The Creative Writing Handbook by John Singleton

Author:John Singleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK

7

Writing Verse

JOHN LENNARD

Wherever possible, the poems referred to in this chapter are included in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition (New York & London: Norton, 1996), and the page references are given within the text, as ‘(N999)’.

Listen! When anyone speaks, some syllables are more stressed and higher pitched than others. Only a robot would say ‘how-is-it-go-ing, then?-all-right?’; a person would say ‘HOW’s it GOing then? All RIGHT ?’, with their voice rising and falling. The patterns of stress and pitch vary from language to language, from person to person, and according to what is being said, the urgency and emotion: and, as you can see if I put the stresses in capitals and divide the syllables into pairs, sometimes | the PAT – | tern’s VE – | ry REG – | uLAR; | AND SOME- | times it | CHANges | irREG- | ular- | ly: but there is always a pattern. Nor is this pattern of sounds wholly lost in writing: it is often suppressed, especially in reading non-fictional prose; but poetry (like drama), even when printed and read silently, remains close to the spoken and the heard, so the play of stress and pitch is unavoidably active in both writing and reading poetry. Writing without it is impossible, and the choice is simply whether you attend to it, writing to a design, or allow it to happen haphazardly.

In the same way, all poems begin and end, and must be organised on the page – into lines, and often groups of lines: which means that all poems have a form. The lines, and the groups, may be regular in one or another way, as in limericks and sonnets; or they may be irregular, creating a new form unique to that poem: but in all cases there is a form, so again the choice is not whether to have a form, but whether you attend to the form.

Poetry has varied enormously over time (as you can see by paging through the Norton Anthology), and because people have often been taught poetry narrowly at school there are common misconceptions about ‘what poetry is’. Before the twentieth century most poetry in English was written in regular metres (or patterns of stress), so that each line has a similar rhythm; and in prescribed forms, so all the lines are either of the same length, or vary in a regular way. Poems of this kind often have a regular pattern of end-rhymes (called the rhyme scheme): but this does not mean that ‘all poems rhyme’, nor that ‘if it rhymes it’s a poem’; and in the twentieth century (especially since T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land [1922]: N1236) free verse (where the metrical pattern varies from line to line) and open form (where the line lengths and rhyme scheme are irregular) have become increasingly popular. There is still metre, and form: but they are freed from preset rules and limits. You may want to write more traditional poetry (and many poets, like

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