The Different Instruments:
Thoughts
On The Teaching And Practise Of Poetry
by John O'Donoghue
Poems can be quite easily taught: even professors sometimes do this. It's poetry which is the difficult business to teach.
Teaching poetry is rather like teaching someone to ride a bike: it's in the forgetting and letting go that success is achieved. And that is very difficult to teach.
Poets no longer serve apprenticeships. Instead, they go on courses or attend workshops. Where once the dead taught the living, now the dead have all but been eliminated.
Form is very easily taught. There are rules, and they are there to keep the ball in play. It's what done with the ball that counts. We could all be Tony Adams, if we trained hard enough. But how do you become Georgie Best?
Certain kinds of teaching emphasise the transmission and acquisition of knowledge as ends in themselves. Teaching poetry sees these as merely means. The end in view is something very different: the preparation of the mind to see beyond knowledge to understanding.
A poem can be analysed, dissected, paraphrased. But what cannot be explained is why it haunts us, makes us shiver, gives us a momentary glimpse into another dimension.
In order to write prose, a pen will suffice. To write poetry we need an array of very different instruments.
To direct by indirection may be used by a teacher sparingly, for effect. For the teacher of poetry, it is the whole shebang.
Poetry for a novice will focus on technique; a master loses this focus in proportion to their mastery.
Poems are made of simple words in order that greater complexities may be expressed.
Indifference to poetry comes through the impoverishment of language.
The material world is fine for writers of prose; it is what's immaterial which fascinates poets.
The clarity of a poem comes not from meaning but from effect.
Beyond the line, the stanza; beyond the stanza, the poem; beyond the poem, immortality.
Where two or more poets are gathered together, the Republic is troubled.
Prose offers words a hiding place; poetry is an ID parade where the usual suspects are very quickly found out.
If you teach the sonnet, the novice will write a sonnet. Eventually, they may even perfect the form. But have you taught them how to write a poem?
A curriculum for the teaching of poetry should include as many opportunities for indolence as can be arranged. Then work can begin.
Children make fine poets, because of their imaginations. Adolescents struggle to become poets, because of theirs.
Craft is not about technique; craft is a reflex.
Form is not the superimposition of structure on thought, like a city grid upon a landscape; form is what appears in the gloom, like fog clearing to reveal the Statue of Liberty.
What was always there form seeks out and reveals.
Haikus that don't obey the rules – like playing ping pong with the net down.
Refrains are echoes that have had time to think and come back slightly altered.
Rhyme is most effective when least heard. By all means rhyme – but let the line flow on and not thump in at the end. This is closest to the way we speak, and makes for a subtler kind of poem.
Just because a poem is strict in terms of form and metre does not mean that the poem cannot be quiet, subtle, elusive.
All art aspires to the condition of music, save poetry, which is aiming a lot higher.
The worst sin of all is to think of poetry as a ‘career'. Careers can't even sustain careerists these days.
The villanelle is not programmed by a couplet which drives the poem forward to end in that aa the aba rhyme scheme has been suppressing; it is a poem in its own right, written in a state of suspense like any other poem, with an ending that is not pre-determined, but which comes as a surprise to every poet who succeeds in writing a good villanelle.
A poem should begin in delight and end in payment.
The sonnet reflects the Renaissance – a form that grew from scraps of song into magnificence.
The difference between the soliloquy and the sonnet is the difference between the stage and the chamber, between overhearing and listening at the door.
Those who would write poetry should learn that it is first a craft, second a means of self-expression.
Confessional poetry is emotion recollected on tranquillizers.
A poet who writes prose is like a singer who speaks.
A sonnet sequence should be as good as a novel without the bits you want to skip.
Editing is a translation of the text into its purest form.
The tension between the primacy of the text and the agency of the author is the forefront of utterance.
Cadence is all.
Rhythm is far, far more powerful than rhyme.
Poetry is oratory with no hidden agenda.
True poems appear to have always existed; they're like formulae which explain the universe.
We live in times when the English language has expanded so far, its outer limits allow for the expression of a poetry close to that airy thinness at the edge of the world itself, the realm of Ariel and Prospero, enchantments for the few, caviar to the general.
Poets should know words in the same way a tradesman knows his tools: their usefulness, their handiness, their breaking point. And who supplied them.
Workshops are not where poems are brought for correction or approval; workshops are where language surrenders long-forgotten secrets all over again.
A prose writer may feel defensive in a workshop, but is more likely to correct and revise if he feels the feedback he's been given is sound; a poet who does the same, by contrast, will feel the power going out of him.
Poetry makes nothing happen subtly.
The difference between writing poetry and teaching poetry is the difference between art in heaven and daily bread.
Poets are soloists, not choristers.
A poet these days needs a muse far more than a patron.
Purifying the dialect of the tribe is a form of linguistic eugenics.
Dabble in verses, by all means, but be very careful when they become your life.
Poetry continues to attract vocations, despite difficulty and hardship. But then who ever said it would be easy? To be fully human is to seek the difficult; what's easy we can leave to the rest of creation.
John O'Donoghue's journalism, poetry and fiction has appeared
in The Observer, The TES, The London Magazine, PN Review,
Ambit, Acumen, Orbis, Aesthetica and Poetry Express.
Letter To Lord Rochester was published by Waterloo Press in 2004.
The Beach Generation and Brunch Poems are forthcoming in 2007.