Imitation Game: Copy Your Favourite Poems and Improve Your Craft
A how to guide and one I made earlier
It’s standard practice that musicians and painters learn their craft by imitating the greats. But, when it comes to writing poetry, the mere suggestion of copying is a major faux pas.
The pressure is to always be cultivating your unique voice.
But just like musicians and painters, copying the work of artists we love can help us hone our skills.
Pulitzer prize winning poet, Mary Oliver, devotes a whole chapter to imitation in her bible of poetic craft, A Poetry Handbook. She states:
"if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned partially and haphazardly."
She argues that the pressure for writers to be original is holding them back from developing their understanding of craft. But by copying our favourite poems we can learn exactly how they are built to take our breath away.
Of course, we can write good(ish) poetry without learning craft, but there is a joy in educating ourselves on the lineage and skill of those that have come before us. We write poetry because we love language so we should learn how to use language better. There is always room for improvement.
The process of imitating your favourite poems will help you interrogate the choices in your future writing and help with the editing process. It will help you better understand your own system of writing.
In this article, I will show you - step by step - exactly how I go about imitating a poem. Please play along.
And when you make it to the end, I’ve included fun prompts with different ways you can approach this task.
Pick a poem you love
Pick a poem that has captured your attention. Choose something short. You’re looking for a quick win to get you immersed in the process straight away.
Pick something that made you feel that poetic sense of awe. Something with that je n’est c’est quoi, the feeling of mystery poetry creates within us.
The point of this exercise is to try to understand where that mystery comes from. To lift the veil on the magic behind the marvellous.
Write the poem out by hand. This process will help you become intimate with the words and the flow of the syntax, stanzas and line breaks.
Read the poem aloud. Feel the shape of the vowels and consonants in your mouth. Listen to the music created through rhythm and rhyme.
Read the poem a few more times. Get on friendly terms. Highlight all the places you got that tingly feeling.
Tear the poem apart
Only by tearing the poem apart can we start to put it back together again.
Remember, we’re searching for where the mystery is hiding.
Look at all the places you’ve highlighted. What is interesting about these words or phrases?
Is it in the pattern of syllables, beats, the jazz of it all? Are there long vowel sounds that slow the poem down or short, sharp consonants that create tension?
Is it in the choice of words (it’s always in the choice of words)? But dig in - what does this choice of words tell us about the feeling of the poem? Is it all in the verbs? Or maybe the way two words relate to each other?
What is it about the imagery and metaphor that makes us feel a certain kind of way? What happens when you change that image? What is the scale or specificity of the image?
What sensory language is used? Where do you feel the poem in your body?
Write all over your document. Scribble notes. Circle. Highlight. Cross out. Rip it up.
Now, let’s start again
Pick a new theme/topic for your poem. It could be complementary or something completely different. But, as this is your first attempt, go easy on yourself. Go with what your gut is telling you to do.
You’re going to use the original poem as scaffolding for your new poem. That means you’re going to try and keep the rhythm and the line lengths as much as possible. Maybe you just want to start by changing the verbs and the nouns.
What does that do to the poem? Are you capturing any of the magic or does it feel flat?
If it feels flat to you it will feel flat for your reader.
Do you need to choose some different words? How does your choice of words add to the music of the poem? What emotions do your words conjure? What is their history?
Is your image/metaphor succinct or does it go in too many directions? How does it relate to the theme/topic you’ve chosen?
What sensory language are you using?
Feel free to revise and revise and revise again. The aim here is to play with words within a pre-constructed form to see what feelings you can evoke. In doing so, you can get a glimpse of what the poet was trying to achieve when they first wrote the poem.
Ask yourself: is my poem successful?
If yes, do you understand why? Do you understand how the choices you made, or how the structure of the poem allows the poem to convey meaning?
If no, that’s OK. The point of the exercise is not to write award winning poetry but to understand the mechanics of building a successful poem that moves the reader.
Write down everything you’ve learned from doing this exercise.
Example
Here is an example of a poem that I rewrote using this process:
In Passing by Lisel Mueller is such a gorgeous poem. It is simple, soft and succinct but so evocative and sensory.
On the day I rewrote the poem the sky outside was thick and grey and I couldn’t seem to get warm no matter how many layers I put on. I used that as my theme/topic — the antithesis to the hope and energy in Mueller’s poem.
In this example, I have barely deviated from the scaffolding of the poem, only changing the verbs, adverbs, adjectives and nouns.
I did linger on removing ‘in order to’ in the last line of the second stanza but I decided that it adds a delay that I wanted to keep. For Mueller’s spring poem, the phrase acts like a coil releasing the blossom. For my winter poem, it adds to the sense of weighing down.
Mueller repeats the word 'exists' in the first line of the last stanza and it's a call to action. It creates excitement and movement – like spring. For my poem, I wanted the reader to feel stuck in the day so I've chosen to mirror the last line of the first stanza with the first line of the last stanza.
Why you should care about craft
The easy answer is — you don’t have to. If you’re writing poems for yourself, as a cathartic release, and to make you feel good then craft is not important.
But, if you want to give your reader goose pimples, if you want to make your reader feel changed after encountering your poems, then you have to understand form and structure and the lineage you’re writing from.
Poetry is an ancient artform. It was originally used to tell stories and pass messages between towns and villages. It also belongs to a mystic tradition in which the poet converses with God. Today, we use it to convey feelings and emotions but the story, and the mystical, lives within the bones of its structure.
A lot of poetry has already been written. Some poems are more successful than others. Some poems transcend time and the fashions of the day.
But what has remained with us, what is exciting today, has a lot to teach us and should not be ignored. There are certain rules and structures that have developed out of these long traditions.
It’s the age old adage, once you know the rules you can break them. Rod Judkins, in the Art of Creative Thinking rephrased it:
“the more you understand your medium, the more you can use it to your advantage.”
By imitating poetry we love, we can gain a deeper insight into how the poem was made and some of the rules that sets great poetry apart.
Conclusion
The biggest takeaway from this article is to have fun with language and gain a deeper understanding of the poetry you love.
Writing poetry will not make you rich and famous. We do it for the love. We do it because we have to; because if we don’t something inside of us wails and screams.
The pure joy of writing comes when we put words in an order that makes something magical. This magic cannot be plucked from thin air. Occasionally, it comes as a fluke, but mostly it takes a lot of hard work to cultivate the skill.
"Learn by reading the kind of poetry you want to make and trying to figure out how the writer did it. Imitate another poet until you can erase the footprints that lead you to them, and now write your poem.”
~ Roger Robinson, On Poetry
Prompts
Hate to Love: Find a poem that you know is technically good but that you really hate. Now turn it into something you love.
Poem Swap: Do you have a poem that’s rotting in your Drafts (of course you do). So does your friend. Do a poem swap and rewrite each other’s poems. Need to find a poet friend - find each other in the comments.
Fake Translation: Find a poem in a language you really don't know. Look at it for a while, observe its shape, its music, the shape of its letters and then try and write what you think it says. Try to keep the form and what you think the original poems' music might be and you'll be imagining/creating new words in no time.
~ Devised by Roger Robinson, On Poetry