I enjoy writing poetry but I write it mainly for myself. I very rarely share poems I’ve written with other people. This takes the pressure off; I don’t have to worry what people will think of the poetry.
You might argue that this defeats the objective of writing. Surely we write only to be read. If our words don’t find an audience then they’re wasted.
That’s true of business writing and most people reading this will be business writers. But I argue that, as business writers, we all need to find other ways of looking and writing about the world. So I write poetry as a way of keeping my business writing fresh by keeping me in touch with the sheer craft of writing. Writing poetry forces you to consider the place of individual words in a sentence or a line, the possibilities of rhythm, the choice of unexpected vocabulary, the value of imagery, the surprises that come with different poetic techniques. It’s unlikely that we’ll write poems for our business clients, but we can all use knowledge gained from practising the craft of poetry.
A recent example of this came with 26 Exchanges. The idea here, as part of International PEN’s Free the Word festival, was to explore a piece of writing by a PEN writer from another country and language. My paired writer was Edwin Gomez Anconi, a Bolivian who writes in Aymara but is translated into Spanish. My version of his poem “Cholita de San Simon” built up stanza by stanza over a couple of weeks in the Free the Word blog http://freetheblog.typepad.com/ I found it a joyful, liberating and inspiring process. I’ll also attach that blog to the Blackberry section of this site.
Isn’t it so essential, that feeling the words have when they begin to carve themselves out? It’s easy to forget words have history, that they are attached to the people and the lands that bred them. The poets, the Heaney and Hugheses, unearth them so elementally.