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Don’s train was a little late. He arrived clutching a guitar; took one look at us and the way the room was set out and then suggested that a writing workshop where we all try to write something would probably prove unsatisfactory. Instead, the three hour session took the form of an interactive off the cuff lecture. His easy style and vast understanding and knowledge kept us all fully engaged throughout. He said reading his poems to an audience didn’t make him feel like a poet. A poet is only a poet when he writes poetry, and the next best thing is talking directly to readers about his poems and his craft. What follows gives only a flavour of the session.

Prompted by questions from the workshop members, Don described writing poetry as a craft involving a process. The result is something that amazes the poet and rewards the reader. A good poem evokes a sense of “awe, wonder and mystery”. Don suggested that before you even think of submitting a poem for publication, refine, polished and finish it, as you would any product of any craft.
 
According to Don, the process of writing a poem involves five distinct stages: 

1. Inspiration
Interestingly, Don considers that the inspiration should be words, not ideas;

2. Realisation
This is writing down all the different thoughts and words and sounds that come to you that may or may not end up in the poem; the unformed poem or materials from which the poem will emerge;

3. Redaction
Redaction can be defined as “putting something (as a literary work or a legislative bill) into acceptable form”. It involves  framing, honing, drafting the poem; “looking at it both as yours and as not yours”. The form of the poem emerges during the Redaction stage. Don encouraged us to see the title of the poem as part of the poem. He said “poetry is the art of saying something once”;
4. Consummation
I think he means fulfilment or completion, the “polishing” stage;

5. Publication
Publication can mean simply letting someone else read your poem as much as sending it off to a magazine or publisher. “When the poem is published it is no longer yours”.

Don told us that poetry should not be overstated or understated. Adjectives can fudge metaphors; the reader needs to be given just enough information to understand the metaphor in its context.

Technique, for Don, is not a dry set of rules. He sees it as spiritual, a dark art, occult, manipulating states of mind, implanting things in the reader’s mind. Startling isn’t it? He said that “the relationship of the reader to the poet is innocent, intelligent but innocent”.

He recognised the importance of syntax and suggested that Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Seamus Heaney use it best.

Imitation of other poets is one of the tools of the trade. Another is finding different voices. He said you don’t have to always use your own – you can use any voice you want.

Stanzas, line breaks, indentation all provide an opportunity to improve the poem’s visual written presentation. The ends of lines provide an opportunity for the sound of the last word to “resonate into that silence”. Don’t waste them. “Make your poems beautiful.”

Don believes that Poets have to be thinking about everything at once. Form is to do with that. At the Realisation stage – that’s when you decide what form it will take. The complex rules of poems don’t make interesting poems. “Language is complicated song.” Good poems contain tension and release, like the dominant and tonic scales in music. “Fun is your friend.” The various forms are all part of the poet’s toolbox.

“Words are things. They should echo off each other.”  Don suggests we bring words back into other words by the repetition of their sounds, uniting the sense of the poem. “If you get the sound right, the meaning is always right.” We were encouraged to try to get an evenness of surface tension – nothing in the foreground. We should see the mundane is the context from which the poem emerges. Don told us to “write with feeling, not about feelings; find the middle way between all these things”. We should use internal rhyme, sound repetition, even make up words.

Don’t discard rhyme; a rhyme is a rhyme if you can hear it.” Half rhyme ends in the same consonant, but the vowel has changed. We can think of the different kinds of rhyme as a spectrum; “people hear the proximity”.

Apparently for Paul Muldoon, the rhyme comes first, before the poem. The process of looking for rhymes then makes the poem. We can use rhyme as a means of interrogating the memory and imagination; and this becomes a “mystical interrogation of the text using occult technique” which to me suggests the poet has to become something of a Shaman.
 
Don suggested that we should watch movies. The poet has all the equivalent tricks of the cinematic trade in his toolbox e.g. panning, slow motion, flashbacks etc.

“You don’t put all the colours in the top left hand corner of a painting.” You spread them all over the canvass; merge the colours. In poetry you do something similar with the sounds of words.

Don wants us, when we’re talking, to try and tap into the stress. He said that stressed syllables are roughly the same distance apart. Metre is in the language, not something poets force on to it.
- - - / - - -/;   - / - / - / - /   etc.
It is us, the poet who determines the metre. The sense of the line that the poet means determines the metre. The reader should be unaware of all these things [metre, rhyme, rhythm etc.] “Sound and meaning are the same thing.”

Paul Fussell:  Rhythm, Metre and Rhyme
Derek Attridge:  Poetry and Metre

Don covered a lot of ground in three hours. But the issues he discussed with us only skimmed the surface. As if it wasn’t enough for the poet to keep all these things [and more] in mind at once, Don added another: “mediate through imagination”. By this I understand he meant that although the poet is committed to the truth, he sometimes may have to change the facts, even lie.