32 Statements About Poetry by Marvin Bell
17 June 2004
- Every poet is an experimentalist.
- Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read.
- There is no one way to write and no right way to write.
- The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.
- Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.
- You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.
- Originality is a new amalgam of influences.
- Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
- The I in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.
- Autobiography rots.
- A poem listens to itself as it goes.
- It’s not what one begins with that matters; it’s the quality of attention paid to it thereafter.
- Language is subjective and relative, but it also overlaps; get on with it.
- Every free verse writer must reinvent free verse.
- Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
- A short poem need not be small.
- Rhyme and meter, too, can be experimental.
- Poetry has content but is not strictly about its contents. A poem containing a tree may not be about a tree.
- You need nothing more to write poems than bits of string and thread and some dust from under the bed.
- At heart, poetic beauty is tautological: it defines its terms and exhausts them.
- The penalty for education is self-consciousness. But it is too late for ignorance.
- What they say “there are no words for”–that’s what poetry is for. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.
- One does not learn by having a teacher do the work.
- The dictionary is beautiful; for some poets, it’s enough.
- Writing poetry is its own reward and needs no certification. Poetry, like water, seeks its own level.
- A finished poem is also the draft of a later poem.
- A poet sees the differences between his or her poems but a reader sees the similarities.
- Poetry is a manifestation of more important things. On the one hand, it’s poetry! On the other, it’s just poetry.
- Viewed in perspective, Parnassus is a very short mountain.
- A good workshop continually signals that we are all in this together, teacher too.
- This Depression Era jingle could be about writing poetry: Use it up / wear it out / make it do / or do without.
- Art is a way of life, not a career.