Sir
Andrew Motion is an English poet novelist and
biographer who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom
from 1st May 1999 to 1st May
2009.
Below are his top 10 tips for being a successful poet
1. Let your
subject find you.
My parents were not writers and they
didn't really read very much either. My Dad once told me he had only read half
a book in his life. I had a wonderful English teacher called Peter Way. He
walked straight into my head, turned all the lights on and he gave me my life
really.
If I get stuck I
go for a walk or if I don't have much time, I wash my hair - it seems to wake
my brain up.
When I was 17, quite soon after I
started tinkering around with poems, my mother had a very bad accident, which
eventually killed her. So I found myself wanting to express my feelings about
that in ways that were relieving to me.
It sounds a slightly self-aggrandizing
thing to say, but I've always thought that death was my subject. You don't find
your subject, it finds you. Writing poems for me is not simply a matter of
grieving, though very often it is that, it's wanting to resurrect or preserve
or do things that pull against the fact of our mortality.
2. Tap into your
own feelings
I never quite believe it when poets
say that they're not writing out of their own feelings, and when that is the
case, I tend not to be terribly interested in what they're doing.
I don't mean to say that they are
writing bad poems, but those aren't the poems that I like most. The poems I
most like are where the engine is a very emotional one, where the warmth of
strong feeling is very powerfully present in the thing that is being given to
us. I think poetry is a rather emotional form and when it isn't that, I'm not
very interested in it.
3. Write about
subjects that matter to you
I didn't always cope with being
commissioned very happily as Poet Laureate to tell the truth. The best poems
get written, not by going in the front door of the subject, but round the back
or down the chimney or through the window.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant,'
said Emily Dickinson and that's always been a very important remark for me. It
can be quite difficult to do that if you're standing in a very public place.
People who live in public, as I very
suddenly found myself doing, can get very bruised in the process if they're not
used to it. I found all that public stuff extremely difficult to deal with. I
never wanted to cut myself off, but wish I had devised better ways of
protecting myself.
4. Celebrate the
ordinary and be choosy
Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary. What we very badly need to remember is that the things right under our noses are extraordinary, fascinating, irreplaceable, profound and just kind of marvellous.
Look at the things in the foreground
and relish stuff that can lose its glow by being familiar. In fact,
re-estranging ourselves to familiar things seems to be a very important part of
what poetry can do.
If you can, be choosy about what you
do, so that the things you do write are the things that you do best.
5. Use everything
in your toolbox
Don't go live in
an ivory tower, read the newspapers and involve yourself in the world. Where do
you think subjects come from if not the world?
I haven't written a rhyming poem now
for many years, I seem to have lost my appetite for it but I haven't lost my
pleasure in reading them. I think anybody that insists on the presence of rhyme
is really not thinking hard enough about what poetry is or can be.
Having said that, it is important to
bear in mind that as poets we have a kind of toolbox, in which there are all
kinds of different pieces of equipment, not available to any other kind of
writer and rhyme is very importantly one of those.
So never to use rhyme in your poetry
would be a bit like buying a car and never getting out of second gear. Use
everything in your toolbox.
6. If you get
stuck, go for a walk or wash your hair
Wordsworth once said that the act of
walking was closely related to the creative process. I do love walking and if I
get stuck I go for a walk or if I don't have much time, I wash my hair - it
seems to wake my brain up!
Even when I'm on a hair washing day,
rather than a walking day, I walk up and down my study, just to get myself
going.
Poems are so crucially to do with the
movement of words through a line or a series of lines, and that is just as
important as their shape and the way that we understand them I think.
7. Let your work
be open to interpretation
People will interpret your poetry in
different ways, but provided the interpretation that is brought to the poem
isn't plainly bonkers, I actually enjoy that, I rather hope for it.
Your poem can be a world in which your
readers can go and live themselves and seek out things which resonate for them.
And it would be completely bonkers of me to try to restrict their reaction.
In Auden's beautiful eulogy for Yeats,
he said, 'He became his admirers,' and I think that's kind of what he had in
mind actually. You give your work over to your readers and provided they're not
crazy, it's absolutely open to them what they find in it.
8. Read your
poetry out loud
Reading your poetry out loud is crucial and absolutely indispensable because wherever we reckon the meaning of a poem might lie, we want to admit that it's got as much to do with the noise it makes when we hear it aloud, as it has to do with what the words mean when we see them written down on the page.
In a really fundamental way, I think poetry is an acoustic form
and we've slightly forgotten that in the last thousand years. Since the
invention of the book, the aliveness of poetry has been perhaps slightly pushed
to the edge of things.
9. Find the right time to write
Find your own writing time. Everybody will have a slightly
different time of day, I have yet to meet the person who thinks the early
afternoon is good, but I expect there is someone out there who thinks that
that's a good idea.
For me it's very early in the morning, partly because the house
is quiet and partly because I feel I'm stealing a march on things and that
makes me feel good.
I think there might be some kind of hook up between what happens
in our minds when we're asleep and writing imaginative material. I think good
poems get written, as no doubt good paintings get painted, as a result of these
two things coming together in an appropriate way.
10. Read a lot, revise and persevere
Read lots, write lots of course too, but assume that your first
thoughts are not your best thoughts, so revise, revise, revise and don't expect
every poem to work, because it won't.
Don't go live in an ivory tower. Read the newspapers and involve
yourself in the world - where do you think subjects come from if not the world?
Persevere. I think right at the beginning of your writing life
you really have to accept that within a few years, or possibly even a few
months, you are going to be able to wallpaper quite a large room with rejection
slips. But don't let that put you off - if you've got it, you've got it!
