Advice to poets

[Fist and Faith]

Not from me!!! I don't have a clue, other than keep writing!! I wish I had poetry in me.

Anyway, there was a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926. I don't know that much about too many poets, but he's one of my favorites. He corresponded with someone who was trying to be a professional poet. Here's part of the first letter:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all - ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

[birdandbear]

Wow. I think that's the best advice on writing I've ever heard.

[Fist and Faith]

Yup! Writing, or anything else.

[Worm of Despite]

Like everyone, I want to be good and strong and virtuous and wise and loved. I think that writing may be simply a method or technique for communication with other individuals; and its stimulus, the loneliness we are born to. In writing perhaps we hope to achieve companionship; what some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft. Absorption of the small and frightening and lonely into the whole and complete, a kind of breaking through to glory. -John Steinbeck

That's one I've always liked, ever since I read the "glory" part in the intro to Grapes of Wrath. Anyway, my new technique for writing song lyrics/poems is to pick up my guitar and construct words around my playing. I recently got it, so, before that, my poor-man's method was to write poems not to my beat (seeing as I had nothing to beat musically upon up until said guitar) but to the beat of The Beatles, Zeppelin, Floyd, etc.

That probably only works for me, or is not used at all! But, anyway, the catch is I don’t think of my poems as poems anymore. They’re songs, and meant to be sung--played to, the way I see it. Not read straightforward. The only thing that makes them poetry is their manner and structure, I suppose.

[Fist and Faith]

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

[Fist and Faith]

There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!