Poetry for Pleasure

 

Most people join poetry or literature circles for pleasure. They have always enjoyed poetry, and now have the time — through retirement, unemployment or the children leaving home — to try their own hand at this absorbing genre.

How to get started, find like-minded friends, engage in collaborative associations and publications?

Discussion

The pursuit can hardly be bettered. Poetry is the most versatile and wide-ranging of literary forms, enabling things to be said that cannot be encompassed in prose. It can be finished in odd moments, unlike the novel, which takes long years of effort. Whatever its standard or style, a poem can usually be published somewhere, given the determination, the research and the contacts. Poetry forms a good introduction to more commercial types of writing, and is usually included in creative writing courses.

Nonetheless, poetry is not easy. The medium is a compact one, needing great concentration to read, and even more to write. First efforts are not always rewarding. Nevertheless, even the most pedestrian poem occasionally lifts into the vivid and memorable, and kindles a warm response in its reader. And that is worth a great deal, despite what poetry has become in recent years. With the Modernists' love of experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and intellectualism came a great narrowing of aims and accomplishments. Poetry was not writing at its highest pitch, but something fabricated altogether differently. With Postmodernism these trends were accentuated. Writers became the self-appointed spiritual guardians of language, championing its creative and arbitrary nature over its more prosaic powers to represent, analyse and discover.

Those writing simply for pleasure can ignore these subtleties. At least at first, the opportunities seem boundless. Despite all the advantages enjoyed by contemporary plays and films — the technology, the "real-life" dramas, modern idiom in speech and attitudes — Shakespeare is still the most performed of dramatists, giving us a gallery of recognisable characters that no one has rivalled. Dante provides us with a sharp-etched picture of fifteenth-century Italian politics. Byron manages to work in slang and details of a water pump into Don Juan, and Ezra Pound incorporates views on capitalist economics in the Cantos.  Philip Larkin paints the domestic nihilism of the contemporary welfare state,  and Ted Hughes's animals are exactly observed. What are these but the smallest examples of what lies open to talent, honesty and determination?

Success brings pleasure, and pleasure may be the truest mark of a writer. Without talent, nothing of importance can be achieved. But without increasing absorption, fascination and sheer pleasure in literary craftsmanship, that talent will never see the light of day. Native ability and hard work are both essential to poetry, and pleasure is the stimulus to both.

Suggestions

1. Join a local poetry writing group or literature circle. Writing is a lonely enough activity, and moral support and shared aims will help you through the barren stretches.

2. Be realistic. Good poets are not household names, and earn little or nothing from their efforts. The pleasure of writing has to be sufficient reward.

3. Develop some street sense. Like all the arts, poetry is a world of sharp infighting, excellent achievements and a good deal of chicanery, hypocrisy and plain madness. Carry on just the same.

4. Read biographies of poets. You will understand their work more, and the struggles they faced.

5. Consult books or attend classes on poetry appreciation. Your style will be different, but the underlying principles remain the same. You can't write well without thoroughly understanding what poetry is about.

6. Enjoy the literary life. Curl up with books. Sit with notebook in hand at local cafés. Join literature circles and societies. Poetry is an excellent way of making friends, for all that writers are competitive and fretful creatures.

 

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