While you're working on your poems — writing, revising, maybe starting all over — remind yourself that poetry is communication.

Every teacher of creative writing has at some time had students who resisted all criticism, however constructive and nurturing it might be, and who defended their writing with something like, "It doesn't matter what you think of my poem. I just write for myself!"

I've tried to persuade those students that the written word was invented to facilitate communication between two or more people, but I've never had much success. On the defensive, they insisted on their right to write for themselves. The poet and teacher Sam Green says he's had students hand him a poem and say, "I wrote this just for myself, but would you mind having a look at it?"

It is, of course, possible to write for one's self, and all of us do it. We jot notes of things to remember, make lists of errands to run, and so on. Your sister, coming upon your scribbled grocery list, understands without a moment's question that what you wrote was not meant for her. Writing that nobody but the author takes interest in — lists of things to pick up at the hardware store, crib sheets for final exams, an address jotted on a napkin — is truly writing for one's self. But poetry is too good a thing to keep to one's self. A poem is meant to be shared with others.

I've inadvertently written lots of poems that meant nothing to anybody else, and I've mailed those poems to editors from coast to coast, hoping that they would be published, only to realize when they were rejected that I'd written them just for myself. I'd been delighted by what I'd written but I hadn't thought enough about the person reading it. For all that my efforts came to I might have saved the postage and humiliation and posted the poems on my refrigerator door like... well, grocery lists.

You too will accidentally write poems just for yourself from time to time, spending hours on work that nobody but you has any interest in. When that happens, it may be that you haven't thought enough about the people on the other end of the communication. You choose what to write and how to write it, but if you want to earn an audience for your work, you need to think about the interests, expectations, and needs of others, as well as how you present yourself to them.

   THE IMAGINARY READER

I recommend that when you sit down to write you have in mind an imaginary reader, some person you'd like to reach with your words. That person can be anybody, but give it some thought: How old? Level of education? Experience with literature? The more real your imaginary reader seems to you, the easier it becomes to shape a poem that might reach through to that person. If you keep the shadow of that reader — like a whiff of perfume — in the room where you write, you'll be a better writer.

One choice of an imaginary reader is as good as another. Yours might be a chicken plucker in a poultry processing plant or a distinguished professor of choral music. The important thing is to have a sense of the person for whom you are writing and address your work to that person. It needn't be the same imaginary reader for every one of your poems, but with each poem you need to be aware of somebody out there who may have occasion to read it. You'll also want to be sure your imaginary reader doesn't shift from one person to another during the course of a single poem. For a poem to feel all of a piece, it needs to address a consistent imaginary reader.

The more narrowly you define this reader, the more difficult it will be to put your poem someplace where that reader might come upon it. For example, if your imaginary reader has a PhD in Middle English, you'll have to publish your poem in a journal that might be read by PhDs in Middle English. How many such readers are out there, and how many journals fit that description? On the other hand, if your imaginary reader is somebody with a couple of years of college and an everyday job, there are a lot more readers who fit the description and who may be waiting to discover your poem. The more narrowly you define your reader, the more difficult it becomes for your poem to contact him or her.

In an interesting essay, the critic Sven Birkerts talks about the way in which we read, and how the writer and reader are joined by the experience: "Reading... is not simply an inscribing of the author's personal subjectivity upon a reader's receptivity. Rather, it is the collaborative bringing forth of an entire world, a world complete with a meaning structure. For hearing completes itself in listening, and listening happens only where there is some subjective basis for recognition. The work is not merely the bridge between author and reader; it is an enabling entity. The text is a pretext." He then goes on to show how this sense of having a reader serves the writer: "The writer needs the idea of audition — of readers — in order to begin the creative process that gets him beyond the immediate, daily perception of things. In this one sense, the writer does not bring forth the work so much as the work, the idea of it, brings the writer to imaginative readiness."

Keep in mind that most readers of poetry are always slightly on their guard, and your imaginary reader is among them. I've been reading poems for many years and should be altogether comfortable with them, but still, when I turn a page in a literary journal and come upon a poem, I jump back just a little to size up what I'm getting into. Lots of people approach unfamiliar poems with a hollow feeling in their gut because poetry so often presents sizeable challenges for which a reader may be completely unprepared. We've become accustomed to being confronted by poems that confuse, baffle, embarrass, and intimidate us, and for a lot of people, reading poetry is a dreadful experience, that is, an experience full of dread. As poets we need to think about breaking down reader resistance, and having a reader in mind can help.

When I ask you to think about reaching an audience through the help of an imaginary reader, I'm talking about a relatively small audience. If you can develop a handful of devoted readers for your poems, you're doing well. Be realistic about the number of people who read poetry, a tiny portion of the population. Enlisting new readers can be a pretty hard sell. A few new readers of poetry are won over each year, engaged by a poem or two they've happened upon, and that helps to offset the number who give up in despair or out of boredom.

   DON'T WEIGH DOWN YOUR POEM WITH SPARE PARTS

When engineers design lawn mowers they don't throw in a lot of extra doodads. Extras in lawn mowers don't help do the work of mowing, and they can make the mower heavier than it ought to be, too hard to push around the yard. And extras can get in the way, can come loose and fall down inside and jam the belt. Extras are also expensive. When it comes to poems, too many extras, too much froufrou and falderal, can cost you a reader.

Have you ever seen one of those illustrated books or articles, drawn from U.S. Patent Office archives, about quaint and curious inventions that never caught on? I remember a drawing of a system of jacks and levers that would tip a man's hat as he approached a woman on the street. I'd guess the inventor thought he had a pretty cool idea. But we all know that unless people see the need to purchase mechanical devices to tip their hats, they won't support an inventor by buying his hat-tipping thingamajigs, no matter how beautifully they are constructed, no matter if they are built as carefully as (dare I say it?)a poem.

There are thousands of writers among us, and each is an inventor. For each invention that catches on with the public — each electric light bulb poem, each jet turbine poem, each "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" — there are hundreds of poems — poems that will automatically tip a gentleman's hat — that fail to engage their readers, primarily because their authors never give their readers' possible needs and interests enough thought. Nobody is going to make use of a mechanical hat-tipping poem for which he doesn't recognize a use.

   THE POEM AS A HOUSEGUEST

A poem is the invited guest of its reader. As readers we open the door of the book or magazine, look into the face of the poem, and decide whether or not to invite it into our lives. No poem has ever entered a reader's life without an invitation; no poem has the power to force the door open. No one is going to read your poem just because it's there. Because most of our early experience with poems happened in classrooms where we had to try to make sense of a poem, we've gotten the impression that people are going to sit still for a half hour sweating over the poems we write, trying to understand and enjoy them. Not so! In the real world, people know they don't have to understand the hidden meaning of your poem to pass eighth-grade English. They passed eighth-grade English years ago. If your poem doesn't grab them at once, they're turning the page.

Once a poem has been invited in, it can very quickly wear out its welcome. It may tire or offend or bore its hostess and be promptly dismissed. People who read poetry probably dismiss a couple dozen poems for every one they choose to be hospitable toward. The competition is heavy, and there are lots of poems out there waiting for their chance to be invited in. Many that earn invitations will fail to charm or engage their hosts, but a few will succeed, and one or two may be so perfectly suited that they will become a permanent part of their readers' lives, the way Joseph Hutchison's one-line poem describing an artichoke has become part of mine.

The poem I've just described as being successful may sound obsequious, fawning, too eager to please, but I don't mean to leave that impression. You needn't write in words of single syllables. You needn't fall on your knees before your imaginary reader. You needn't pander. You can write with difficulty and ambiguity if you envision readers who appreciate difficulty and ambiguity. However you see your imaginary reader, if you write with an abiding sense that someone is out there on the other end, someone generous enough to give you a few minutes of their time, you'll make much better choices while you're writing.

I've always liked this very useful passage from John Fowles, author of The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and other fine novels. It's from a review of William Trevor's book The News from Ireland: "I remember years ago watching the commercial folktale-tellers in a Cairo bazaar. All writers ought to have observed this ancient practice of oral narrative — all critics likewise. Getting the audience, I remarked, depended not at all on preaching and philosophizing but very much on baser tricks of the trade: in short, on pleasing, wooing, luring the listeners into the palm of one's hand."

The Poetry Home Repair Manual:
Practical Advice For Beginning Poets
by Ted Kooser

University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln, Nebraska

available wherever books are sold or
from the University of Nebraska Press
800.526.2617


© 2005 by the Board of Regents
of the University of Nebraska
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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