How To Write Poetry

There is a huge amount of poetry published nowadays, not least on
this site, and books aplenty on how to read the stuff, but very little
on the art of writing poetry. So I thought I'd provide newcomers, and
young people especially, with some basic guidelines.

Let's start with a little piece which comes from ..ahem, my own meagre
collection:

The cat in the hat
Is sat on the mat.

Now, this is not the worst poem ever written; it scans, it rhymes, it
even makes sense after a fashion!

But look at those capital letters, that punctuation! A bit gauche,
predictable, jejune perhaps? Maybe a fatal whiff of year seven English
homework hangs over it? OK, let's make some
improvements&;#8230;

the cat in
the hat
is sat on the
mat

Now we have the terseness of a back-to-basics craftsman, a wordsmith
eschewing frills for simplicity, a glimpse into a stripped-down world
of monosyllables where four-letter words are truly an obscenity. But
those nuances are unlikely to penetrate the jaded brain of the
jobsworth who is actually marking year seven English homework, so let's
instead try&;#8230; a haiku!

the cat in the hat
(who ate a big fat old rat)
is sat on the mat

You may argue that this 5-7-5 structure makes for very poor metre, and
I would have to agree. But we are talking classical Japanese poetry
here so the mere fact that you know what a haiku is will gain you
credibility, or good marks, depending what you're after - but, if
you're still at school, don't forget to put the word "Haiku" in the
title in nice big letters (remember that illiterate who's doing the
marking!). With a bit of practice you will find yourself composing
haikus waiting for the bus, or in the dinner queue; a good tip is to
carry a small notebook and you can write them down as they occur to
you. In a couple of weeks you will probably be able to write at least a
hundred, and what you can do then is to wait for a nice quiet time on
ABCTales - say, five o'clock in the morning, or when everyone is
watching "The Book Group" - and post the whole lot. Just think how
amazed the editors will be when they look and find the last hundred
entries are all yours!

Another good ploy is to flaunt your European credentials and slip in a
few foreign words; but exercise discretion. For instance:

el gato en chapeau
sitzt auf dem Buro
hola!

doesn't contain any English words at all and would look very impressive
on, say, the edge of a one Euro coin but not, unfortunately, almost
anywhere else.

Or why not improve your style and enrich your composition with some
beautifully descriptive words. You don't know any? No problem - I know
a man who does! Try, for example, D.H. Lawrence; flick through one of
his masterpieces - I've chosen "Women In Love" - and pick out a few
choice adjectives; you don't need to know what they mean, as long as
they sound good!

The primal cat
In the lambent hat
Is fearfully sat
On the voluptuous mat.

Judicious use of flowery adjectives can not only make your work
unreadably long but simply unreadable. Then you can turn your attention
to fantasy science fiction, but that, as they say, is another
story.