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

THE CRAFT

The Craft

Edited by Rishi Dastidar

ISBN: 978-1-911027-85-0

eISBN: 978-1-911027-86-7

Copyright © the individual authors

Cover artwork: © Ria Dastidar, Uberpup

http://www.uberpup.net

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The individual authors have asserted their rights under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

First published November 2019 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom by:

Imprint Digital

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding

by Arts Council England.

Also published by Nine Arches Press

52: Write a poem a week. Start Now. Keep Going

by Jo Bell and guest poets

How to be a Poet: A 21st Century Guide to Writing Well

by Jo Bell and Jane Commane

CONTENTS

Foreword

by Rishi Dastidar

Introduction

Do All Rabbit Hutches Look Alike?

Against ‘Craft’ in Poetry

by Will Harris

Part One: On Poetic Forms

I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines

and Keep Him There: On the Sonnet

by Jacqueline Saphra

Enter the Fun Matrix: On Writing Sestinas

by Marvin Thompson

The Sense of Distillation: On Prose Poetry

by Carrie Etter

A Necklace of Disparate Pearls: On the Ghazal

by Debjani Chatterjee

Writing Poems Can Be Real Cool:

On the Golden Shovel

by Peter Kahn

Let Me Try On Your Tool Belt: On Borrowing

Techniques from Short Stories

by Tania Hershman

When Two Become One: On the Coupling,

a Poetic Invention and Intervention

by Karen McCarthy Woolf

Part Two: On Making Poems

The Discipline of Getting Lost:

On the Impossibility of Poems

by Caroline Bird

Active Lines and Scoring Goals: On Line Breaks

by Moniza Alvi

Writing Phone Calls: On Sound in Poetry

by Antosh Wojcik

I Should Have Called this Essay Something

Better, But in Not Doing So Have Thereby Proved

One of My Points: On Titling Your Poems

by Rishi Dastidar

Notes from the Notebook:

On the Writing of ‘Nine Nights’

by Malika Booker

Part Three: On Bringing Poems to Life

Digging Up the Word Hoard:

On Using All of Your Voice in Poetry

by Liz Berry

Write What You Know and Then Write

Something Even Better: On Creating

Characters and Personas in Poems

by Dean Atta

Creating Unfaithful Beauties:

On Translating Poems

by Clare Pollard

Computer Says O:

On Using Technology in Poetry

by Harry Man

There is No Closing Time:

On the Poetics of Performance

by Joelle Taylor

Part 4: Where Poetic Craft Meets Real Life

Beyond the Known:

On Using Research in Your Poetry

by Roy McFarlane

Of Guardians and Destroyers:

On Using Your Family in Your Poetry

by Julia Webb

Agents of Change: On Power,

Politics and Class in Poetry

by Peter Raynard

The Mother of Lies?

On Poetry, Fiction and Truth

by Gregory Leadbetter

This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours:

On Writing the Real

by Jane Commane

Coda

34 Interrogations: The Questions You

Should Ask Yourself When Writing a Poem

by Roger Robinson

Giving Off Sparks: Writing Prompts

Further reading

Contributors

Acknowledgments

About the Editor and this book

FOREWORD

Rishi Dastidar

For so many of us, ‘craft’ is a word that is double-edged when it comes to writing poetry.

It is a necessary word of course – what art can be done well without a grip on the basics of the technique of its creation? And who, at whatever their level of proficiency and facility, does not want their work to be ‘well crafted’, to be of the highest possible quality that it can be, achieving the goals that they have set for themselves?

But ‘craft’ is a slippery beastie too. Many of us – especially those of us from backgrounds where poetry writing is not a common way of spending time – are more than familiar with the whisper, the critique, the rejection that, while the work is good, it is in some way lacking in some aspect (often not articulated) of craft. And it can become a way of excluding people from the art, through suggesting ideas of standards that are unclear to beginners – and even to those who have been writing for a while.

This collection of essays is an attempt, not to supplant craft in poetry or overthrow it, but rather to broaden and deepen what it means in the 21st century – making it live for all poets, no matter what tradition you’re writing in and from. This is, necessarily, a political act, but one with a small p, and – to my eyes at least – there is nothing contentious in the book.

And for the avoidance of doubt: in no way does this volume replace guides to writing and learning about poetry such as those by Stephen Fry and James Fenton¹. The Fenton is a foundational text for me, and it’s a volume I come back to when I need to be reminded of how pentameters dance and dactyls land. I want you to read those books too, and gain that knowledge and understanding.

But then I want you to recognise that, to write poetry today, you need to be thinking about more than just your technical, prosodic abilities. How do you perform your work? What about the ethics of using real life in what you write? Can you use technology as a way to push your work to new places? These are ‘craft’ questions, as much as knowing how to get the most out of a sonnet, attempting your own translations and improving the titles you give your poems – all subjects covered here.

I also feel obliged to point out that this is not a traditional ‘how to’ book: while there are practical tips galore in these essays, I have deliberately avoided drawing them out where the writer has chosen not to themselves. But within the personal stories and opinions you will find insights as to how to approach poetic craft in such a way so that your writing is renewed with a new spirit; and perhaps you will develop a sense of loving the process of ‘crafting’ – after all, the best part of writing is working and reworking and working and reworking and working and reworking your words.

My thanks to all the contributors, for their time, generosity and creativity in sharing aspects of how they work, and to Jane Commane in inviting me to edit the guide.

Let me close with an analogy with a world I know well, that of branding and corporate design, where I spend my non-poetic days. The logos that my colleagues in the design team make all start with a pencil being picked up, then sketching – squares are drawn, curves swoop, circles connect. But very quickly they take these sketches and start to recreate, remake and remix them in computer programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, using the power of those to vividly bring their ideas to life. In how they approach their task, they start by using what you might call traditional craft skills – but then they have to use newer approaches and thinking to get to something that works for today.

The point being, of course, that ideas of what craft is, what it might be and what it can do never stand still. And that’s as true for poetry as it is for any other creative endeavour.

And you must learn the rules – new and old – in order to break them. Happy writing.

Nine Elms, London

October 2019

Note

¹ Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within (Arrow, 2007); James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry (Penguin, 2002)

INTRODUCTION

Do All Rabbit Hutches Look Alike? Against ‘Craft’ in Poetry

Will Harris

Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art. – Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

1.

A poem isn’t a rabbit hutch just because they look the same from a distance. By which I don’t mean that poems and rabbit hutches look alike, but that to the untrained eye all poems look the same and all rabbit hutches look the same. Their samenesses, though, are different.

We’re taught that poems have certain formal features in common: rhyme schemes, iambic pentameter, summer’s lease hath all too short a date. But really they can take any number of forms and do what they want – have one-word lines or no lines, include dialogue and pictures, even be in prose.

A rabbit hutch is limited by form in the real sense that if its form changes too much it’s no longer a rabbit hutch; if it fails formally it fails completely. The food tray might be badly placed or the gate’s faulty lock might cause it to swing open at the slightest nibble. If so, the craftsman has failed.

Rabbit hutches are defined by their form. Poems only make use of – or avoid – forms and techniques. A poem could decide to set itself political, moral or aesthetic goals that it fails to communicate or realise, but in an important, literal, sense poems can’t fail.

As Wallace Stevens put it, poetry is a revelation in words by means of words. (Imagine how a tradesman would react if you told them a wardrobe was a revelation in wood by means of wood.)

Though I say this now, for a long time I was under the thrall of craft. Maybe I was scared that someone was going to expose my lack of it. At university I spent two months on a poem that began: A necklace of stem that’s easy to snap./ A thinly hairy stem of granny’s nightcap. I pored over its sound patterning and rhythm, repeating thinly hairy over and over again in my head. I was stuck.

I thought that, as with building a wardrobe or fitting a horseshoe (things I definitely can’t do), the more I practised the better I would get. But ‘real’ craftsmen work with materials that have consistent properties. If you heat up or hammer metal it reacts in a consistent way. No one pulled me aside to explain that writing a poem isn’t like that; poems don’t just improve over time corresponding to effort.

More than that, no one pulled me aside to explain that ‘craft’ was a misapplied metaphor. It takes formal or technical features, embedded in a particular cultural-linguistic tradition, and then extrapolates them into a false, pseudo-mystical idea of what poetry should be. It’s about granting access and denying entry.

What do we mean when we say some poems are beautifully crafted and others lack craft? Who decides what value should be placed on any given set of formal features?

Instead of saying poems should have evenly-spaced vowel sounds and an internally consistent thematic domain, what if we said that all art should be done in felt-tip pen and applied directly onto the flank of a cow? Because that’s how it felt to me back then. Trying to write my long poem featuring a thinly hairy stem of granny’s nightcap, I thought that the more the cow squirmed and the pen slipped, the harder I needed to push. Resistance showed I was on the right track. So I didn’t stop to question why I was knelt beside a cow holding a felt-tip pen in the first place. This was craft.

2.

The Poet’s Freedom by Susan Stewart begins with an anecdote about a trip to the beach where she describes seeing a small boy building an elaborate sandcastle replete with turrets, crenels and a little moat. Having finished, the boy steps back to admire his work and then runs at the castle and proceeds to kick and stamp it to pieces, smiling all the while. Stewart writes:

Since then, that boy has represented for me a certain relation we have to making. Without the freedom of reversibility enacted in unmaking, or at least always present as the potential for unmaking, we cannot give value to our making. Was his castle a work of craft rather than art – one he felt could be replaced easily? Did this object that implied, but could not realise, an interior acquire an interiority in being a memory alone?

By destroying the mere thing, and using all his physical might to do so, the boy seemed to be returning the power of the form back into himself, as if what he had been practicing all along was a mode of memorisation or, better, learning. Once the skills used in making the castle in its entirety were internalised, they were ready to be used again. Unwilling or unable to be the curator of his creation, the boy swiftly returned it to its elements, that is, to its pure potential.

I take from this a kind of parable about the differences between craft and art, or about the dialectic that exists between the two. With craft, you’re making something that can be replaced – a commodity. If you spend all day building a wardrobe and then someone comes along and smashes it, you’ll be angry because that wardrobe represented a day’s work and could have been used or sold (it was also unique in its way) but the power to remake it is still inside of you. In fact, as that boy on the beach discovers, you might find your power affirmed in the act of its destruction.

With art objects, broadly defined, there’s a quality of irreplaceableness. If you rewrote the Divine Comedy it would be a different poem. The art object is defined by the threat of destruction in a way the craft object isn’t. Its terminal fragility is the site of its value. And whereas the destruction of the craft object proves the strength of the maker, the (possible) destruction of the art object proves the strength of the work. It affirms what Stewart calls its interiority, the vital flame of its inner life.

But the division between art and craft isn’t clean-cut because, of course, the maker is crucial to the work of art, and the alternating impulses towards art and craft are generative. Seeing them in dialectical terms should bring out the risks of an excessive focus on either. Too much art leads to a vatic emptying out; an abnegation of ethical responsibility. Too much craft leads to a narrowing of vision; the production of mere commodities.

When I was obsessed with craft, I thought there were models I could imitate that would show me how to make and remake indestructible little poems like stainless steel spoons. But putting together a poetry book I’ve realised just how insufficient good writing is. What’s important is that the work has that sense of pure potential. A life that exceeds itself. Which lives because it can be destroyed. Which wants to live through others.

Because a living thing is much more than a crafted thing. It can’t be bought or sold or replaced. It’s death-aware, shaped by the same freedom of reversibility that shadows our lives. It tells us that we’re more than just form; it tells us to cradle, for as long as we can, the potential that defines us.

3.

Reading Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice, I rediscovered a poem I’d forgotten about by Derek Walcott called ‘Blues’. Often I find it hard to know whether I like a poet’s work. It can take me by surprise when something clicks. It was a while before Walcott clicked for me, and then it was less because of anything I’d read by him than because aged 18 – around the same time I was writing granny’s nightcap – I heard an old recording of him reading ‘Blues’, a poem about a nighttime assault in New York City. This is its first stanza:

Those five or six young guys

hunched on the stoop

that oven-hot summer night

whistled me over. Nice

and friendly. So, I stop.

MacDougal or Christopher

Street in chains of light.

It looks like a conventional poem: lines of equal length, a clear (though loose) metrical tick, a compound adjective (oven-hot), and rhymes (guys/nice, stoop/stop, night/light). But said out loud it’s transformed. Or not transformed, which suggests changed. Rather its submerged rhythms float up to the surface. In Brathwaite’s essay he says you can hear in Walcott’s voice the sound of Don Drummond’s trombone. Drummond was a key player in the ska scene in Jamaica in the 1950s and 60s and perhaps Brathwaite is saying that, although ‘Blues’ is a poem about an