The Delicate Craft of Writing Poetry
The rules must first be learned in order to be broken
There are a lot of writers out there who take their poetry very, very seriously. They study tone, lineation, verse and structure. They analyze rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and the many conventions of Western poetry. And while it’s important for a writer to understand the function of line-breaks, alliteration and form, etc — poetry remains one of the few forms of prose where there are no rules. In an essay about writing poetry, Robert Pinsky — one of America’s foremost poet-critics — states: “There are no rules. Or, you can modify that rule by observing that each work of art generates its own unique rules.” And critic and poet, James Longenbach, in ‘The Art of the Poetic Line,’ connects the definition of poetry to lineation:
“Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines.”
I began to view my poetry with closer consideration. While I had understood the fundamentals of free verse and stanzas, the more I read about poetry the less I felt I knew. It was as if I had been writing blindfolded, and yet as Pinsky claims, with an element of confutation, there are no rules. Or rather rules that must be learned in order to be broken. And perhaps not altogether broken, but repurposed, re-contextualized.
