I started writing poetry about three years ago, in the early days of the Covid pandemic. The poet Ian McMillan encouraged his twitter followers to have a go at writing a sonnet, an idea that appealed to me more than making sourdough bread or the various other distractions other people were turning to in those odd, desiccated days. So I did, and Ian read it out (about 28 minutes in), and said some encouraging things about it; so I wrote more, mostly about the experience of living through the pandemic.
Three years on, I’ve clocked up nearly fifty sonnets, numbered using increasingly unintuitive Roman numerals. Some of my early attempts were, bluntly, not very good - whether any of them are any good is not for me to judge, of course, but most of the first twenty or so now feel awkward, too literal and prosaic, and make me wince a bit. But that’s OK, because doing things badly is how we learn to do them better.
In this post I set out some reflections on why I write poems, how my approach has evolved, and what I find fascinating and difficult about the process. I do this with a little trepidation, as I still feel like a complete novice and don’t really know much about poeting. So this post is about the approach I’ve developed for myself; many other (no doubt more original, innovative and well-informed) approaches are, of course, available. I’ve interspersed images of most of the poems I refer to, but the full set can be found at my website here.
Why sonnets, first of all? All of the serious poems I’ve written have been in this form: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (ten syllables with the stresses on the even beats). The point of this fairly strict metre is not that it should be read out in strict time like a nursery rhyme (di-dah, di-dah, di-dah, di-dah, di-dah), but rather that it gives an underlying rhythm to the poem, a solid base on which the words can sit comfortably. (Somewhere in my word-lab is the start of an attempt at a sonnet in which some lines used a different rhythm, which I found quite difficult, but I may go back to that some day.)
Sonnets can have different rhyme schemes (or none), but all but the first few of mine have a Shakespearean scheme, with three four-line stanzas then a rhyming couplet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG). I’ve sometimes thought I should try another form altogether, and maybe I will when I’ve exhausted more of the possibilities of the sonnet.
But for now, it’s a form I enjoy working with, even if it’s a bit old-fashioned: it has a Goldilocks quality - it is short enough to be easily manageable (I can spend lots of time on each word if I need to, because there aren’t that many words to play with), and it can be viewed with a single glance to identify connections; but a sonnet is also long enough that it gives the space to develop, explore and play around with the ideas it introduces. Also, this strict structure means that the end result should sound good when read out (I’d like my poems to be read aloud where possible, please, because the noise they make is part of what makes them), even before considering what the words are saying. So I can leave the music and dance of the sonnet to take care of itself, and focus my attention on squishing the meaning and ideas into the sonnet mould.
From the start, I’ve found myself to be a perfectionist: I uncompromisingly require my rhythms and rhymes to be right, with no awkward corners (though even Shakespeare didn’t mind breaking the rules at times), and rhymes unforced and natural. It can be frustrating: I sometimes find a word or image I like but cannot get to fit the structure, or cannot find a rhyme that works, so I don’t - can’t! - use it. This makes the process an intellectual as well as a creative challenge, a poetic Rubik’s cube where all the different colours have to fit together correctly and precisely at the same time. To make this work, I sometimes find myself forced to go to places and explore ideas I wasn’t expecting: so the structure itself drives creativity and expression. And the moment I find a solution that successfully brings everything together feels a bit like when my football team scores a goal, though usually less noisy.
As well as something that sounds good, with memorable or melodic phrases or juxtapositions, I aim for verse that makes at least some sort of sense on first reading; but which on further interrogation reveals additional layers, with an underlying logic or pattern, hints or metaphors that make the reader ponder and wonder. If the ultimate meaning is elusive and ambiguous and leaves the reader intrigued and uncertain, taking something different from it each time they read - perhaps even something I hadn’t noticed myself - so much the better. With some of my poems, such as The Mined, the original concept is quite obscure and I’m not sure whether many readers will get it, or whether that matters. I’m not even sure what some of my poems (such as The Well, below) mean, and hope that one day someone else might work that out.
The seed of a poem is usually an image or idea, which has potential to develop in sometimes unexpected ways; ideas tend to bubble away for a while before I feel ready to do something with them, and I’ve had plenty of false starts, ideas that have gone nowhere. I start the process by writing down as many words and phrases as I can think of that may be of use in developing the idea. I then sketch the outline of a structure: first thoughts on what each stanza might cover, though this often bears little relation to how the finished poem ends up, but I need to start somewhere. The initial idea may not survive - for example, The Parting was inspired by the death of a famous person, but then it felt wrong and intrusive to commemorate the passing of someone I didn’t know, so the final version is non-specific.
Often I will try and weave a theme through the poem - for example, Time’s Pages (below) has something about the act of writing and something about time in each stanza, and The Well has references throughout to citrus fruits and water, as well as to the ‘well’ of the title. I don’t know if readers consciously notice these, but even if not, perhaps the half-hidden threads will help create a mood that will stir their souls. Developing such themes also helps me find new, unexpected images and metaphors (such as ‘lime-shaded friendships’).
Most of my poems are fairly serious - I don’t think the sonnet form makes it easy to carry off something light-hearted; and in any case the inspiration for starting to write was the pandemic, which is a naturally sombre subject. Since the pandemic poems, I have written a series of strange, mysterious reflections on landscapes and life, like Sunlight Dances, Of Water and, more recently, Still Morning - perhaps these types of subjects fit well into the sonnet mould.
I think Shut Down and The Guitar are perhaps the most successful of my less serious sonnets (though Shut Down has an underlying melancholy), and The Penalty (written in the light of the Euro 2020 football tournament) just about works too. I’ve tried comedy but it’s really hard and I’m a long way from having an approach to funniness I’m at all happy with (I would not advise reading my efforts to date).
Having developed structures and themes for a new poem, I can at last start writing, sometimes from the beginning, and sometimes part way through; in Of Water, the first idea I came up with was ‘rivulets soft-gouged by ages past’, and I liked that, so I built the rest of the poem round it. I find some stanzas almost write themselves, while others take a lot of work and rework to get all the pieces to line up satisfactorily (and sometimes I play round with the order of the stanzas). In the right mood I find myself thinking in iambic pentameter as I try out different options, though I do sometimes use a thesaurus and a rhyme-finder, to help generate ideas to play around with.
Many of my stanzas end up as single sentences, piling idea on idea - this was never a conscious stylistic choice, but as my writing has evolved I’ve found it is an expressive approach I like. One of the challenges it creates is maintaining a thread of meaning, so it makes formal sense, even if the reader doesn’t need to follow it.
Some words or phrases don’t work well with iambic pentameter. Most two-syllable words are either an iamb (such as ‘provide’) or the opposite (‘any’), but some are ambiguous (‘downhill’); and many long words are unusable (such as ‘anything’, in which the last two syllables are both unstressed). Single syllable adjectives can be a problem (for example, ‘soft apple’ has two stressed syllables in a row), and a phrase like ‘of the’ is out of bounds as it has two adjacent unstressed syllables. Lists can also be awkward - ‘of beer and bikes, of books and bells’ (In Memory’s Place) may sound poetic, but the ‘of’s and ‘and’s are mostly there just to provide unstressed syllables to make the metre work.
I use enjambment a lot, where the end of a sentence or phrase does not coincide with the end of a line, so the rhyme may not be obvious to the listener - for me this helps add to the subtlety of the poem, to make the reader do some work to find out what’s going on, and it helps the development of longer ideas. When I read such lines out loud I don’t pause at the end of lines (though I don’t mind if others do), and I no longer capitalise the first letter of a line unless it’s the start of a new sentence. I have tried splitting words between lines, but I don’t really like the awkward effect it creates. (My one attempt to trendily do without punctuation didn’t really work).
Still, sometimes the rhyme really matters: somehow I find the end of the first stanza of Time’s Pages feels like it is inexorably leading towards the final ‘gone’, which we can sense is coming because of the ‘on’ two lines earlier (or maybe that’s just me because I wrote it).
I also use assonance - rhyming within lines - which, when combined with enjambment, can make it intriguingly hard for the listener to work out where the lines start. One example is ‘lands’ and ‘sands’ (In Memory’s Place), which are two syllables apart but in different stanzas. When I read this aloud I instinctively make a slight pause on ‘sands’.
‘…memories from lifelong lands.
The sands know stories…’
Other examples of assonance are ‘cry wry smiles’ from The Well, ‘used to show its age with crashing rage’ from Shut Down, and ‘…space around, a round-holed sharing box’ from The Guitar.
Some ideas regularly recur throughout my poems, such as time and memory (or ‘mem’ry’, when I need it to be two syllables not three - helpfully it can satisfactorily be either), and echoes, shadows and rhyme often weave their way in too (‘rhyme’ and ‘time’ helpfully rhyme); while ‘still’ has different meanings so can be usefully ambiguous.
I like plays on words, which grab the reader’s attention and make them pay attention, like ‘that way sadness lies’ from Do You Know?, or ‘April’s mourning light’ from After the Funeral. The whole second stanza of ‘Shut Down’, about a laptop, is a series of puns.
Replacing one concept in a phrase with a different idea, in a way that, taken literally, makes no sense, can create new images and hinted meanings - for example, ‘trip over sadness’ in Walking On.
And of course repetition is important, helping to provide colour, emphasis and structure: for example, each stanza of Presteigne starts with ‘These colden stones’, and similarly the words ‘A memory’ start each stanza of The Guitar.
Do You Know? has the poignant phrase ‘still I know you are the you you were’, three ‘you’s in the space of a few words, which emphasise the subject of the poem.
Sometimes word choices, like the ‘And’s that launch the first two stanzas of December (below), don’t have obvious purposes: they’re quirky, unexpected or mysterious, and if people wonder about them I’m sure they come to different conclusions about why they’re there. Similarly, I like making up words, such as ‘darkwards’ and ‘churchstone’, ‘nowpaths’, ‘beshouldered’ and ‘soontime’, which I hope add to the music, and help readers appreciate new ideas from new angles.
Sometimes I’m able to incorporate a well-known quotation into a poem, and imagine a spark of recognition among (some of) my readers: for example, ‘This life was once a cabaret’ (quoting Cabaret) in The Parting, or ‘whose teams of players strut and fret’ (Macbeth) from Seasons’ Dreams. But of course it doesn’t matter if readers miss the references.
It’s always a joy to come up with a richly resonant phrase (especially when it’s ready-made in iambic pentameter), like ‘sands of song sweet-played by tides of time’ from In Memory’s Place (I originally used ‘soft-played’ instead of ‘sweet-played’, until I realised that made it sound like a children’s activity centre, which somewhat undermined the effect). Poems are partly about enjoying language for its own sake and that’s what I’m doing when I write things like this, and I hope my readers will share the joy.
I find the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet is often the trickiest part to get right. The couplet should sum up and round off what’s been said, but I think it is too easy for it to sound trite, which is not something I want at the end of a serious poem (I tried to parody a vapid couplet using cod-Shakespeare in an early poem I’d otherwise prefer to forget:
‘A sonnet should aim the soul to nourish:
So end it with a coupletty flourish!’)
Almost all my couplets use enjambment as a way round the risk of triteness - one of my favourites is from ‘December’. I love the way Ian McMillan says the final words here.
I’ve never timed how long it takes me to complete a poem, but it’s typically many hours - minutes per word rather than words per minute. Even once I’ve got an initial draft I will usually spend a long time refining it, trying to strengthen the invisible threads that hold it together to tempt a reader to explore further, and hopefully make them smile when they discover a connection or pattern that I’ve managed to sneak in.
When I think I’ve finished a poem I read and re-read it, checking and rechecking the rhymes and rhythms, and making sure I’ve not inadvertently repeated a word (the first version of my first sonnet repeated the words ‘evening nears’ at the ends of two different lines, and when I realised that I was mortified that I hadn’t noticed that before).
And then I send my poems out into the world, sometimes unsure of what they mean or what people will think of them, and leave them to fend for themselves. Even if no one read them I would keep writing, because (as I hope this post has made clear) the process involved in rigorously crafting a poem is fascinating; it is deeply rewarding to create something that meets all the multitudinous challenges I have set myself, and which, I hope, adds a bit of poetic song to the world (I would love someone to set one of my poems to music…) I do occasionally tweak a word or two here or there in an old poem, but mostly I leave them in peace once they’ve been set free.
I’ve memorised a few of my poems, though I find it takes longer than I might have expected to memorise something I’ve written myself. Should I admit I sometimes quote my own poetry to myself? - I hope that doesn’t sound too solipsistic, but there is something smileworthy when a phrase I have written resonates: when I see trees in the snow, for example, I sometimes mutter the second stanza of December to myself, which I think captures that feeling.
So I will keep writing, looking out for inspiration, and allowing ideas to seep into my brain ready to be turned into sonnets in due course. I’ve not written many recently, because it’s hard work being a perfectionist, and if I end up only doing a few each year that’s fine. None shall pass unless they say something new that I think is worth saying. And I hope the thoughts I’ve set out here might encourage others to have a go too; but I hope my readers will try your own things in your own way, and find - as I did - a style and language that works for you. No licence needed.
A very personal reflection to end these meanderings: my dad died last year. When it became clear he was not going to be with us much longer, I started writing a poem as I tried to process what was happening and how I was feeling. This became In Memory’s Place. I shared it with my family, and my wife and my mum both suggested I should read it out at dad’s funeral - I was initially unsure, but in the end I decided to finish my eulogy with it. It felt like an authentic way to express my grief. And this was the moment I realised how important my poetry had become to me, helping me to think about the sometimes strange, sad old world we live in.