Writing Tips

Writing Tips: “I’ve come to believe that it’s important to share it,” FitzMaurice said. “I really believe that the muses know when you pass the gift along. And if you’ve received a gift, and you’ve captured it on paper, that the act of sharing it opens up space for the muses to come back.” Holper draws inspiration from the works of other poets. “I think it was reading other people’s poetry to see what they were doing in enjamb-ing lines, or using line breaks to create new meanings, I became really curious to try that myself,” he said. In his early career, the editor of a poetry journal advised him on how to better use punctuation and line breaks to create even more interesting, unexpected, meanings by arranging the words in such a way that the line breaks create new meanings on the page, a lesson Holper took to heart. “I’m doing a lot of that,” he said. “I want to play with the space on the page. I want, in my own poetry, to explore things that I want to try out. I want to try new things all the time.” Holper cited his own poem, Fiction Lessons, as an example of how to effectively utilize enjambment and line breaks to create a new interesting self-sufficient line in between the two sentences, providing additional meaning emphasizing the poem’s overall message: This is the way you learn to tell a story. You must see the man in the porcupine hat as he shuffles in his cheap shoes “See,” said Holper, “I want to create new meanings by rearranging stuff on the page.” When asked what advice they would give to aspiring writers, Burns replied, “I think my favorite piece of advice is once you’ve started writing, don’t stop writing. Use filler words, even circle the words that are filler words. It keeps you writing, keeps you going with the flow. And then, you can go back afterwards... if you stop in the middle of your writing to try to come up with the perfect word, you could lose your focus, you could easily lose your source of inspiration.” Burns also emphasized that young poets should “breathe before they sit down to write.” Curiel encourages other writers to write about visceral memories or experiences with which your audience will be familiar. “I have a lot of poems about food,” for example. In the same way that food evokes a visceral memory connection with the reader, young writers can evoke that same connection when they “write about love, write about sex, or any kind of memory which is … outside of official narratives.” “You share your work with other people and get feedback. You learn to anticipate how people read your work,” Curiel said, that’s really important. So I recommend students create their own writing communities or become part of an existing writing community.” Advice to aspiring writers? “To write more.” And then she added, “Keep writing, and then create or join a community. Those are the two important things. It’s hard enough to write on your own, but to write without a community, makes it doubly-hard.” “When I first started writing poetry,” Martien said, “I would think of a line, and thought, wow, that’s a great line, I’m going to try to write a poem that ends with that line. And, I tried it for quite a while, but it didn’t work very well at all. Because the poems were kind of forced. You know, it’s like trying to get your foot into a shoe that’s too small or something. Then I realized - that’s the line that the poem starts with! … Ok, this is taking me someplace I haven’t been before.” “Beat poet Lew Welch gives the example of, on a wine tour, the guide is droning on, nobody’s paying attention, and all of the sudden he says, ‘who’s kid is that?’, because a kid is about to fall into a wine vat. All of the sudden everybody’s attention is galvanized on what he was saying and the kid was saved. He’d say, I want everyone of my lines to have that force: ‘who’s kid is that?’ He was a really brilliant poet who had that kind of insight into how to use language to get the maximum amount of force, like the strongest thing you can possibly say, not like something somebody else said.” Suskin explains, “I’m very much about accessibility in my own writing, so I appreciate that in others.” “You have to know who you’re writing for” she explained. “If you don’t know then you won’t know how to edit your work. If you’re writing just for yourself, it may not matter,” she continued, “but if you’re writing for the whole world you have to speak in a language for everyone, and in a really accessible way. You have to try really hard and edit really heavily to do that.” Suskin has “Very simple advice: Read poetry everyday and write in a journal every single day. Handwritten pages, paper and pen. … It’s like a book of your mind. …A journal saved my life, kept me together.” Tips from Poets Therese Fitzmaurice, CR Prof. David Holper, Courtnie Burns, HSU Profs. Barbara Curiel & Jerry Martien, Jacqueline Suskin, Poem Store

Brought to you by Mad River Union newspaper, Arcata, CA

From a series of poetry articles I authored for the Mad River Union newspaper, Arcata, CA (Winter/Spring 2016) - Sarah © Sarah Isbell aka BeTh isBell - WCI Publishing LLC 2016