Instructions for Diligent Poets
By Pauline Rodwell
Ignore the ones who say they know.
Do it your way and avert the struggle.
Don’t suffer the strain of trying to change
your ingrained ways of wording a muddle:
The rambunctious rain wrought Wednesday a puddle?
Don’t imitate Whitman, Stevens, or Plath—
instead insert expletives that shock your readers.
Spurn strong metaphors to speak for wrath
and dispense with primers on iambs and meters—
(why waste time slashing feet?)
Indulge the urge to rip slang words
such as skank or wack in your cracks at rhyme;
and when you run dry with nada to say,
show your elite side with some foreign phrase—
paté de foie gras or c’est si passé!
or whip up some luscious, archaic cliché—
like rise and shine or seize the day!
Never practice any proven calisthenics
such as nuancing or syntax mimicry,
for you can always put in some stray prosthetic
to bestow a sense of symmetry.
If terms like trope or negative capability
trigger a cerebral freeze,
just recall that in his time
Keats’ sweet prose was not well-received.
Keep writing ‘til you’ve honed a style
critics could consider yours alone;
it’s likely to prove as much worthwhile
as countless poems still unknown.
I meant to post a response to this entry last week but simply ran out of time.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many changes to this draft that I admire. It is clear that the draft has been revised to accommodate our suggestions and it does it well. Some of my favorite changes occur with these lines: “Don’t suffer the strain of trying to change / your ingrained ways of wording a muddle: / The rambunctious rain wrought Wednesday a puddle,” and again with “Indulge the urge to rip slang words / such as skank or wack in your cracks at rhyme.” There were several more than this but then I realized that I had too many. Alright one more: “you can always put in some stray prosthetic / to bestow a sense of symmetry,” because it’s so incredibly witty, Pauline. I looked for something to critique but I truly did not find anything.