Writing Poems about Writing Poems: Why (Not)?

by Wendy Bishop

This article is reprinted from FOCUS: Teaching English Language Arts (Spring/Summer 2000), a publication of the Southeastern Ohio Council of Teachers of English.

There's a writing workshop truism that you should not write--or ask your students to write--poems about poetry, the workshop, the composing process, writing block, the muse, and the like. Any teacher who has been inundated with such poems, particularly those of the escape variety ("I can't think of what to write so I'll write about why I can't think about what to write"), knows the stomach-sinking feeling that leads to the generation of such a rule. At the same time, I have found that these are the very sort of poems and poetry-making assignments that can draw students into their writing and allow them to feel more of an investment in the world(s) of poetry and poets.

So what's a teacher to do? My advice comes in a teacherly three:

1. Try writing some poems in this genre yourself in order to analyze what's strong and weak about the assignment. As part of this practice, look at some published poems of this sort: it's surprising how many publishing poets break their own teacherly "rule" and with what interesting results.

2. Assign these exercises to your classes in the spirit of fun, of games: ask students to write several poems in this genre to explore for themselves what's valuable--and discouraging--about the poem about poetry so they can learn to self-assign or self-rule-out this popular "fall-back" option as an informed choice.

3. Use the first two pieces of advice as occasions for discussing what it is you and your writing students think actually is/are the topics of poetry, the qualities of successful and unsuccessful poems, and so on.

I want to illustrate this advice but I'll preview my conclusion: if you follow my suggestions, you will find that an in-depth examination of the contexts and occurrences of rule-making and rule-breaking teach you/us/our students an awful lot about writing. I'd further suggest that this holds true for all "rules" for writers. Examining writing rules like "don't write poems about poems"; "show don't tell"; "don't change point of view"; "avoid clichés and strong rhyme," and so on, can yield productive learning and teaching discussions and exercises if these examinations are seen as possible sites for study and for play.

Back to writing a few poems about poetry yourself. I argue the centrality of this topic because I have found that poets like to write about writing poetry. And, while there is certainly historical precedence and I'm pretty sure I could make a good case that way, the argument is more fundamental: poetry for many poets is overwhelmingly about language: language play, language skill, language dexterity and cultivating their love of language possibilities. To write poetry about poetry is to examine the tools of the trade. Is to come directly at a topic that is often encoded deeply in the best poems anyway. Bringing this discussion to the surface occasionally in the poem about poetry hurts no one and often charms, enchants, entertains, and illuminates.

In my introduction to In Praise of Pedagogy, a collection of poems, flash fiction, and essays about composing that I recently co-edited with poet David Starkey, I argued that poetry can do all sorts of work that we have often denied it: that it can help us solve problems; share understandings; deal with teaching conditions, observe; see better, more clearly, and more deeply; note, commemorate, save, and savor; critique; celebrate; poke fun, often at oneself, in productive ways; highlight contradictions; help us become a better reader, writer, teacher; investigate and shed new light on issues; theorize and work out positions; argue and persuade. These are all good reasons, I'd argue, for writing the occasional poem about poetry.

But doing so doesn't always result in successful poems. The poems we write in this genre are liable to the same failings and frailties as other poems. They should be scrutinized, critiqued, revised, and appreciated on the same lines. I'll illustrate with two of my own: one I think is successful, one not. I'll start with the latter, hoping to end by pleasing with the former, but both I think are instructive and were worth having been written, particularly for me, the learning poet.

A Short Course in the Sonnet

In English it's divided into three
Sicilian quatrains and one heroic
couplet; twelve lines and then a turn is needed
to emphasize the climax and the subject.

The Italian has an eight and a six:
more rhymes repeat, the turn of thought takes place
sooner: less time to explain, more to fix
the return. Syllabic lines; accent racing,

pentameter heartbeats: ta-DUM, times five.
To simplify, let's call it ten by fourteen.
The prosody handbook proclaims new kinds
develop weekly, words propagating.

A novice taps Morse Code, chants: abab
bcbc cdcd ee?

This sonnet was written during an in-class exercise with my students. I was out of sonnet topics and preoccupied with the classroom moment, so I quickly "assigned" myself a self-referencing sonnet. What would it be to try to define the form in the form as John Hollander does in his book Rhyme's Reason? I had pragmatic goals: to appreciate Hollander's project, to help me articulate sonnet-writing rules to share with my students, and to stay in the action: to write with my students when I ask them to write as I often-to-always try to do. The result wasn't bad. The poem almost made the cut in my own poetry-writing textbook Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem, but I found others (particularly Marilyn Hacker's poem, "July 19, 1979") that I found more intricate and more satisfying.

The problem for me with this poem is not its didacticism but how little room I had for developing texture since I felt I had to use so much of my small sonnet space to cover all the many rules of sonnet writing. To be short and sweet, I felt impelled to compose toward the quick laugh, the ironic turn. The poem is fun of a sort but doesn't sustain attention. A more successful sonnet on writing appears next:

Working at Home

Each morning I rise early whether nights
Were late. Before I write, I sit and watch
The hummingbirds that ravish in mid-flight
The stalks of pale orange flowers and the arch
Squirrels who bate the cat. Light comes in kitchen
Windows first and fills the house with clarity
I rarely reproduce. I give attention
To thunder mixed with freeway drone, off-key
And threatening. The sky dumps summer rain
On roads: bad drivers skid, accelerate.
Drops fall in patterns on my window panes.
At home and safe, I want to celebrate.
I move from task to task a petty clerk,
Finding the cloud-filled skies the masterwork.

More descriptive, narrative, textured, and of course not didactic--or is it? This poem evokes more response from me as poet returning to it twenty years after it was composed (the sonnet on sonnet writing is recent which just shows we don't always improve with age; something to remember as we remind ourselves to appreciate the there-ness and just-rightness of our students' work).

No, I don't write exclusively about writing. I had to look through my files pretty thoroughly to remember the earlier poem, "Working at Home, " that it was both a sonnet and about writing. Yet just looking at these two sonnets makes me want to take on the challenge of the first "A Short Course" again--to write if not instructions for, than an appreciation of, commentary on the sonnet itself. Fourteen lines on fourteen lines. There would be, I'm sure, learning in that return. To start your own approach, I'd suggest imitation (which I was doing in a sense with my poem and Hollander's practice).

So now, pull out your favorite poems on poetry and/or consult Thirteen Ways which includes the following poems on poetry (along with other poems more generally on writing) that I'd recommend: Rita Dove, "Ars Poetica"; Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica"; Linda Pastan, "Ars Poetica"; William Stafford, "A Lecture on the Elegy"; Donald Justice, "An Elegy Is Preparing Itself"; Agha Shahid Ali, "Ghazal"; Basho, "To a prospective student"; Desmond Skirrow, "Ode on a Grecian Urn Summarized"; David Lee, "Loading a Boar"; Ted Hughes, "The Thought-Fox"; "Alma Luz Villanueva, "Crazy Courage"; Marilyn Hacker, "July 19, 1979"; Ronald Wallace, "The Bad Sonnet"; Peter Meinke, "The Heart's Location"; Mary Oliver, "Writing Poems"; Larry Levis, "The Poem You Asked For"; and Hayden Carruth, "Saturday at the Border."

Next, instead of waiting for your student's poem on poetry to arrive as a fallback assignment, especially if you await such a fallback with dread, ask for it. In many composition classrooms, we ask students to compose their literacy autobiography. By doing so, they see and situate themselves in discussions on writing and of writers. So too the poem about poetry, poem about the muse (see exercises and examples of student work in Released into Language and Working Words), and so on. You can ask students to write poems to their readers, to their poems, or in imitation of any of the poem in this genre that you think they will respond to, as you did. Putting students' poems about writing processes, about their perceptions of poetry and poets, on the line with those of published poets always leads to invested discussion and levels the playing field. They are talking as writers to and with writers.

Which leads to the inevitable, difficult, necessary discussions of quality and poetry. You may not have agreed on my own estimation of the relative worth of my two sonnets. In that case, we need to discuss reader response. As do our students. You may find the genre of poetry about poetry still so bothersome (self-indulgent? not the real subject of poetry?) that you can't appreciate either of my efforts. That too can happen in our classrooms where tired teachers can no longer appreciate the genre of "student poetry" or students fail to ever get interested in the specialized discourse of "contemporary poetry" and therefore resist our directives to use metaphor, slant rhyme, detail and image, substituting instead song, cliché, or banal or easy lines.

We need infinite occasions for talking about taste and the way taste is formed and forms our reading communities. Because poems about poetry represent an offshoot, offbeat, subgenre, one that doesn't have to (but might be) taken terribly seriously, it offers an arena for these discussions that may be safer than the poem about a lost family member, the poem about injustice, the poem about depression, celebration, or foreign wars.

To reiterate my conclusion. Poems about poems are just that. An interesting type of poetry. A location for exploration and discussion. A fairly popular student genre. A sometimes dreaded object for writing teachers. A place of some tension and much promise. A place to explore, understand, savor, and then leave, better informed, as we go on to other poetic tasks.

Works Cited

Bishop, Wendy and David Starkey, Ed. In Praise of Pedagogy. Poems, Flash Fiction and Essay on Composing. Portland, ME: Calendar Islands Publishers, 2000.

Bishop, Wendy. Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem: A Guide to Writing Poetry. NY: Longman, 2000.

______. Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing. Portland, ME: Calendar Islands Publishers, 1998.

_______. Working Words: The Process of Creative Writing. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994.

Hollander, John. Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1989.

The late Wendy Bishop taught writing at Florida State University. Bishop authored and edited many books, including the edited collections The Subject Is Writing 2e, Ethnographic Writing Research, and The Subject Is Reading (Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1999, 2000), and (co-edited with Hans Ostrom) Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing, Theory and Pedagogy (NCTE 1994).