PD 30 Day 21: Moving Beyond Imitation
September 21, 2008 by John Hewitt
I wrote earlier about how we need to embrace our own experiences. Every poet needs to find what is unique about their writing. Many younger poets, especially students, find themselves imitating other poets. That is one of the key ways that people learn, through imitation. At some point though, to progress as a poet, you need to move beyond imitation and find your own style and your own voice.
Imitation can become a problem early on because people find themselves imitating the styles and patterns of classical poets. This is especially problematic when a beginning poet embraces “poetic” words that have long gone out of common usage. There are people who enjoy that. There are people who want to write like the classical poets. I don’t fault them for that. Writing poetry should be, first and foremost, enjoyable. If it is fun for you to write in the style of Shakespeare or Yeats or Frost, go right ahead and write like that. If you do though, realize that you are not developing your own voice, you are only imitating the voices of those who have come before you.
Not all beginning poets imitate the classics though. It is easy to fall into the trap of imitating more recent poets, such as trying to imitate the persona poems of Ai, the rough edged poetry of Bukowski or the outraged radical voice of Ginsberg. It can be harder to spot imitation when the poet imitated is more recent, but it is still apparent when a poet is imitating rather then writing from their own experience. You can’t write well in the style of Ginsberg unless you’ve led Ginsberg’s life, and only one person has managed to do that.
While not everyone wants to write in a conversational style, I do encourage people to listen for their own voice when writing. If you are using a word you wouldn’t normally use in your own life, make sure that you are doing it for a reason. If you are writing about experiences you have never had or places that you have never been, think about why you are choosing to do this rather than write about the places you actually have been and the life that you actually lead. You would be surprised how much better your poetry will be if it is about the things you know and written in your own voice and style.
Today’s Poetry Prompt
Write about something you can see from the window of your home.
Related links
- 30 Poems in 30 Days set for September (1.000)
- All About 30 Poems in 30 Days (1.000)
- PD30 Day 1: I Believe in Poetry (1.000)
- PD30 Day 2: Generally Be Specific (1.000)
- PD30 Day 3: A Review of Meter (1.000)
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Crooks in the Window
Large, inelegant, detritiferous trees
Inflict hard, ugly, potentishrapnel pods on our front lawn at the slightest breeze;
Fling their root systems subterraneanally far and wide;
Even into metal pipe and drivewaycrete they insidiously glide.
So barren is the earth around these monsters’ despotic trunks
Urinations of thirty dozen besotted drunks
Could not serve to even marginally water them.
Know this: I would cheerfully, ecstatically, gleefully Slaughter them,
Even if Slaughter has nothing to do with the conventional destruction of trees–
Right now plugs of C-4 in well-placed drillholes, I believe, would be the Bee’s Knees.
View from my window
Nestling among the greenery
Is an aged swing
Its once bright yellow surface
Peeling under the days of sun and rain
Surrounded by plants and flowers
I see not the greenery
Lovingly planted by my father
But fleeting images of my father in his garden
The view from my window is but a pale comparison
To my father.
welcome to my garden
aflixed with many colored roses
roses as big as a fist
despelled with enagnent beauty
draped accross the entrance
lime colored petals damper the against the wind
heavenly scent spellbound in memory
plush and desolent