Writing is about more than just having an idea and putting words to paper. There are formal concerns to consider, as well, and I do not mean rhyme and meter or the intricacies of a sonnet.
Every piece of writing goes through a process; for the more experienced writers, that process can occur subconsciously — we all do the kinds of things I instruct my freshman composition students to do: brainstorm, organize, identify audience and purpose. Most of us in the writing business just do these things in our heads.
Yet sometimes we need to return to the basics. Sometimes, when writing an essay, I will need to pause and draft an outline to make sure I am following a logical plan; or when pulling together a long piece of reportage, I will need to list the important points I need to make to ensure I cover all of my bases.
The same goes for writing a poem. Often, poetry grows from an image or a stray thought, sometimes from something more deliberate, but it always follows the language and sometimes to unexpected ends. While this can lead to some marvelous and unexpected work, it also can lead the poet down a dead end, or allow the poet to fall into bad habits and ruts. I know that there are stock phrases and images I return to far too frequently, personal cliches I need to avoid. But how to do this?
A couple of years ago, as I was pursuing my master’s degree in fine arts at Fairleigh Dickinson University, my friend and mentor Renee Ashley issued a challenge. I was, as Bruce Springsteen might say, “stuck in the mud, somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.” Something drastic was needed to extricate the muse and Renee had a powerful prescription. It’s called the “rut buster” — that is the rated-G name; we called it something more colorful when she assigned it — and it truly did the trick.
This is how Renee describes its effect (this is from Adele Kenny’s blog, The Music in It):
It reminds the brain that there are other ways to work than the ones you fall into without resistance, ways to enlarge our possibilities for discovery while we’re writing. And when this becomes too easy, there are lots of great grammatical ways to crank up the stakes! It’s a sort of eye-opener for many.
The rut buster is a 10-line poem
— that uses NO abstract nouns
— that has at least one concrete noun in each line
— that does not have a narrative (a story line)
— and that has at least 3 sentence fragments
It is far more difficult to manage that it might seem. Read the post over at Adele’s blog — there is a full explanation, along with Renee’s bio and an example from yours truly.
The exercise has the effect of shaking the poet out of his or her comfort zone — I know that’s what it did for me — and placing craft issues front and center. The problem that a lot of young poets have is that they think all poetry is just feelings, that if you write honestly and openly you will produce a good poem (older poets like me run into other problems, like the rut). They need to be shown that mastering their craft is key to writing good poems. Poetry is about more than feeling. The good poet knows how to control the language to process very specific effects, to dole out information deliberately, to master pace and tone — all of the things that go into good writing.
The “Rut buster” puts that craft work front and center.
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Hank Kalet 