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by Luke Harvey
As a high school English teacher, my work is to teach the Holy Trinity of language arts: Reading, Writing, and Speaking. There is, however, an unspoken fourth art, and it proves to be the one binding the other three together with its invisible thread: Listening.
As anyone with toddlers, ADD, or just a lot on their plate can attest, hearing is an entirely different animal than listening, and true listening often proves to be a difficult beast to tame. Now of course, reading and speaking—or at least reading and speaking intelligently—require the ability to listen, but a knowledge of how to listen also proves to be the pulse of good writing. So much of writing poetry is learning to pay attention, and one form such attention takes is learning to attune your ear to the elusive voice of language. But be encouraged: as abstract as that may sound, there are very tangible ways to begin. Here are four ways to begin listening as you endeavor to write poetry.
Listen to the Conversation
There really is “nothing new under the sun.”
Our writing exists in an eras-long conversation that has been going on since God first invited Adam and Eve to name the animals, by extension inviting all of us into the act of creation. As with any conversation, if you want to contribute meaningfully you need to first listen to what’s been said and what’s being said.
Begin with the poetry of Scripture, and then start working through the masters: Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Moore, Bishop, Frost, Stevens, Wilbur, etc. Eavesdrop on the conversation their poetry is having with life’s big questions and with others who are writing about life’s big questions. Notice how each master’s work is rife with allusions to those who came before, responding to, arguing with, and building on their work. But don’t stop there: move into the modern era and subscribe to Image Journal, Ekstasis, Poetry Unbound, and the Rabbit Room Poetry Substack (shameless plug).
The conversation between poets of faith is still going, and going strong. Put your ear to the door and catch what you can.
Listen to the Words
Ah, words. Mysterious little rapscallions, no? Words will lead you where you need to go, but only if you’re willing to follow.
All too often a poem becomes a wilted, stilted thing because a poet knew exactly where the poem was headed and what the poem would do and was unwilling to alter course. The poem, to such a poet, is nothing more than a clever container for some preconceived message. Ask any poet and they’ll likely tell you the same thing: the best poems they’ve written ended up at a very different destination than the one they set out for, the creation surprising even its creator.
This only happens, though, if you’re willing to listen to the words themselves—the sounds, the cadence—and not sacrifice these on the altar of “sense.” In a marvelous essay on learning to listen to language called “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” Garielle Lutz explains that the aspiring writer often holds too tightly to the belief that their work is to achieve “in the arrangement of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe.”
The problem with this “end-in-mind” approach is that it devalues the power of words to help the writer discover what really needs to be said. Writing should be a process of uncovering versus mere transcribing of a thought to paper.
Marvels are swimming beneath the surface of the writer’s consciousness that words can help draw out, not as a magic trick but more in the way that talking to a friend or therapist often helps you discover the way you really feel or what you’d forgotten you knew.
For this to happen, though, the words must be allowed to situate themselves within their environment instead of being forced to awkwardly find a place for themselves within the poet’s preconceived idea. Lutz puts it this way: “As the words reconstitute themselves and metamorphose, your sentence may begin to make a series of departures from what you may have intended to express; the language may start taking on, as they say, a life of its own, a life that contests or trumps the life you had sponsored to live on the page.”
Wrangling a child into your own expectations of adulthood rarely works out well. Wrangling a poem into your preconceived expectations of what it should be renders similar results. With parenting as with writing, doing it well allows a certain open-handedness to let the words and the children—yes, still with your help and direction—discover themselves. So begin by listening to the sounds in your writing. If a sentence sounds delightful, even if it’s taking you away from where you thought a poem was going, follow it. If that sentence then proceeds to suggest another departure into a new series of sounds and therefore a new idea, but become a child again and follow the glimmering light deeper into the forest. As Scott Cairns puts it in “Salish Sea Winter” from his new book, Lacunae, “and if my assay / fails to deliver / simply what I sought, / well, all the better.”
Listen to your Dreams
Speaking of conscious and subconscious, learning to listen to your dreams can be an excellent source of poetic inspiration.
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott pictures the inner work of the subconscious as the child in you, rifling through the basement of your life until it finds what it is looking for, and she admits that “the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time—but she knows gold when she sees it.”
Lamott goes on to share with us that, for her, this means listening and paying attention to her characters, attending to the crevices of her childhood experiences, and then allowing the “polaroid to emerge,” oftentimes discovering things coming into focus that she never knew (consciously) existed.
The same might be said for our dreams. Poetry often works with a kind of dream-logic, where imagescapes and soundscapes are layered on top of each other in a way that works even if it doesn’t make logical “sense” to the left hemisphere of the brain, so learning to listen to our dreams can be fertile soil. Begin by keeping a dream journal. This is a new practice for me, and it includes keeping a notebook by the side of my bed and then setting aside 10-20 minutes to write down—in all of their seeming illogic and absurdity—exactly what happened in my dream when I wake up. Flipping through my notebook this morning, there were images, metaphors, and stuff in profusion, waiting to grow into future poems.
If you’re one who only dreams vividly once or twice a month, make sure you catch it when you do. I don’t have studies to back this up, but I imagine that keeping a dream journal will actually help you dream with more and more flavor as that odd little chef of the unconscious sees that you’re developing a palate and are appreciating his avant garde cuisine.
Listen to Rhythm
Finally, if “sound-sense” and “dream-sense” are on par with logical sense when it comes to poetry, then “rhythm-sense” should also be thrown into the mix.
Learn to hear the cadence of language. Hear the fire cracking in the hard sounds in “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden:
"Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him."
Listen to how the stress in the first four words rises with the moon in “Astrophil and Stella 31” by Sir Philip Sydney: “With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies!” Practice writing in iambic feet, which is the natural rhythm of the English language. For starters, flip around a bit in Timothy Steele’s book All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing or go read a Shakespeare sonnet. When you attune your ear to the lilting rhythm of the English tongue, you can then play with rhythm, manipulate it, or just let it lead you where—again—you need to go.
My wife is quick to remind me, “Luke, you heard me but you weren’t listening.” Our marriage works when Gracie and I listen to one another, and the poet’s courtship with the Muse is no different. While there is much to be said for sitting down and forcing yourself to put pen to paper, there is also a time for slowing down, sitting in the silence or in the blank space between lines, and waiting for next steps to reveal themselves. This doesn’t mean that perfect poems will just begin flowing out of your pen, but cultivating an ear for the dream-speech of the subconscious, tuning in to the conversations of literary history, and giving every word and line its proper airtime is a good place to start.
The Muse may speak in an elusive tongue, but these are some very tangible ways to learn the language.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
This was super interesting - thank you! I related so much to several aspects, like letting words express the subconscious, even unknown thoughts, bringing expression to what was otherwise inexpressible.
But learning to let the "instincts" of the poetry process take the wheel was also fascinating, and not trying to force my original thoughts on it. While I do this to some extent, I feel like your article gave me more permission to let it flow unharnessed - I'll have to practice that more often and give it a try.
Taking time to simply sit and listen to the silence often provides pearls of thought that turn into poems.... but oh, the simply sitting and listening! Life bombards the best of us, the most of us.
Thank you for all these other ways of listening, Luke.
So well said!