The Art fof Failure

The art of failure is not the failure of art. Rather, it is analogous to Thomas Edison: "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." So too with your poetry. This will come to have greater importance if/when you submit to publishers except that rejection comes not from an idea that didn't work but, more often, from an editor who wasn't receptive at the moment of reading. Nonetheless, each poem should be considered a step forward despite the fact that most poems are not very good, in fact fail, as poems. Get used to this notion-- most of your poems will fail at greatness and, usually, goodness. Yet each one is a stepping-stone to the next one which will be better and so on until you have 10,000 ways that didn't work but the last is the best you've ever done and not as good as the next. This is the art of failure. Cultivate it. Do not be discouraged by any of it. Your commitment to the art will overcome any sense of failure and your understanding that the process of writing a poem, of being a poet, will trump any dejection. As I have so often said, this is a rigorous, demanding art and the act of devotion to it is very much the success of it.

This post will be expanded upon in the next-- don't judge this until you read that.

Next post: What has truth got to do with it?
So long for now.

Quick Rules for Better Writing, Part 2

Molly Peacock said once in a lecture to read fourteen poems for each one you write. Good advice. Better advice is to read one great poem fourteen times for each one you write. Study HOW it means not what it means. Why each word? Why each line break? Why each stanza break? Why write the poem? Identify the sonic elements-- meter, rhyme, assonance etc.-- all the poetic devices. Read the poem aloud. As the wine taster does, notice the mouth feel. Does the poem read better silently? Listen to the poem read by another. (Do this with your own poems.) Read it a month later, a year later-- how has it changed?

All these things will make the poem and its poetry yours to call upon as you write. Never stop learning and studying the craft and never stop reading the great ones. Everything will become part of the thought basin you call upon when you write and the larger that thought basin the better your writing will be. So step two is to read a great poem fourteen times for each one you write.

Part 3 in the next post.
So long for now.

The Best Use of a Poetry Mentor, parts 1-2 or 3

This has two parts because my use of a mentor had two parts, actually three, that were distinct. I emphasize from the last entry that a long relationship with a single mentor can be really productive. Initially I submitted poems, we worked them over, I revised the poems, we worked them over again and repeated the process until the poems were as fully realized as they could be at the time. This was a grueling process and hugely educational. The more you learn about writing and the way you write the more you will eliminate bad writing from your drafts (more later about the notion that you shouldn't self-censor in the earliest stages of a draft). This phase of being mentored lasted several years and was indispensable. In the second phase I did much less revising and preferred to take what I was learning from my mentor (Baron Wormser) and apply it to my future poems. Keep in mind that at this time my poems were coming fairly rapidly and I felt that each new one was better than whatever came before. I rarely returned to the mentoring with the same poems again. The most recent stage came about both because I was evolving satisfactorily and because I was low on money. In this stage I worked with the mentor only occasionally, often less than once every six months, and usually with a batch of poems in which I had a specific interest. We have achieved a stage of marvelous mutual regard and friendship and there is nothing I won't show him or that he won't say about my poems-- good, bad or ugly. It has taken more than a decade to arrive at this.

In the next post I will discuss the pros and cons of self-censoring an initial draft.
So long for now.