Writing Problems: Cheap, but Good Advice for Making Poems

Merwin, Oliver, Tsvetaeva, Bourgeois, Gornick, Schiller, Ohno, Kyger

This post was inspired by some cheap, but good advice for playing music in a group by Chick Corea

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1. Write only what you hear.

   One of W.S. Merwin’s tenets was that “poems begin with listening.” He meant not only literal listening to sounds and people’s speech, but a kind of inner listening, a heightened awareness of poems when they occur.

   W.S. Merwin:

   

2. If you don’t hear anything, don’t write anything.

   It becomes hard to make a poem that is sealed-off from other sounds. In a song, the lyrics have a counterpoint of music, but in a poem the counterpoint is silence or blank space. The “voice” in a speaker can be a human voice speaking to the reader, or it can be a more omniscient psychic distant voice, or the language itself speaking.