How do you write a poem?
How do you write a poem?
You go to bed at midnight after a pleasant meal with friends, ready for sleep. A thought occurs – the wooden bed you’re sleeping on, the cotton sheets, the sand on the beach you walked along today – all these were once alive, part of vibrant, living things. Now they are merely scenery in the play of life.
A line leaps into your mind: ‘The cloth of life is woven from the dead’. (I changed that to ‘clothes’ later, to mirror the ‘o’ sound in ‘woven’). You sit up. Groaning, you turn on the light and grab a pen and the back of an envelope on your desk. Three hours later (in this case – I have known it take three years) you have gone as far you can and stagger back to rest your head on a pillow.
Your back is itching from bites because you forgot to put on a dressing gown and replenish the mosquito coils. Words and phrases collide in your mind. Should you really introduce a prosaic spondee like ‘bacon’ in line six of a melancholy Shakespearian sonnet? Can a fluttering pennant ‘hold fast’? Castles and fortresses do, so why not a pennant? Eventually, at about 4 a.m. or so, you drift into sleep.
That is how you write a poem – or, at least, how I wrote the one thousandth, three hundredth and ninety-second poem of my adult life. A poem which may never see print or be read by another soul.
Click on ‘How to write a poem’ below to download a full version of Felix’s poetry writing article.
How do you write a poem? (179)