Andrew

“Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.

Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.

Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page?

Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.

Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.

Play with syntax.

Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will.

Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.

If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time).

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words.

Minimum: One.

Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Don’t let small thinking cut your life down to size. Think big, aim high, act bold. And see just how big you can blow up your life.”
― Gary Keller, The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

“I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying.
In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way).
When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken – the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength.
This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems

In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business.
Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse 40 years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t.


RICHARD HUGO
Public versus private poets:

With public poets the intellectual and emotional contents of the words are the same for the reader as for the writer. With the private poet, the words, at least certain key words, mean something to the poet they don’t mean to the reader. A sensitive reader perceives this relation of poet to word and in a way that relation – the strange way the poet emotionally possesses his vocabulary – is one of the mysteries and preservative forces of the art.
If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions.
In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over. (Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost’s statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn’t be).”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Failure is an opportunity.
If you blame someone else,
there is no end to the blame.
Therefore the Master
fulfills her own obligations
and corrects her own mistakes.
She does what she needs to do
and demands nothing of others.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching