to not just think or speak or read the way we’re told. Poetry has the revolutionary potential Shelley expressed in his idea that the poets are the world’s unacknowledged legislators. But rather than exploit the predictable effects of words used as sledgehammers – me preaching at you – it will be better to study more specific techniques for getting a reader to see his or her world in a new light.
Over the next few exercises we’ll look at a number of different methods in rhetoric to make readers take a second look at what they were otherwise taking for granted. The first of these methods is what you might think of as reversal – turning things upside down or inside out.
Let’s start with a very simple kind of reversal – changing subject-object relations. We can sometimes do this simply by changing the normal Subject-Verb-Object sentence pattern which is basic to the structure of the English language. Fill in the following gaps in any way you like.
… leads to……takes a……thinks……switches to……rehearses……pins……glances…
Now simply reverse the position of subject and object – so if you had one things leads to another, now you have another leads to one thing. What difference in meaning have you made by reversing positions of subject and object?
Don’t underestimate the potential of a simple turnaround in thought or image. Don’t underestimate the power that lies in looking again at what you thought you already knew. In a surprisingly moving passage in the novel Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut has his protagonist watch a war film backwards, so that it appears that guns are sucking the bullets out of people, that bombs are healing holes in the land, that an air force is repairing a country rather than destroying it. This poignant view of the imbecility of human destructiveness is achieved through a simple temporal reversal. In this fantasy, damage which can’t be, is undone. The fantasy is the healing which cannot happen in real time in real life. But in the real world, those of us who read this other way things can be – we can decide to make a difference. This is an important form of persuasion to which creative writing is uniquely suited.
Take Vonnegut’s example and reverse a process to un-damage the world and the people in it.
experimental rhetoric – turning things around 81
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Or let’s take the example of what I would call negative attention, the drawing of attention to things that don’t happen or things that simply are not. Let’s return to Szymborska’s poem, ‘In Praise of Self-Deprecation’. It begins:
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.Scruples are alien to the black panther.Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.
The last line of this stanza is a bit of a departure because it’s positively stated whereas the first three assertions are hard to fault – they really just amount to witnessing what’s not there. But this can be a powerful means of leading the reader to a judgement. We’ve spent a lot of time in this book so far being present to the here-and-now, thinking about what’s wrong with how things are, thinking about how things could be different. But here’s another approach altogether. Work with the reverse image in order to witness what’s missing in the world.
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隱喻：意象之間最大的跳躍。
Aristotle tells us metaphor is the most essential thing for poets. It’s essential in the way Shelley intended when he wrote of unacknowledged legislators, because with the use of metaphors poets say what’s what – they tell us how the world is. Wallace Stevens wrote that it’s only in the land of metaphor one is a poet. And Stevens says, ‘Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor’. Metaphor is the most discussed of all tropes or figures of speech. Among the other tropes are simile, metonymy, irony, hyperbole – a number of these to be discussed in exercises to come. Metaphor is essential to everyday language. We all use metaphors every day just in the normal course of saying what we want to mean. Lakoff and Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By, is a useful practical exploration of this fact. You’re a rat, you’re a clown, I’m buried in work, don’t be a pain in the neck – each of these is an everyday metaphorical expression to which we usually wouldn’t give a second thought. In fact, metaphor is difficult to avoid in everyday speech. When Aristotle tried to define metaphor he wrote of adorned speech as opposed to the bare facts. But metaphor is not a kind of clothing you can take off or put on; Aristotle couldn’t help using metaphors to tell his readers what metaphor was.
Metaphor is not only everywhere, it’s also one of the most fundamental of operations of language (and of signs themselves). That fundamental relationship is one of equivalence – a = b. The word tree in English or arbre in French or shu in Chinese puts in the heads of the speakers of those languages the picture of a tree. The word is not the picture and the picture is not the tree but language works (meaning is made) through these kinds of equivalence which are so fundamental we have to make a serious effort to bring them to our attention. Metaphor is also essential to poetry, as Aristotle claimed, and we’ve seen plenty of examples of it in this book before now – the exercise on riddles, on ‘I am’ poems, on symbols, on portals, on being a little god and making new worlds – all of these involved metaphors (among other things).
And what is metaphor? It is the art of saying things are what they’re not – it is, in other words, an art of lying, of making things up. This is what the poet and the story teller have in common – they make up things which are not true but which need to make sense in some way for their readers/listeners. And so they make new truths, truths of the fictional kind. A metaphor can make sense because it connects in some interesting way with the reality of the readers – with the truth of their worlds and their lives. Aristotle thought metaphor was essential for poets, because it’s the poet’s work to reveal truths a reader would not otherwise see.
A metaphor has two halves. If I say you’re a big ugly ape, then let’s say you are the origin and big ugly ape is the destination of the metaphor, it’s what you end up being by being in the metaphor. The Greek origin of the word metaphor is in the idea of carrying across – in other words the carrying across of meaning from an origin to a destination. The aim of this exercise is simply to make the most far-fetched leaps you can think of from origin to destination, then sit back and see if they can be of any use to you in the making of a poem. Use circles and arrows to join the origin and the destination of choice in the examples below.
82 metaphor
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my head is…your heart is… these hills are…the truth is… the underpants are…
… a monster made of lies … a passage of clouds through the rain … a stiff doorknob … a mirror of the sky … all the tea in China
You can make your own metaphor cutups, simply by creating your own two lists like these above.
Now a poem which consists entirely of a list of farfetched metaphors is unlikely to succeed for the simple reason that it will wear the reader out. How can you have a turn to end (to resolve) such a poem when every line is, of its nature, a turn in itself and from the last? The answer is that a metaphor-list style of poem would need a different kind of turn to end, a turn that would break the metaphor spell somehow. Think about what would go well with the metaphors you choose from the cutup list you’ve made. Play with the possibilities for a poem from out of these.
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完成下面幾行，看看能否找到一首詩或詩的一部分。
Let’s take a step back and look at the workings of simile, that form of comparison which usually makes use of the words like or as. Simile is the analogy declared to be, not unquestioned truth, but a comparison. Simile is the metaphor in inverted commas, it’s the metaphor weakened by having attention drawn to it.
my love is like a red red roseas if the willows wept When the evening is spread out against the sky
/ Like a patient etherised upon a tableI wandered lonely as a cloud my mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
In simile something is denied; if I say you’re like a father to me, this means, among other things, you’re not my father. Likewise, of the examples above, I am not in love with a rose, willows can’t cry, the evening is not a patient under anaesthetic, I’m not a cloud myself, and the girl I’m getting about with doesn’t blind or burn anyone with her eyes. You could make quite an interesting poem simply by collecting other people’s similes or metaphors and denying them, or alternately by upping the ante – I’m a cloud in love with the sun and this puts the dusk to bed, squeezes tears from trees.
Simile comes in many forms and this means that one can use quite a bit of simile in a poem without being boringly repetitive. In this exercise, let’s complete the following lines to see if they suggest a poem or part of a poem to you.
as far as …the river seems to be a…… like a bolt from the blue____ is to me as ____ is to you as if it were… like gold from aery thinness beat…as a bat out of hell … like a lizard drinkinghe looked as if …she took him in her arms as if he were a…as … as the mountains of …
Similes can sometimes be piled up effectively in a poem. By building up a choice of similes for a reader you can make a poem a little riddling. For instance:
safe as houses ugly as sin tough as old nailsthick as a plankoften as not I am…
It might also be helpful to go back to your metaphor stockpile just to see if any lines there actually work better for you in simile form.
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選擇一個隱喻，用隱喻的方式來對其進行延伸，以此組成一首詩。
In Exercise 27 (the poem of the nth degree) we played with the idea of taking things beyond a logical conclusion, in other words just thinking a little further along a track than most people would allow themselves to go, in other words – thinking a little crazily. The idea of an extended metaphor is simply that one metaphorical image in a poem has consequences and that these consequences can be followed through to (or beyond) a logical conclusion. For instance, if I say that the sea is a hungry wolf then I could go on to describe the wolf devouring whatever was on the beach on a bad day or sunning itself there on a bright day, or chasing boats as if they were bones or having a good old snarl, because that’s something both wolves and the sea can do. But let’s take a somewhat better worked example in Emily Dickinson’s famous poem:
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune – without the words, And never stops at all,And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm.I’ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.
Here hope is a bird and by following this metaphor through to a logical conclusion, we learn a lot about this one abstraction and its meaning for the persona. A really different example of extended metaphor is in e.e. cummings ‘she being Brand new’, a poem worked around the car = woman metaphor.
John Donne and other Metaphysical poets were famous for their use of a kind of extended metaphor they called a conceit. Essentially the conceit is an extended metaphor by means of which a complete poem is governed, and usually with some complex logical argument. Conceits often served to show how clever their authors were, and how they were up with the latest scientific knowledge. Donne’s poem ‘The Flea’ is a classic example. Here’s the first stanza:
Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be. Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead; Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two; And this, alas! is more than we would do.
extended metaphors, conceits – taking things to their logical conclusion
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The whole point of the poem is to bamboozle a girl with logic so that she’ll agree to have sex with the man who’s delivering the argument. And the whole of the poem turns on the image of the flea, which is used as a metaphor for how unselfconscious pure love ought to be. What makes the flea an interesting choice of metaphor is that it’s so unlikely; something small, annoying and disgusting is used to show how silly the girl is being in denying herself. But the whole effort is tongue in cheek and the real goal is to show the girl that the poet is so clever, he’s irresistible. That’s one to add to the list of functions for poetry.
In this exercise choose one metaphor and develop it so that it will be the organising principle for an entire poem. Here are a few possibilities in case you’re scratching around for one:
my head is a house the poem is a staircaseyou are an ugly monster/beautiful creaturethe alarm clock is a barking dog the future’s so bright – I gotta wear shades
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把收集到的陳詞濫調拆散，再用隱喻以全新的方式把它們組合起來，讓讀者感到驚喜。
The Russian Formalists were theorists of literature who saw – among other things – that language had become so automatic in its use that much of its meaning was lost. The aim of poetry in such circumstances could be to bring language back to life, to ‘make the stony stony’ again, as Victor Shklovsky said. The Formalists called that process of bringing back to life de-automatisation. Now it’s easy to see how language loses meaning through use. It’s worn away the way the king’s head on a coin could be worn away by a long passage through many hands. Language, like the coin, is equal to everything (it buys and sells) but its meaning can be eroded simply through the repetition of transactions. That’s how clichés and dead metaphors come about. A cliché is simply an over-used phrase, a phrase which has lost the force it once had. Here’s a string of examples, courtesy of Reginald Perrin’s boss CJ from David Nobbs’ books and television series: ‘If you ask me a straight question, I’m going to give you a straight answer. I’ve always taken great pains not to talk in clichés. A cliché to me is like a red rag to a bull. However, there’s an exception that proves a rule, and there is a cliché which fits my situation like a glove.’ Aristotle couldn’t talk about metaphor without using one and CJ can’t talk about cliché without speaking in clichés. The paradox of the cliché is that it’s often the most fitting (and at first, surprising) phrase which becomes outworn with use and so devalued.
A dead metaphor is a metaphor which no longer conjures up anything. Meaning may have been ‘carried across’ from origin to destination but the first time it was carried across was a long time ago and now it’s moved from the origin to the destination so routinely no one feels the weight anymore. Classic examples include the leg of a chair or a branch of the firm. No one thinks of chairs as getting about on legs or of companies as being tree-like structures. Lots of insults and abusive phrases are originally metaphorical; when people say ‘go jump in the lake’ or ‘drop dead’ they rarely have a murderous intention (or at least not for long) – it’s the metaphor that’s dead, not the butt of the abuse. If someone calls you a dickhead it’s quite unlikely they actually think your head has the shape of a penis, or even that they would think such a comparison should be taken as insulting.
How to de-automatise for a poetic purpose? It’s quite simple. Just draw attention to a cliché or bring a dead metaphor back to life. That’s what you’d be doing if you said the face of the clock was glaring at me, or if you decided to stare out the clock (as if it were a person staring at you). So de-automatising a dead metaphor is as simple as making the chairs and tables dance on the legs they have, which were after all provided for the purpose.
In this exercise, find a metaphor to bring back to life. Here are some examples to get you started, but please add to the list:
85 de-automatising or metaphor – wanted dead and alive
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lose face lend a hand flower bed catch a name run for office all hands on deck head teacher
Or play a cut-up game with clichés. Simply collect clichés, take them apart and match them in new and surprising ways. By doing this you will have drawn attention to the meanings that were otherwise buried because taken for granted.
As suggested above, a lot of abuse is automatised; especially for instance, in English, abuse related to sexual or toilet-oriented language. It’s dead metaphor we’re dealing with, unless hearing the abuse has power to make you imagine the act referred to. But consider this piece of Australian abuse – I hope your chooks (chickens) turn into emus and kick your dunny (outdoor toilet) down. It would be difficult to hear this and not picture what’s intended; it’s the image-conjuring that proves that the language is, in this case, alive.
Perhaps we can combine some ideas from the last two exercises, so de-automatise and extend the one (otherwise dead) metaphor. The face of the clock would be a good candidate. Or consider the humble computer mouse. Send it on an extended journey and you might manage to de-automatise all sorts of things!
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Now, let’s look at two specific strategies for de-automatising; one is literalising and the other is ironising.
literalising
Literally is one of the most over-used and inaccurately used words in the English language today. People use it to mean really or very when actually it means what I just said was not intended as metaphor, I mean it’s actually happening. So if I say the wheels are literally coming off the cart I don’t mean things are really bad in a very general way; I mean I have a cart and it has wheels and those wheels are – for whatever reason – falling off the cart. But in fact people do use this expression simply to mean things are really bad. The inappropriate use of this adverb gives the poet some unexpected collecting opportunities. Listen for literally misused and you will find opportunities both to de-automatise and to extend metaphors. When someone tells you they literally died of fright you have the opportunity for a ghost monologue.
Literalising – making literal – can in itself be a way of turning things upside down. It’s one thing to call someone a donkey; it’s another thing to pin a tail on them or make them bray. Literalising is often a close cousin of hyperbole. Making a metaphor real feels like exaggeration of the facts. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wishing to portray a regime so corrupt and environmentally callous that it puts everything up for sale, has a country sell its sea to big business. After that it has miles of mudflats but no sea. Or Woody Allen in his early film Bananas portrays a South American dictator who makes all of his citizens wear their underpants on the outside. Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels imagines a country, Laputa, where the scholars, having given up on words, carry the objects they wish to discuss around with them in sacks. Danté’s Inferno is packed with bizarre images of the torments which the damned must suffer forever. And of course Dante’s models for these torments are mainly from classical mythology. They include characters like Sisyphus who has to roll a stone up a hill never quite reaching the top and always having to start up the slope again. What Danté was doing with his hell was creating a space in fiction where his enemies would literally suffer the torments he imagined for them.
ironising
The ultimate upside-down trope is irony. Irony means meaning the opposite of what one seems on the surface to be saying. Shakespeare’s Marc Antony, delivering Julius Caesar’s funeral oration, tell his audi ence, ‘Brutus is an honourable man; / So, are they all, honourable men.’ His objective is not to honour but to expose Caesar’s murderers and to turn his audience against them. Through irony Antony draws attention to the gap between an appearance of respectability and the vicious intentions of his opponents. Irony is probably the tricki est of all rhetorical figures, and so is often hard to recognise. When one spots an irony one realises that the world you saw before was upside down.
For example, someone looks out of her window and says ‘Great weather’. Now if you can see that it is raining outside then you know that this is an ironic statement. If you cannot see the rain, for
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instance because you are reading the sentence in a book, then you might not see any irony at all. In fact you would expect it to be a sunny day in the book until someone or something gave you some contrary indication. Let’s take the example further. Stay on the printed page so you cannot see the weather. Someone says ‘Great weather’ and someone else replies ‘For ducks’. We know that ducks like water, so the ironic implication here is that the weather is bad, i.e. it is raining. Bad for humans but good for ducks. Irony in this case is demonstrated to the reader by introducing another point of view. So irony requires or implies a changing point of view – a kind of stepping back out of the picture so as to see the frame. In this exercise, try to ironically re-frame a situation. Make the stepping back to re-frame (or shift point of view) a turn in the poem.
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通過各種不同方式組合諺語（包括死喻和陳詞濫調），寫出自己的詩句。
As with cliché, proverbial knowledge is a brilliant source of materials you can have fun de-automatising. In fact, one of the properties cliché, dead metaphor and proverb share is that they can easily be brought to life by some simple decontextualisation. Take a fish out of water and it flaps about conspicuously; put it back and it swims away never to be noticed again. So, to de-contextualise will be to de-automatise. An easy way to do this is to show clichés, dead metaphors and proverbs into each other’s company. Simple cut-up collage techniques are likely to yield interesting results with these materials and they’re likely to draw attention to what would have otherwise gone without saying in the component parts.
When a native speaker of English looks at a list of common English-language proverb starts (or endings), s/he will probably have no trouble identifying them and completing them. Let’s take a few examples.
fools rush…every cloud has…a bird in the hand…a fool and his money…a rolling stone…a woman’s place…barking dogs…good fences…honesty is…don’t put the cart…
… gather no moss… in the cupboard… mother of invention… will move mountains… with fire … deserves another… first served… think alike… but pours… after the horse has bolted
Throw in clichéd line starts, like
once upon… there was an old woman…
or endings
… happily ever…
Let’s borrow from other cultures to enrich the mix of our raw materials. Here is a small set of translated Chinese proverbs for a start.
86 putting proverbial wisdom to use or fracturing a fairy tale
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haughty before – reverent after a waterfall of wordsno intact eggs under an overturned nest dying embers may glow again swap a writing brush for a sword to rear a tiger is to court calamity they are the knife and the chopping block – we are the fish and the meat how can a swallow know the aspirations of a swan?picking bones from eggsa dog snapping at a hedgehog has nowhere to biteplaying the piano to a cow
Now use the internet (or other sources) to collect more proverbs of various kinds from around the world. Perhaps there’s a particular proverbial topic that interests you; for instance proverbs about work or love or war or men and women. In this exercise make your own lines by playing with the way parts of proverbs (and dead metaphors and clichés) can be combined. Once you’ve got some lines you think you can use, consider what you would like to say in a proverb collage poem. What’s the point you’re hoping to make? Note the way many proverbs contradict each other, for example, fools rush in where angels fear to tread but on the other hand he who hesitates is lost, and a stitch in time saves nine. So proverbial wisdom isn’t all in accord with itself.
One of poetry’s vocations is to resolve contradiction and so to demonstrate a paradox which had not previously been visible to – or recognized by – the reader. Proverbial wisdom is a good place to start on this work.
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描寫你每天或每周都要經過的一段路，但不要讓讀者知道那段路的位置，看看在讀者想像中出現的是甚麼？
In Dylan Thomas’ famous poem ‘Fern Hill’, the reader experiences wonderful colour imagery and a landscape of magical places and objects which conjure up the parts of Wales with which the poet’s voice is associated. Here are the first two lines:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughsAbout the lilting house and happy as the grass was green
‘Happy as the grass was green’, ‘easy under the apple boughs’, ‘about the lilting house’: different techniques are employed in each phrase but a related principle applies in each. The meaning is transferred between or among objects through a pattern of association. This pattern has a generalizing effect because it unifies a landscape or image field by sharing the attributes of the objects in it. The technical unity of these first two lines sets up the pattern for the reading of the whole poem. The reader has to make her own images from the patches of colour and the glimpses of movement and from the patterns of association that make up the poem. How complicated is the work of reading lines like these? Later in the poem we read of ‘tunes from the chimneys’ – to understand this image we need to associate things inside the house (singing) with what’s coming out of it (smoke). Put these ideas together and we imagine people gathered for warmth around the hearth inside and singing to express themselves and as a way of being together. These lines are challenging because the associations we need to make to understand them are more of a stretch than those used in life or poetry before Dylan Thomas; and also because they come thick and fast. The trope as stake here is metonymy – the figure of association, which allows us to think of things, courtesy of what’s next to them in mind.
Aristotle tells us that metaphor is the most essential thing for the poet, Wallace Stevens that the poet lives in the land of metaphor; but the power of association is both more subtle and more essential to the spirit of poetry. Metonymy is the trope of getting a better view by not looking at the star directly. Because so much mental association is unconscious, metonymy links the world of the poet to the experience of dreaming. A poem organized metonymically slips from image to image, rather than following daylight logic or a conventional plot. You can easily get a feeling for what that’s like by reading the Alice books of Lewis Carroll. A particularly good place to look for it would Chapter III of Through the Looking Glass.
Like metaphor and simile, metonymy is common in everyday life, when we speak of the kettle boiling or what Washington thinks, likewise when we say someone had cold feet or his heart on his sleeve. In Australia a ‘petrol head’ is someone who drives too fast. Their interest or hobby or moral failing – whichever way you look at it, something associated with their heads – is speeding in an automobile: that is, using too much petrol. Popular culture and phraseology is steeped in metonymy. As with metaphor, some metonymies are more alive than others. Live metonymies encourage those hearing them to make the association implied. Dead metonymies don’t demand the association be made; they take it for granted. Skirts for girls, the crown for the government, the law for the police. You can have just as much fun de-automatising metonymies and bringing them back to life as you can
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have with metaphor. By and large though, the process of metonymy is unconscious and so at once demanding interpretation and difficult to explain.
But perhaps the most interesting metonymic poems will be written, not by de-automatising, but by conjuring up fresh associations, associations which come from your life experience but which will communicate with a reader by giving him or her some imagining work to do. So metonymy is to some extent riddling. Rhyming slang is conceptually similar (apples and pears for stairs and trouble and strife for wife) – to understand it you can’t be direct, you have to guess what rhymes with what’s meant. With metonymy though, the process of association is through image rather than sound similarity. In this exercise, let’s practice the art of not looking too directly at the image we’re hoping to conjure. Let’s make the reader do some imagining to see what’s in the poem. Let’s take the reader for a ride. Let’s make it a short trip you take every day or every week. Your objective is to describe the way you go without naming directly any of the places or objects or people along the way. If it was a walk through the woods, you might start – I follow a song unseen up in branches…
Here are some ideas for possible metonymic poems, using an unexpected persona to tell a story indirectly:
the clothes in the cupboard tell of the life they have knowna conversation in a jewellery box the hell of the eaten the leaves’ farewell to the tree
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和動物談話，為牠寫一個獨白。
Anthropomorphism is a long word for something with which every child is familiar – the making human of things which are not. The most obvious example of this would be the talking human-like animals in children’s books and cartoons. Anthropomorphism has been such an important part of children’s culture since ancient times (Aesop’s fables) that it’s simply taken for granted. But when you think about it, it’s really quite a curious thing that the animals should talk in stories (and in cartoons) when in real life we know that they don’t. If one asks the question – what’s the most important difference between humans and other animals? – one of the most likely answers will be – language. As with metaphor more generally, this is a likening of dissimilars. But why make the animals talk in stories? If you can think of a good reason, I’d be interested to hear it. What does it mean to make human things which are not? Perhaps the most challenging poetic use of anthropomorphism will be that which precisely asks us the question – why are these animals talking? You could play interestingly with this question, just by disturbing a few expected patterns. That could be a good title for a poem – Why are they talking?
What is it about animals that interests us so much? Is it because of the fact that (especially in the case of mammals) they share so many characteristics (arms and legs and faces with eyes and mouths), that we’re simply frustrated by the fact that they can’t actually communicate with us by means of language? Then anthropomorphism is a kind of wishfulness, perhaps a wish for community beyond our own species. How would the speech of different animals be different if they could use words the way we do? We know some animals are smarter than others; from a human point of view then, are there animals and animals? C.S. Lewis in his Narnia books distinguishes between ordinary animals and talking animals. It’s okay to eat the ordinary ones but it’s not okay to eat the talking ones; presumably eating talking animals is a little too like cannibalism for C.S. Lewis’ taste.
In this exercise have a conversation with the animal of your choice. Alternately, write a monologue on behalf of the animal of your choice. This could be a complaint (a zoo animal or a pet complains of its living conditions); it could be a prayer or a hope, an apostrophe, a confession. Which genres suit which animals?
Or let’s reverse the idea; let’s try negative anthropomorphism. Why won’t those silly animals talk?/ I spent an hour with the flowers but they wouldn’t say a thing.
When Gulliver gets back from the land of horse-like Houyhnhnms in the last book of his travels, he’s disappointed that the horses in England can’t talk to him. Or imagine Alice’s disappointment returning from Wonderland or Looking-Glass Land to find out that none of the plants or animals in her real world would be able to converse with her.
Closely related to anthropomorphism is zoomorphism (making animal things which are not, for instance humans or machines). It’s easy to see why Gulliver might have preferred life as a horse, or better still, as a Houyhnhnm. What animal would you like to be? Why? And what would you do if you were that animal?
88 anthropomorphism
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用“of”字寫出意想不到的詩句。
For the last several exercises we’ve been playing with an experimental rhetoric for poetry – in other words a way of playing games with meaning in the hope of producing results useful for making poems. Metaphor, metonymy, simile, irony, anthropomorphism – play with these tropes or figures of speech allows the poet to make meaning in a deliberate (and yet sometimes unpredictable) way. But the poet – like the maker of television advertisements – has licence to do radical things with these resources (compared for instance with someone like a politician or a journalist). By de-contextualising and de-automatising, the poet is able to draw attention to all sorts of contradictions, things taken for granted and ideas in culture which go without being said. In the poem such things are said and the reader has to stop for a moment and think about things and how they are.
More basic – and less visible even – than what happens in the rhetoric of a language is the way meaning is produced by choices in grammar – by the way words with different functions are combined in an unfolding stream of speech or of writing. Grammar expresses the miracle of language – that out of finite lexical resources (let’s say all the words in the dictionary) infinite nuances of meaning can be produced. One of the most fundamental ways to de-automatise language is to play with the functions that words are thought or meant normally to have. In English, for instance, we have some ability to use the same word as a different part of speech (something much more common in many languages, including for instance, Chinese). But there many words which won’t change function so easily. Take a word like word for instance. I can’t word you, I can’t be worded by you, I can stand by wordlessly but I can’t walk wordly into a chamber. But maybe in a poem I can do something like that, and in doing so I would take the reader along with me into a new adventure in reading. It’s rare for poems with many invented words (neologisms) to succeed, although one successful example – Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ – is particularly exciting and has had a huge influence.
It would be easy to fill a book this size with experimental grammar exercises for the benefit of poets, but for the moment we’ll have to content ourselves with one exercise in a little corner of English grammar – in this exercise, let’s play with the preposition of. A few examples first of what of can do in everyday life:
of course, as of late, of life, to cure of, of itself, of mine, of timber, of his purpose, of wounds, of spirit, well rid of, of woman born, nothing came of it, of a mind, of the gods, to borrow of one, a form of, I beg of you, of your own free will, of cirrhosis of the liver, on account of, terrified of, of human bondage, full of flowers, to make a fool of, best of both worlds
There’s nothing particularly poetic about this list of examples; but it’s not hard to see how you could cut things up and get a rhythm going and play with this sort of material to make something:
89 grammar games, preposition play
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nothing came of the gods to beg of timber of wounds of time full of flowers, made fools of both worlds bested, of woman born nothing come, of all accountsof a mind, well rid of course
Why is it so easy to start generating interesting and unexpected meanings? Very simply, because a word like of does so many different jobs in English. Give yourself a day or two to study the complete entry for of in the Oxford English Dictionary. It covers quite a few pages.
For now though, let’s be less ambitious and just play with one function of of – that familiar form where one thing is made of another – a month of days, a house of sticks. Let’s have things consist of what you wouldn’t expect.
a clock of ice a river of same a block of wrath a tide of speck
Please continue the list.
So that was of. Feel free to keep playing with of or choose another preposition and play!
The preposition is one of the most exciting areas for the poet in the grammar of English today. One of the reasons for this is that prepositions are always on the way from somewhere to somewhere; they’re not the action itself but they’re between the things that make the images of which poems consist. Functional grammarian, M.A.K. Halliday has called prepositions semi-verbs; that’s because they pack a lot of action and direction and force into a shape that we can’t quite tie down the way we understand a verb proper.
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想像一個不懂中文的外國人圍繞一個中文字來寫一首詩。
Learning to use a seemingly simple word like of is a real challenge for the foreign learner and for the foreigner user of the English language. That’s because a word like of can do a lot more things than a word like because or thing or like, and even though those words are very common too and also have a wide range of uses. The other group who have trouble knowing what they can and can’t do with words is children. They don’t know the rules yet so they find them out by breaking them. They break them just in the very natural process of trying to mean what they want to mean. Both children and foreigners find their way into a language by testing the rules they don’t yet know. And so they provide excellent role models for the poet, who is testing the language in just as fundamental a way, but from a different point of view. If a poem is about doing with words what words have never done before, then getting this job done likewise involves the finding, the testing and the breaking of rules, much in the manner we saw in the last exercise. The surprise element in poetry involves making the kinds of errors and intelligent guesses kids and foreigners are always trying out, and which makes them entertaining to be in conversation with.
The poet does to the words of his or her own language what the non-native speaker cannot help but do – s/he de-automatises them. The non-native speaker cannot see cliché as cliché, doesn’t know which metaphors are dead. For the new user as for the child user of language, every metaphor met for the first time is alive. One of the reasons the Romantics were interested in recovering innocence was in the simple fact that the language of children is very little automatised; it has the freshness of words really meant for what they seem to mean. One gets a sense of this in Blake’s Songs of Innocence. So in dialogue with the native speaker of a language, the foreigner is always bringing dead metaphors back to life. This is a healthy and helpful model for the poet. And we can say that in an important sense the non-native who wants to make poetry has a big advantage. S/he doesn’t need to recover innocence, that’s the point from which she starts. If you think of poetry as an art of knowing and not, then the child poet and the non-native speaking poet have impressive not-knowing strengths. They are driven by questions of a fundamental kind as to what the language can do and what’s to be done with the language.
The foreigner makes interesting – let’s say poetic – errors, just in trying to use language for everyday purposes. Does it count as poetry though if you don’t know that you’re doing it? Interesting question. However you answer it, there is in the naturalness of the non-native’s errors a good motive for the native speaker and the foreigner to be in a dialogue about poetry, perhaps to translate collaboratively, or perhaps to make poems together. Native and foreign users of a language have different kinds of knowledge about the meaning making materials available to them. Think about trying to develop some rules for the way the preposition of can and can’t be used. So many of the errors a foreigner makes with this word are errors a native speaker simply could not make, and so they approach the question from very different angles.
In this exercise, be a foreigner in your own language. Let’s use an unknown word and build a poem around it.
poetry as a foreign language90
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Which of these words is foreign to you?
slivovitzbenobobroughamshimpipistrellemoa chintz frabjous
dioramabasiliskgilliewhifflepitonmyrmidongimble ju-ju
glyphwabegimbals tum-tumchamferandantino gimble
harridanwoomeratovearnica tulgey carnelianmullion
jabberwockybanshee borogrove mulligatawnydrupe fathingale arrack
Choose one of the words above to title a poem about whatever you imagine the word to mean. Don’t look in the dictionary until after you’ve drafted your poem. Feel free though after you’ve written your draft to find out the word’s real meaning and incorporate this in some way in your re-working of the poem. Note that some of the words in the list above are from the most famous nonsense poem ever written, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’:
‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!Beware the Jubjub bird and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!’
He took his vorpal sword in hand Long time the manxome foe he sought –So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!He left it dead and with his head He went galumphing back.
‘And has thou slain the Jabberwock! Come to my arms my beamish boy!O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy.
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‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogroves And the mome raths outgrabe.
Although this poem is nonsense and most of the lexical words in it have no dictionary meaning, in fact the piece is so famous that several words from it have become ‘official’ dictionary words of the English language. No other poem has achieved this!
You can think of nonsense as everyone’s foreign language and yet it’s interesting how different nonsense is in different languages. Here’s Henri Parisot’s (1946) French translation of ‘Jabberwocky’:
« Il était reveneure; les slictueux toves Sur l’alloinde gyraient et vriblaient; Tout flivoreux étaient les borogoves Les vergons fourgus bourniflaient.»
By the way, what do you think Jabberwocky’s about?
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練習“偷時間”，在你應當做其他事情的時候寫詩——在上課、會議或排隊中。
Poetry is in a number of ways about doing what you’re not supposed to do – and this is one of several key contradictions embodied in this book. Going with words where words haven’t gone before means getting out of the range of the rules for what you’re allowed to do with words. Poetry is about breaking rules you have to discover in order to learn how to break. Maybe poetry is the most fun when it’s dealing with contradiction. And poetry is also a way through contradictions; it draws our attention to the fact that rules in life are only as good as the purposes they serve. In poetry as in life more generally, it’s important to work out when to follow and when not to follow a rule, when to stop, when to break a rule, when to create a new one.
In general, in the industrial and post-industrial world, it will be fair to say that life is for many, if not most, overly rule-bound, and that a lot of the patterns which dominate our lives are silly if not actually destructive and nasty. So much human time is taken up with thinking on narrow tracks and with dull tasks which turn us into machines. Blake was onto this already two centuries ago when he wrote of ‘mind-forged manacles’ and ‘satanic mills’. The Romantics were interested in recovering innocence but in a more general way we might claim that the practice of self (or collective) expression in any art is an escape from unreasonable burdens laid upon humans by modern life. Poetry is a resistance with words against the inhuman purposes to which words can be put.
The purpose of this exercise is simply to practise stealing time by writing poetry when you shouldn’t be – in class, during a meeting, when you’re waiting in queue. If you need a justification, then think of it this way – these are all situations in which time is stolen from you. So, in point of fact, you’re really just claiming back time that was yours all along – that’s to say, you’re casting off the mind forged manacles, getting out of the satanic mill and claiming back your life. In this exercise collect lines for poems when you should be doing something else. Keep this book hidden under the desk so no one can see what you’re doing. Or maybe you’ve been doing this kind of thing all along? In that case – put the book up on the table and flaunt it – show those miserable soul-less fools what poetry means to you. And don’t blame me if you get the sack!
Remember – rules are for breaking. But you need to learn them first!
91 perruque, poetry where it’s not supposed to be, let the poem go the way it will
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儘量吹毛求疵，剔除自己認為最差的作品。
There are two good reasons why this book of one hundred and one poetry exercises doesn’t include any instructions or help with writing rhyming poetry. Firstly this is a fairly specialised activity, known as versifying (the making of verses), and which others have already done a brilliant job of teaching (a good first reference would be Phil Robert’s Penguin Book How Poetry Works). The second reason is that rhyming is an advanced skill for the poet and it’s very easy to do it badly and make a mess. Rhyme is an over-rated pastime. You’ll recognize it’s a crime for a mime in his prime to chime in with a rhyme time after time… it aint worth a dime, so suck on a lime… the effort to rhyme easily distorts a poet’s hope of having something to say. The poet gives up finding what needs to be said because he or she is just too busy finding the next rhyme word.
There are many things one can do badly and make a mess of in poetry. Up until now in this book there’s been no real discussion of what not to do in poetry. That’s because this isn’t a book of rules, it’s a book of suggestions. It’s also because negativity kills creativity and the aim of this book is to encourage, not to discourage. Still, there are so many ways to write bad poetry, there’s even a name for this activity – it’s called poetasting. And those who do it – bad poets – are called poetasters. It’s as well to remember the word taste in there. Taste changes and one generation’s finest poets may be another’s most loathed poetasters (and vice versa).
In this exercise we’ll briefly canvass some of the best known ways to write badly and make awful poems. Rhyming badly or too much is one such way. Also, the kinds of half-rhyme you could get away with in a song on the radio are pretty painful for the reader when set down on paper. But here are some more sure-fire ways to write a bad poem:
Too many adjectives. Sometimes known as the Victorian disease because the Victorian poets were so fond of over-describing things with epithets. If you have trouble sleeping, take some lesser known works of Tennyson or some of his lesser known friends to bed – you’ll find yourself in dreamland before they’ve finished describing the first sheep.
Abstraction. Ezra Pound famously wrote ‘go in fear of abstraction’. You could say abstraction is the opposite of imagism. The problem with too much abstraction is not simply that a poem becomes heavy and ponderous; it’s that there’s nothing for the reader to imagine – nothing to see, touch, feel, taste, smell – all you’ve got is great ideas that you’ll have trouble remembering because there was never anything your imagination could get a hold of.
The sledgehammer of commitment (as mentioned in Exercises 42 and 81). Preaching or telling the reader what to think and feel. Telling instead of showing. Especially a problem for self-consciously political or religious poetry, generally sledgehammers persuade readers to stay well out of the way of things like sledgehammers.
Sincerity and emotion are not enough. A lot of people start writing poetry because they have something truly heartfelt which they feel a need to say. Handled badly, the results of this outpouring
92 poetastings
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can vary from amusing to nauseating or some combination. But here’s a simple test. If you know you were meant to cry but you actually want to laugh and it’s a struggle not to, then something has gone wrong and the poem isn’t working. T.S. Eliot developed his theory of impersonal poetry as a reaction to what he saw as self-indulgent outpourings of emotion passed off as verse. For Eliot, poetry involved a ‘continual surrender’ to the ‘vast order of tradition’. Like the Metaphysical poets he so admired, Eliot thought of the whole process of poetry as something like a science experiment. For him, the poet is a kind of depersonalised vessel in which poetry happens. It’s interesting to compare Eliot’s conception with Harold Bloom’s idea, that it’s by disobeying (or rather misreading) the orders from the past that poets get to be truly original in their own right.
But to return to the question of emotion – Eliot saw poetry as an escape from emotion, not the indulgence of it. A little earlier, Oscar Wilde tells us ‘all bad poetry is sincere’. This doesn’t mean it’s bad to be sincere; it doesn’t mean that good poetry is insincere; it means that people use their sincerity as an excuse to suspend their judgement in such a way that they turn out bad poetry, but they can’t see it because they’re so impressed with their own tears. Perhaps Auden resolved this conflict between emotion and its poetic expression when he said, ‘Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings’.
The twin dangers of obviousness and obscurity (well, the opposite dangers) – these are the Scylla and Charybdis of poetry today. Think of it this way, if your meaning is obvious then what’s the point of saying it at all? If that’s your problem then your poem’s too easy. On the other hand if no one can understand what your poem is about, then you’re being obscure. The trick is to have something worth saying – something new and surprising – and to have readers for whom this discovery of yours will communicate. Managing this trick is the life struggle of most successful poets.
There are many ways to write bad poetry; this page is just a beginner’s guide to some of the best known methods. The point of this exercise is to help you to reflect on your own work, to make some judgements about it, and to have some fun while you’re getting the poison out of your system. Still, remember Ern Malley and how his poetry resulted from the best efforts of two poets who were trying together to write as badly as they could? So – on the page opposite, without any further encouragement – do your best to do your worst! Of the poetasting methods outlined above, choose and combine whichever take your fancy.
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以第一人稱表達自己對這個世界的想法。
This is another exercise for getting things out of your system – possibly an antidote for the last exercise (in case you found that a negative experience). So now, in the first person give your opinion about the world or any particular aspect of it. Do this in the form of a monologue as long as you like (or that you can fit on these two pages). The Beat poets provide some classic examples of writing in this genre. Take for instance, Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, which starts:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…
Or consider Bob Dylan’s allegorical song ‘It’s a hard rain’s a gonna fall’:
Oh, what did you see, my blue eyed son? And what did you see, my darling young one? I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’ I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’ I saw a white ladder all covered with water I saw ten thousand takers whose tongues were all broken I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
So what did you see? Tell all!
93 the rant
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找出兩首最特別的作品，組成一首跨體裁的詩。
Most successful poems in this day and age are more complex than the poems you’d be likely to make by playing with any one exercise in this book. That’s because interesting poems are usually a product of the confluence of diverse trains of thought; or one might say, the bringing together of thinking from different contexts and from different points of view, and also of stylistic methods from different genres.
One of the fundamental principles of poetry asserted from the beginning of this book is that, for a poem to work, there needs to some kind of a turn or surprise in it. If you can predict the last line by reading the first then the poem is not really happening – there’s no challenge in it for the reader. And note that the same observation would be true for a play or film or a story, or even for a television commercial.
In the modern and postmodern ages one of the trustiest methods for being surprising (in any kind of text) is to combine genres and/or contexts in an unexpected way, so that the reader really won’t have known what kind of a text she was in until after she’s finished reading. It’s not just the cleverest and most avant-garde of texts which do this trick. A detective thriller turns out to be a ghost story, a ghost story turns out to be a comic romance. Take the case of Australia’s unofficial national anthem, ‘Waltzing Matilda’, which is a strange kind of waltz, but which one realises, reading the lyrics (the poem), is actually a ghost story. It’s the fact that this text is challenging and mysterious that has kept it popular for a long time now.
Writing across genres puts pressures on poets (and the makers of other cultural artefacts) to find forms of consistency to replace the generic consistency let’s say Shakespeare’s audience could have expected by knowing that they’d gone to a tragedy or to a history or a comedy on the particular night in question. But if a recipe can be a poem or if a poem can be a set of stereo instructions, then you have to find your own way of keeping the poem together and convincing your reader that it’s just the one work s/he’s in.
For this exercise, search through your raw materials to find work of at least two distinct kinds which might be brought together to make a genre-crossing poem.
To get you started, here are some lines and phrases selected from very different kinds of poem. See if you can work out some way to connect them and so create your own poem on the page opposite.
listen my children and you shall here and many more whose names on earth are darkup the airy mountains now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight whenas in silks my Julia goes ah happy they whose hearts can break winter kept us warm, covering the season’s ill flower in the crannied wallo sweeter than the marriage feast
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there was a time when meadow, grove and stream and many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge since rules were made but to promote their end the expense of spirit in a waste of shame
… and collect as many more lines as randomly as you like … and set about to play!
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選出你最喜歡的十個詩句，寫在右面一頁上。再把它們拆散重新組合，作一首新的詩。
Throughout this book there has been a lot of advice on poems to read. That’s because poetry doesn’t just come from the heart or the body and soul; it also comes from other poetry – it comes from tradition and from past practice. To do something new with words in the form of poetry you have to understand what poetry has done before. This is very much a matter of learning the rules in order to break them. Or you could say it’s a matter of reading to get it wrong in a new and interesting way – this is the basis of Harold Bloom’s theory of misprision in The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom thinks that poetic innovation comes from poets’ brilliant misreadings of the works of their predecessors. If you want a shortcut to practise misreading, try this simple exercise: just let your eyes go out of focus a little as you read and copy someone else’s poem. Chances are you’ll keep quite a lot of the rhythm and some of the sense of the original poem, but you might make some quite interesting innovations through what you misread. You can do the same thing with sound by listening (at the right distance) to a recording of a poem, and so allowing yourself to mishear parts of it.
To put aside misreading for the moment though, as a poet you need to read in order to know where you’re coming from. But one of the dangers of reading, especially when you’re starting out, is that you’ll be too strongly influenced by one particular voice. This is difficult to avoid and it’s not uncommon in the early stages of a poet’s career to clearly discern the successive influences of particular great names in poetry. That kind of a journey will be worthwhile provided you find your own unique voice in the end (or before it’s too late). But there is a way around the problem and that’s to be influenced, not by one particular poet, but by many different voices. Be influenced by everyone! To do so, you need to have a poetry library. How to use that library? Probably teachers and librarians have been telling you from an early age never to write in books? Well here’s some advice to contradict that. By annotating (preferably in pencil) your poetry books with the ideas that come to you for poems when you’re reading you have an immediate way of responding to the voice that speaks to you from the page in those poems. That process would be a little like using this book; only instead of writing on the otherwise blank right hand page, you’re writing in the margins all around the poem you’re reading. Luckily modern poetry usually involves a lot of blank space on the page so there’s plenty of area in which you can write. So make your more or less stream-of-consciousness notes while you’re reading and then later you can type up what you’ve written and see if you have a poem or a possible part of a poem to work with. The principle is simple – in the presence of poetry worth engaging you’re more likely to be able to find a voice of your own. The idea isn’t new at all; John Keats did this with the blank pages in his edition of Shakespeare. In the presence of poetry a poem comes, and this is a natural process, like taking part in a conversation.
For this exercise, choose ten favourite lines of poetry and write them below. Now on the page opposite, arrange and re-arrange whichever words or phrases or whole lines suit, and combine these to make your own poem.
Probably what will come out of this exercise will be a little clumsy because it will be too dominated by the lines of others you’ve chosen and because those lines will be a little too discordant to fit together to make a poem in their own right.
So – treat this as raw material for a poem.
95 be influenced by everyone the annotation mode – in the presence, so a poem comes
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回過頭來看看你已完成的練習，並整理出一本屬於自己的詩集。
We’ve spent enough time with raw material, now it’s time to let your material roar!
This exercise is about finishing your poems, collecting them and turning your stuff into a book, or a chapbook (a small book), or at least a manuscript (m/s) that could become a book.
It’s hard work turning the raw material of poetry into poems that could be published (or read out aloud to an audience). And it can be endless work. At the age of seventy, it’s said Robert Graves was revising poems he wrote when he was seventeen. How many drafts does it take to complete a poem? There are as many answers as there are poems. Think back to the Mozart and Beethoven methods. Some poems will just come out more or less perfectly formed from the poet’s mind, others will take years of re-drafting. There’s personality in deciding this, there’s luck and mainly there’s hard work. The poet who’s lucky enough to have the right words trip off his or her tongue has usually had a lot of experience and reading to get to that point. As Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Criticism:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
It may feel like a gift when the words seem to come unbidden, but in fact this privilege is usually hard won. And of course when the words do just come, as for instance from a dream, then it’s important to get them down before they’re lost. That’s the moral of the apocryphal tale of Coleridge’s interrupted transcription of ‘Kublai Khan’. That poem and the context of its making can in fact be read as a parable for the creative process more generally.
A poem, any work of art, is like a living thing. Typically, it’s the work of one voice for other ears. To survive, to go on being listened to and read, the poem needs to go on engaging those who receive it. It’s a struggle for a poem to be brought into being, and a poem is a work that is always fighting for life. A poem struggles for attention to maintain its existence once it finds a final form. As in the case of Robert Graves however, perhaps it’s only the death of the poet that will give the work a fixed and final shape. But before you decide to have an indoor barbeque or walk out of your office window, remember dying is no guarantee that your works will survive. It’s the communicating enduring quality of your work that will ensure its survival. Ensuring that quality is usually the result of carefully directed self criticism and ruthless editing of one’s own work.
The hard thing about editing is that you have learn to let go. You have to let go of words and phrases and lines that you love, simply because they don’t fit into the poem you’re trying to make. The good news is that nothing need be wasted. You should keep all the bits and pieces you let go (the bits and pieces you like, that is) and you should be on the lookout for future opportunities for these to find a place in a poem you’re yet to write. If not in one poem, then in another. If not in the book you’re working on now, then in a later book.
96 recycling – editingkilling your children and having a family
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Editing your work for a book manuscript is a different order of task from editing a single poem. One has to particularly be careful of repetitiveness. There’s a danger that the poems in your manuscript are too much like each other, that the book will be too narrowly focused and so lack range. Every poet has favourite words, phrases, images, characters, places, ideas – these are the writer’s trademarks. They’re important to voice but the danger is that you’ll bore the reader with material that’s too much the same. There’s a simple technological solution to at least part of this problem, and that’s to put the finder through the word file of your manuscript in order to see if you’re overusing any particular words. For myself I know I need to be careful not to over-use words like sky or cloud or tree or bird – these are some of my favourite images. Where you find you’re over-using words, consider whether you should be using synonyms or more detailed or more specific terms, or whether you should be using different images altogether. The problem with abstraction is that the reader has nothing to imagine; the problem with the over-use of a set stock of images is that the reader doesn’t have enough to imagine. The problem with mixed metaphor, by contrast, is that the reader is given combinations of images which are impossible to envisage. This is image overload. Unless you’re hoping for humour or other special effects, mixed metaphor is to be avoided for this reason.
How to organise a book of poems? There are many ways you can go about this but ultimately your success as a poet will depend on your finding a method uniquely successful for you. The hope is that working through the exercises in this book has given you range as a poet, has helped you to write a lot of different kinds of poems about different kinds of topics; and that by writing in many ways, about many different things, you will develop a distinctive voice and a range as a poet – the ability to include in your work a range of themes, topics and interests. But to organization – one method will be to find a governing metaphor for the book. Take T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ or Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’; in either case the one image provides a metaphoric (or even allegorical) frame for the work as a whole and for the ways in which character and action relate to context. But there are many ways to organise a book of poems. It could be a calendar, a map of the seasons. Your book could be a journey in haiku, like Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. Perhaps you want to write a book of birds or of places in your town? Look back through the exercises you’ve completed and try to find some thread which will organise the poems you’re collecting. Perhaps there’s one poem you’ve completed which will be the book’s title poem; that’s to say it will give you the title for the book but it will also set the tone for the collection as a whole.
The purpose of this exercise is to help you to plan your own book of poems. On the page opposite, create a contents list for the book of poems you wish to write. Devise a code to classify your efforts so far, into poems that are
finished or almost finishedwell on the way but needing serious workideas for poems worth pursuing fragments in search of a poem in which they’d fit
If you want more of a challenge still, try writing your contents list as a poem in its own right. That would make it, not only a title poem, but a master poem for the whole of the book you’re writing. Don’t worry if this doesn’t quite work out; it’s a tall order – and anyway, heroic failure creates the ideal conditions for poetry.
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選擇你認為最複雜的一首詩，另寫一首新詩來解釋它，再寫第三首詩儘量簡單明瞭地表達前兩首詩的內容。
Poems are clever little creatures. They generally work because they’re doing something considerably cleverer and more complicated than the poet knew she was doing when she writing them. Usually that clever interesting thing that they do is also somehow simple and straightforward. Remember Brecht – ‘the simplest words must be enough’. In other words, poems don’t succeed by trying to be clever. It’s just that if you try to explain how they work you usually find out things are a lot trickier than they seemed when you were simply reading and understanding.
Do you need to explain how your poems work? When would that be helpful or necessary? Fortunately poets are not often called upon to explain how their works work; when they do they would be well advised not to reveal all, if only for the reason that a reader is quite likely to be disappointed with whatever the poet says about his or her poem. That’s because the true account from the poet’s point of view may fail to measure up to an unrealistic expectation. There is one occasion though on which explanation will be especially helpful. When translating it’s often essential to get the best possible explanation of how the poem works in its source language in order to make the best possible corresponding poem in the target language. As mentioned back in Exercise 62, the purpose of translating poetry is to keep the poem in the new language as open to different possible readings as was the original work. So the translator’s job is to not interpret the poem. But the contradiction here is that, in order to not interpret you have to first get an understanding of what interpretations will be possible for the poem. So you have to interpret to be able to not interpret.
A poem is open to interpretation because it can be read in different ways, on different levels on different days by different people. A poem is only worth spending time with to the extent that it remains open to interpretation, to the extent that is, that it demands the active participation of a reader – a kind of dialogue which may well be conducted in perfect silence. Some more words of wisdom from Brecht, on this issue:
How long Do works endure? As long As they are not completed.Since as long as they demand effortThey do not decay.
In this exercise, choose what you deem to be your most complicated poem. Now write another poem to explain it. Write a third poem to make the ideas in the other two as simple and as straightforward as possible. Now choose one poem to keep. Which of the three poems is the best?
97 scribimus – lectionem non damus we write em – we don’t explain em
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去人煙稀少的地方——遊覽破舊的墓園。無論你想去哪兒，立刻動身吧！
The importance of observation has been stressed from the beginning of this book, from the second exercise on. Observation is a part of poetry’s vocation for bearing witness to the world. Poetic observation is an art you can only develop through practice. How to practise the art? Devote some time to it. As in the place poem exercise (5) you have to go to the places you would like to write about and you have to spend undistracted time in that environment, with paper and pen, or camera or voice recorder, and you have to observe. You have to not let people or things distract you. You have to remember why you’re there. It’s like reading a book. If your phone keeps ringing you’ll never turn a page. So the best solution is to turn your phone off. But in this case you’re not reading a book, you’re reading a place.
Go where people aren’t. There’s great value for the poet in getting away from everyone and everything. In wild places (or wilder places) – in the forest, on the beach, in the desert – you can switch off some of the noise of the world and begin to hear the rhythms of your own heart. Turn off the white noise hum of life, turn off the dollar motive too and all the stress and muck associated with just about any job or workplace. Go to desolate places in order to experience the majesty and the wonder of the other-than-human world. This is the awe-inspiring sublime which so interested Romantic poets and painters. Who knows what your imagination will find there!
Desolate human places – ruins and tombs – these are places which nature may be in the act of reclaiming, and these are also important places for poetic observation. Tour the old cemetery; it’s full of untold tales, full of stories lost forever and which invite your speculation and invention.
And you can be lost in city streets too; they can be the loneliest places on the planet. And lonesomeness is in a way the key – the poet needs to be truly alone in order to turn off the chatter that is the world we know (and the roaring material of poetry). That’s the way to find your own voice, to find your own roar, and to go your own way with words and with the images and ideas words bear.
Maybe it’s crowded places which are of most interest for your writing? There are two problems with observing in a crowded place – firstly what’s going on there could be very distracting, secondly there’s a possibility that someone scribbling things down might draw attention to themselves. This is one reason why a voice recorder is not a bad idea. Once upon a time, using a voice recorder would have made you very conspicuous; today it looks like your taking a phone call and telling the person on the other end what’s happening around you. And maybe getting into just that role would be an excellent way to write a poem!
Wherever it is you have to go – go soon. Don’t turn the page until you’ve been there and filled the space opposite with the lines that came to you.
98 here be dragons
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從過去的練習中，收集你沒有想過的主意、印象、隱喻及零散的詩句，用它們來作一首新的詩。發揮瘋狂的想像力，讓它自由飛翔。
A general goal and also technique of the poet is to push words and meaning beyond their usual limits. Language is thought’s main means and poetry is the cutting edge of language – poetry does what you don’t expect words to do. Poetry is the art of expressing the maximum freedom of words. Poetry has no thematic limits but a poem is about seeing what hasn’t been seen before, knowing what hasn’t been known before; even better, a poem is about doing with words what words have never done before. In this sense a poem should always be surprising in some surprising way.
To live up to this vocation for poetry, we’ve had exercises in the nth degree, de-automatising, bringing dead metaphors back to life, animating cliché, turning things round and upside down and inside out – all to do with doing with words what’s not expected of words in their daily round of getting things done for us. Whether consciously done or not, it’s this enlivening of words that brings culture to life – and bringing life to culture is the poet’s function and vocation in society. It doesn’t matter what genre is involved, it doesn’t matter whether it’s in advertising or pop music, the poet is the one who fights the deadening forces of use and of repetition. The poet struggles with entropy to make words live again. This isn’t a highly specialized job – it’s something everyone can do – with a little thought, a little training, a lot of attention and dedication. Hopefully by this stage of the book – if you’ve followed through all of the exercises to here – you’re a lot braver and a lot more skilled in your use of words than you were to begin with. What that means in practical terms is that you’re now in a much better position to execute some of the ideas you had earlier on. Some things that just seemed too crazy to try in a poem before might now be quite possible for you. So, look back through the pages of this book and try to collect ideas, images, metaphors, stray lines you’ve not yet used but which might now be helpful in the making of a new poem. Your objective in this exercise? – to go as wild as words will go. To bring this off you’ll need to be as brave as you can be.
99 as wild as words will go
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寫下你自己的ars poetica ——你對詩歌藝術的見解。對你來說，詩人是甚麼？請為詩歌做注解。
All subjects are fit for poetry and with a little metaphoric/symbolic leeway, we can also say that there’s nothing a poem can’t be. The only limit is imagination. It is helpful to reflect on the question of what poetry is for you. So working from the experiences you’ve had through this book so far, the time has come to make a poem poem – that is a poem about what poetry is. Let’s start with a list repeating the line start:
a poem is…
or work negatively, using the start:
a poem is not…
until you can arrive at some decision as to what a poem is.
Play with the materials you come up with and write your own ars poetica – your understanding of what the art of poetry is. Go anywhere in the book for the images and ideas you need but put your thoughts together in the form of a poem.
And while we’re defining poetry, what about the poet? René Char wrote that the poet ‘is that part of a man stubbornly opposed to calculated projects’. But what’s a poet to you?
100 What is poetry?
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In Plato’s Republic Socrates declares that the poets are disreputable and dangerous rabble who have to be expelled from the ideal state, otherwise they’ll cause no end of trouble by stirring up the emotions of their listeners. It’s ironic that it’s for precisely these kinds of reasons (misleading the youth of the city, searching under the earth, delving over the heavens) that Socrates was condemned to death by his fellow citizens in Athens. But Plato’s Socrates did allow the poets a way back in. If they could write a defence to show that poetry wasn’t dangerous but was necessary to the city then they could yet be citizens of the ideal state. It’s all hypothetical of course but many defences have been written, most notably by Sir Philip Sidney and by Percy Shelley. And now it’s time to write your own defence of poetry. Or if that’s not your style, you could turn things around and write an attack on poetry. Plenty of poets have done that too!
defences and attacks (an alternative exercise)
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教自己寫詩。
There are many contradictions in this book, but probably the most obvious of them is that if poetry is about finding your own way to go, then how can somebody else’s instructions help you? To answer the question a little coyly, someone else’s instructions or example could only help you for so long or so far. In the Divine Comedy the poet Virgil accompanied Danté on his journey through hell and heaven only as far as the top of Mt Purgatory. For the rest of the journey, Danté had to find other help. I’m not really sure whether I’m leaving you in heaven or hell but now it’s time to start working on your own and to do this you need a book with no instructions. These are easy to get hold of and they’re usually quite cheap – they’re books of blank pages and they’re usually called exercise books. Probably you bought one a long time ago because you couldn’t keep fitting all your ideas on every second page in this book. Or maybe you gave up using a book altogether because you prefer typing direct on the computer screen. All your choice, and time for me to retreat from this conversation you need to have with yourself. Now, use the rest of this page to give yourself a list of instructions for writing poems. Either they should make a poem in their own right or you’ll have a poem of some kind by the time you’ve finished doing what you’ve told yourself to do.
Now before you toss this (hopefully) well worn thumb-eared torn disheveled wreck of a book in the dustbin, consider first, that you might still have ideas you’ve written here and there which could be handy later on; second that you might want to look through some of the exercises again; third, that this could be an interesting souvenir of how you started out writing. You might want to go through some of the exercises again because you’ll approach them differently a second time round, so they might be useful to you now in a different way from before. The numbers at the foot of some pages are there to show you the links you might wish to follow, rather than just working from cover to cover.
Okay!? On the page opposite now do what you’ve asked yourself to do. Good bye and good luck!
101 DIY, give yourself instructions
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