Unplanned Thoughts on Pony Poetry · 11:14pm Nov 19th, 2013
In my collection "Ponyville & Other Poems," asked:
Can you, like, tell me a bit about your writing process for poetry? How much time do you spend on these, how much of a poem changes in revision, how concrete of an idea do you need to begin writing a poem, that sort of stuff? Anything else you'd have to say regarding poetry, too, would be amazing to hear...
So I thought I'd put together a blog post thing about it just for sheer humor value. Because I've found composition methods to be weird and wacky things, and trying to graft another writer's ways onto my own has rarely proven to be anything other than a peculiar experience. Still, every once in a while someone'll mention something in their litany of practices that'll get me to say, "Hey, I could try that." So here's how I approach writing poetry.
First off, I love the various "fixed forms" as they call them, the kinds of poems that have names and rules that were established centuries ago, often with a language other than English in mind: I happened into an M.A. in Classics in the mid-1980s mostly because I enjoyed the weird forms of ancient Latin poetry so much, I just kept taking classes about it. So most of what I write is full of regulated rhyme and rhythm.
So when I get an idea--and it can be just as general as "Hey! I should write some poems from the points of view of the characters on the show!"--the first thing I do is decide what particular kind of poem would work best for dealing with that idea. In the case of Our Pony Heroines, it seemed to me that Twilight would naturally gravitate toward sonnets, especially with as many of the restrictive rules in play as she could manage, while the limerick seemed a good fit for Applejack: good-natured and unpretentious but willing to turn serious if need be.
For Rarity and Fluttershy, I figured I'd need to use some of the more abstruse French forms, villanelles and rondeaus and things like that. Fortunately, I've got this wonderfully insufferable rhyming dictionary I picked up at a library book sale that gives the rhyme and rhythm schemes for a bunch of different poetic forms as well as examples from here and there. Glancing through, I found something I'd never heard of before called a "chant royal," and the Rarity in me did a happy little dance. I thought a plain ol' rondeau would work for Fluttershy till I found a thing called a "rondeau redouble'," so I figured I'd give that to her.
Rainbow Dash just kept looking me in the face, daring me to find some sort of poem for her, till I remembered that haiku are essentially nature poems. I'd done a "haiku of haiku" before--in English, each haiku has 17 syllables, so you put 17 haiku in series--and a series about her putting a cloud together seemed the best way to go. The sestina that opens the collection I'd actually written at the beginning of the summer, so I set to work on Twilight's sonnet.
I wanted the title to reference Skywriter's lovely metafictional piece, "A Short Story by Twilight Sparkle," so that was easy. A lotta times, I won't get a title till near the end of the whole process. Next, I opened Notepad on my computer and pulled up a file called alpha.txt. This is a list of the letters of the alphabet in order without the vowels. I find this extremely handy when writing a poem. See, if the first line of your sonnet ends with the word "found," you know you're gonna need a rhyme for it when you get to the end of the third line. Having the alphabet right where I can see it lets me "ring the changes" when I need to--bound, cound (not a word as far as I know, so I ignore it), downed, found, gowned, hound, et cetera--without worrying about missing any of the letters. When I get to the end of the alphabet, I move on to combinations--"st" and "str," "ch" and "th," the various liquid pairs where "l" and "r" follow some other consonant--and that usually gives me plenty to choose from.
With Twilight's sonnet, my initial idea was Twilight expressing her dismay that her friends didn't understand how a science nerd like her could be interested in poetry. So I opened another Notepad document, shuffled things around on the screen so the alphabet one was peering over the top of the blank one, and started trying to think of a way for Twilight to say what I wanted her to say in iambic pentameter.
Now, I'm a stickler for meter when I'm doing this stuff. I mean, half the point of writing a sonnet is that ba-DUMP ba-DUMP ba-DUMP ba-DUMP ba-DUMP rhythm in each line, so I set the little metronome in my brain swinging to that and start shuffling words around that'll fit while still getting the idea across. So the idea of "I don't understand why my friends don't think I should like poetry" needs to be detached from those particular words and restated. "Understand" is a good word, though, especially when you're talking about Twilight, and its solid "DUMP-ba-DUMP" rhythm is perfect to end a line with.
The thing is, though, as I go along doing this, changing what I want to say into the words and phrases that will fit the poem's format, I find that the new wording will change what I want to say. That's a vital part of poem writing for me, the way form and content influence each other in a constant back-and-forth. I always love it when, halfway through a poem, I suddenly realize that what it's actually about isn't what I thought it was gonna be about when I started. It does mean, though, that the process will take some time. Let a sonnet sit a little: I'll poke at it for an hour or so, then go and do something else for a while, then come back and see what my brain's been doing with it while I've been otherwise occupied.
When it's finished, I let it rest overnight, then give it another read, and I do mean out loud. Poems are meant to be heard as well as read, after all. That's the time to make sure it really says what I want it to after all that, too--about four limericks into the series I started writing for Applejack, for instance, she began talking about the inevitability of death. And while that might be a fun subject to explore in a series of limericks, it wasn't exactly what I had in mind for this particular set.
The thing I always try to remember with any poem is that it will never be perfect. I get the idea down as well as I can in the format I'm working with, make it sing and dance as much as I can or as much as I want it to, then I let it go and move on.
Poems are a lot like stories to me, a journey from some beginning, through a middle, and out at last at an ending. They're a lot shorter than most stories, though, which makes me realize that this thing's gone on way too long. Any more questions, feel free to ask 'em in the comments!
Mike
An interesting read, even if 90% of it flies completely over my head. I am utter rubbish at poetry. (He says for the umpteenillionth time.
)
So that's how I'm supposed to be doing it.
I tend to take a more relaxed approach to the rules of poetry. I know about all the different rules and forms and whatnot, but I don't feel bad about tossing them out the window if I think it will work. Take meter, for example. I'll usually pick a meter and stick with it, but I'll end up using something random just as often as I use something more "traditional" like iambic pentameter. And sometimes I'll just disregard it completely.
And unless I really want to write a particular type of poem, I usually just write down several lines I want to use, mess with them until I like the way they fit together, and then I write the rest of the poem with whatever meter and rhyme scheme and whatnot developed in those first bits.
So basically, we can tell which one of us is the professional author around here
1522111
1522682
Poetry's just:
Another manifestation of the miraculous telepathy of writing, just another way of transferring an idea from the inside of one head to the inside of another. Any way that works is good.
Mike
This was an insightful blog.
I do the b...c...d... consonant rhyme checky thingy too, and I recognized the usefulness of a few other things you said.
Particularily, though, how changing the words to say the thing changes the thing the words say. A poem, I suppose, isn't just a static journey throught he begining, middle, and end of the finished prodcut, but a seperate journey through the stages of writing it as well. What it was, what it is, and what it becomes.
2006194
That journey part:
Is what makes my toes all tingly. Getting partway through a poem and saying, "Hey, wait a minute: where is this thing going?" is one of the great pleasures of my life.
Mike