This Is How You Begin to Write a Poem [10 Steps]

For my Aunt Jackie Sapienza, who encouraged me, and Manhattan College Professors John Nagle, Mary Ann O’Donnell, John Fandel, and Edward Proffitt — all of whom wholeheartedly shared their love and appreciation of the written word.

Step 1: Clear and Focus Your Mind

Some people recommend that you empty your head before writing. But that advice usually comes from those who believe in the art-magicked-out-of-thin-air method whereby you’re visited by a bolt of inspiration and given a whispered gift from beyond. And while this occasionally does happen, you shouldn’t rely on it.

However, clearing your conscious mind of those worrying concerns of quotidian life such as money and relationship problems is certainly a good strategy. The stage of your mindscape must be artistically bare — yet inviting — so that your subconscious mind can be romanced into creation and your talent enticed and encouraged to perform. Unless you’re kind of kinky and find fretting arouses and improves your creative abilities, cast out any and all thoughts that may induce anxiety.

The second part of this first step is focusing your mind.

You will find there is an abundance of treasure hidden somewhere amidst the clutter in that skull of yours. Focus your mind’s eye like a searching spotlight until it catches the glint of one single thought, word, memory, image, sensation . . . something. Squint your inner eye like a gold-hungry pirate. I assure you, there be treasures here — perhaps too many.

If you’re a writer, you’re a thinker. You have so many bits and pieces in your head you’re often not sure which one to focus on. Your love life or your lack of a love life; your daddy issues or your mommy issues; your school or your work; your marriage or your divorce; the last poem, short story, or that line from the last book you read; the view out the window or that blue water bottle on the table.

Step 2: Choose the Spark to Start the Fire

Not sure which treasure to explore or exploit?

Try trusting your gut. Your subconscious often shows itself to be more brilliant than your conscious mind.

If you have a bad connection with your subconscious, you’re trying too hard or doing it wrong.

Your subconscious is different than your conscious mind, whose thoughts love to be focused on, like an exhibitionist on stage. Your shy subconscious only allows you casual glances and brief glimpses, seen out of the corner of your eye, with your peripheral vision. It often shrinks when given too much direct attention.

Come on, you know what to do. Wash the dishes. Cook yourself some simple food like scrambled eggs. Vacuum the carpet. Dust the furniture. Water the plants. Go for a walk. Take a warm shower.

Thomas Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” And he meant something quite different from what I am saying, which is that inspiration is 99% perspiration. Routine physical activity that doesn’t require much intense conscious thought provides an opportunity for your subconscious mind to come out to play. When it does, be receptive, keep your big mouth shut, your loud thoughts to yourself, and listen to what it has to say.

Step 3: Any Piece of Paper Will Serve

Open a notebook or grab an index card or a scrap sheet of paper. It doesn’t have to be a fancy journal or a sheet of 100% cotton-rag Crane paper or Southworth 24-pound parchment. In fact, it shouldn’t be anything that even has the merest scent of perfection about it. Don’t worry about keeping all your magnificent writings in one handsome, leather-bound journal. Posterity won’t care. Let go of your fantasy of some esteemed academic going through your manuscript revisions long after you’re dead. We both know that’s a long shot.

The process only matters to you, not to the world. What matters to the world is the final work produced. Oh sure, there’s curiosity (and probably a TV producer or two) that would love to see DaVinci’s preliminary sketches of the Mona Lisa, Yeats’s first draft of “The Second Coming,” ditto for Joyce’s Ulysses, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Shakespeare’s holographs of his plays — just imagine reading Hamlet written in the man’s very own hand (okay, that one would be worth having — but the exception proves the rule).

Step 4: The Best Pen Is the One in Your Hand

Grab whatever pen or pencil is at hand. Don’t go looking for your favorite, wet-writing, oh-how-words-flow-on-the-page fountain pen (which may need to be inked), or your smooth-writing, darkest graphite Blackwing pencil (which may need to be sharpened).

All that is for later. What you need to do right now is get started and put stuff on paper.

Step 5: Defile the Page

I always begin by writing the date on the paper to help crank the ignition to get my hand and brain writing. Having made my mark on the paper, it is no longer so intimidatingly blank (nor so delicately beautiful like your street freshly sheeted in white after a snowfall — before the plows, footprints, and shovels defile it). Defy that part of you that wants to admire the paper’s pale, blank beauty and makes you hesitate to mar it.

Make your mark on the page. That’s your job.

Step 6: Crap Is Okay

Jot down whatever presents itself to your mind. Words or phrases, vague ideas, or better yet, images and sensations. If nothing comes to mind, keep looking at the blank page. Hold your pen poised above it until there is. Jot it down. Doesn’t matter if it’s crap. Crap is okay. Doesn’t matter if it stinks. If you’re patient, it’ll be the fertilizer to make something grow.

Step 7: Eeny Meeny Miney Mo

Look over what you’ve written down. Pick one word or phrase to run with. The others aren’t going anywhere. They will patiently rest on the paper until either you breathe life into them, bury them by crossing them out, or leave them waiting for your future attention.

Step 8: Look for Lightning

Look for whichever word, phrase, or idea that evokes a vivid image or powerful feeling, or if you’re really lucky, bursts like lightning — that’s why it’s called brainstorming — and branches a path to other words, other images, and other thoughts.

Embrace whatever marks seem to arc across the page and spark the brightest. Those are the ones to jump on and ride as long as you can.

Step 9: Write to Create

Don’t overthink.

Don’t listen to any voice in your head except the one feeding you words, images, and ideas.

Then just write them down on paper. This act makes those words, images, and ideas real things in our world. Once those intangible thoughts have a physical form, they now exist in reality.

Step 10: Craft Your Creation

It will be a mess — certainly at first. But if you can see something struggling to rise in the mess, it’s time to work.

Move the words around. Join words into phrases. Shape the ugly mess into something you can breathe life into. Help this linguistic construct of a creature that is your truth stumble forth into the world to echo and resonate in the human heart when it is read or spoken aloud.

If not, give another look at your initial outburst of words and pick something else, anything else.

Above all, do not become disheartened. If creating was easy there would be mountains of masterpieces rising ever higher to touch the sky every day. Recall the small, still voice that calls you a writer, a poet, in your most arrogant, solitary moments.

So be a poet and dare to take that pile of crap on the page and mold it into your own personal, naked monument — that cry of heartbreak, or shout of joy, or flash of encouraging inspiration — which you so desperately and secretly hope will touch others to their core and make them wonderstruck with amazement.

This is how you begin a poem.

How you write a poem is word by word, image by image, metaphor by metaphor, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, memory by memory, and vision by vision.

You are a creator. Create.

Now, get to work.

The whistle has blown. It’s time to wrestle with words and finish writing the first draft of your poem.

You may as well get it done. This is only the beginning after all. Because then after you let it sit for a time, the real work of cutting away the fat, killing your darlings, and rewording awaits you.

It is absolutely necessary to leave it for a day, a week, or longer. Absence may not make your heart grow fonder of your work but it will grant you clear eyes to accurately assess it when editing.

Always read aloud each successive draft from beginning to end. This is freshman English 101 (if you were taught by Professor John Nagle of Manhattan College, as I was). Your ears have heard more words than your eyes have read throughout your life and are the better judge of what’s good and what’s not.

Writing is a craft as well as an art. You will need to learn to be a craftsman. This includes cliché killing. Any phrase or pairing of words that sound too inevitable and comfortably familiar has probably been worn out in common usage. It makes for lazy writing that will have no impact on the reader. Its only possible place is when used in writing naturalistic dialogue in prose.

Revise like you’re shaping a gem or a bonsai tree, honing a blade, or polishing a fine piece of wood or jewelry. Every so often, step back and make certain you aren’t about to wear away too much of the heart of your creation. If you don’t try to do it all in one sitting, your work will survive your best efforts to make it perfect, which is almost always an impossible task.

Believe it or not, this is the fun part — or it can be — if you allow yourself to enjoy the work.

Postscript

Oh, and if you employ rhymes, use a Rhyming Dictionary. Don’t make life — or your writing — any harder than it needs to be. Using quality tools isn’t cheating, it’s being a professional.

Do your best to produce work of professional caliber — not perfect, just professional. In the commercial world, which is the fallen world, the word “professional” means you get paid for your work, while “amateur” means what you do is just a hobby. However, in those higher realms where quality is prized more than coin, “professional” is a standard to strive for. So, I urge you to never vainly struggle for that which is perfect but work to make what is professional. If not for your sake then for the good of all. There are too few of us who strive to do so. We and our professional work — paid and unpaid, rewarded or unrewarded — matter far more than most people know.