By John Wilkinson.

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These adages were prepared for students at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, whom I met to talk about their poetry on the afternoon of March 19th 2023. It surprised me that they should have agreed to a Sunday class, but much about Jadavpur surprised me, starting with a campus bedecked with far-left graffiti, posters and proclamations. The group was female with one exception, and included some exceptional students, among them two bound for the DPhil programme at Oxford and with attractive projects—a study of the figure of the landlady in English fiction, and an investigation of the Indian connections of the Hogarth Press. As an elderly white man from the formal colonial power talking to a group of confident and smart young women, I expected to be challenged forthrightly, especially as I’d had the temerity to lay down the law in these adages; but discussion was relaxed, amusing and generous.

The poems, submitted in advance, were not so impressive; they were dominated by shop-worn English Romantic tropes, and it was this that prompted me to think about how I could best challenge their assumptions about poetic language, form and intention. The conventionality of the poetry formed a remarkable contrast with the political environment of the campus. Students found my disregard for formal recognition and prizes, disconcerting—especially one who had received an all-India prize for a poem exemplifying, in my eyes, ‘poetic’ at its most hackneyed. Attending Denise Riley’s 2024 Clark lectures I heard a like (but more eloquent) antipathy to prize culture and immediate approval, and I suspect this seemed equally strange to her Cambridge audience. Her lectures made explicit a connection to the living force of a lyric tradition derived from German Romanticism, disruptive and anything but stale. If numbers of likes and affirmations, on-line and in the workshop, have become the measure of worth, my imagined provocations may have looked simply outdated; but Denise Riley’s high ambition for lyric poetry and disdain for self-parade, supported by a scholarly explication of German Romantic philosophy and poetics, would surely have been revelatory for a few serious poets in her audience.¹

The decision to present fifty adages followed the example of Philip Guston when he met a group of painting students.

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1.

Everyone has always already started in poetry. We have been exiled from it. As poets we comfort ourselves with the very words that bring about our exile.

2.

Learning to write poetry is unlike learning the cello or how to whittle wood, because there is little agreement on its essential technical repertoire. The predecessors and contemporaries you elect, along with indefatigable trial and error, mean more than taught technique.

3.

If you don’t know the traditions (there isn’t just one) you become their victim—what you write will sound imitative even if you don’t know what you are imitating.

4.

Verse must discover its constraints. Jibing against them, irritating them, accepting them in their arbitrariness, calls on you to exercise your freedom.

5.

Swing between fanatical precision and vandalism to ensure the poem’s cadences sing. Don’t overthink. Or undercook. Or overcook. Or underthink.

6.

Most poetry will fade rapidly as typical of its time. But energy lies buried in canonical work, crusted over by ways we were taught to read. What calls to you in a classic poem that you don’t find in your contemporaries? What can you do with it?

7.

Change the forms. Rewrite with different line breaks, make and unmake stanzas of different lengths and shapes. What happens when stresses fall elsewhere? Where can they take your poem?

8.

What sticks out awkwardly—is that where you should begin again? Does what embarrasses you, deserve release into the wild?

9.

The metaphor that runs off the rails: is that where your poem should go, allowed to change from its advertised destination?

10.

Your poems should not beg for approval. Have some pride! Are you doing this to please your professor or mother?

11.

In public readings, too many poets explain their poems away, or try to ingratiate themselves—I may write this complicated stuff, I may be that absurd thing, a poet, but I’m a regular guy. Or I’m this fascinatingly queer and undefinable person. Love me, even if you can’t love my poems!

12.

What is your poem serving? The revolution? Your CV? The expectations of those you believe to be your audience? A prize committee? Stop being so servile.

13.

Your poem must be unconscionable, more than you could ever have thought. It must seem beyond you how it came about.

14.

A poem must have its own way of thinking. Not yours. Not this or that concept. Not a display cabinet of imagery. Not encapsulate a decent moral. Not display your love for your grandmother. It must get away from you.

15.

If you are pleased with a poem, leave it alone to grow into independence. You may find it’s a troubled child and needs some interventions, whether loving care or punishment, before it can leave home.

16.

Are you writing poems because you want to become a professor of creative writing? Do you want to spend your life reading poems by students who want to be professors of creative writing?

17.

Ninety-nine percent of published poems—yawn, I know what this thing is. Then comes the moment I’m arrested: what on earth is this? What a relief, to be bewildered! To not understand!

18.

The language is more intelligent, more resourceful than you are. Suddenly you recognize its generosity. You are astounded by its gift. Then it goes sullen. You should keep it amused by your efforts.

19.

Write every day—a notebook entry. Change one word in a poem, if only that. You must sustain the attitude, even if your conscious mind is elsewhere engaged, earning a living, feeding the cat.

20.

Find a neglected poet and bring back their work. You owe this to the elders and the ancestors. Your acts of piety may be all that justifies your lifetime of struggle with words.

21.

Damn projects. Bless adventures. Projects are for business studies. Damn statistics. Bless the outliers.

22.

Think through your poetry, don’t use your poems to deliver thoughts.

23.

Resistance is key to poetry. Not just resistance to commonplaces and platitudes, but language’s resistance is the very stuff you work with, noise that’s irreducible to message. In communication theory terms, poetry is shaped noise.

24.

Readers must meet resistance in the poem if it is not merely to be taken in, approved or disapproved, the envelope thrown away—the envelope is the poem.

25.

Stress is necessary to the poem, the poet and the reader. Don’t lull your reader. Stress causes alertness. Syncopate your rhythms. Let them clash. Listen to every music, every rhythm, except stadium rock.

26.

Your bodily motion isn’t a constant rhythm, but a succession of gestures. Rhythm, obstacle and gait. As when walking, you settle into a gait in language, but to know how it limits you or opens new prospects, you must meet obstacles. Don’t make it easy on yourself.

27.

Enough of solutions. A solution interrupts a process. Insert yourself into a process. Yes, a poem ends. But it can be reactivated once read, once felt, once followed, once interpreted. Your poetic thinking must move on, into the next poem, because nothing was solved.

28.

Resist the urge to represent.

29.

Surprise your poems at different times of day and in different mental and emotional states. You will see where you have indulged weakness, forced a sentiment against the poem’s truth, or failed to pick up on possibilities.

30.

Does your poem feel motivated, is it necessary? This cannot be an advance decision—motivation arises during poetic work, out of language, its unconscious, your unconscious (or is sent by the gods, if you’re mystically-inclined).

31.

Who cares about competence? At times you have to write badly, when your habits are crumbling in advance of a new thing struggling into life.

32.

Stop fooling yourself that the poem reads well. Someone has to read it. At least, read it aloud (and wince).

33.

Go for broke every time. Don’t even think of writing a good enough poem.

34.

Do you have to write poetry? Can’t you be a novelist, a painter, a musician—a politician, a doctor? Do something others value, care about? Why can’t you grow up? (Ask that seriously.)

35.

Don’t expect to live except while you write.

36.

Poets are people whose wounding by language and love for its wounding, is the prevailing force in their lives. These walking wounded are rare, even among people who for one reason or other call themselves poets. It would be perverse to solicit such wounding. If you’re tempted, think again.

37.

Love everything that seeks to destroy poetry, the most banal objects of desire. If you can’t love them, you have no need to fight them, and your poetry will reduce to an excrescence of ‘culture’.

38.

The author is your language and its users. Your role is as editor, which does not diminish your responsibility, nor denigrate your hard creative work.

39.

There may come a time when a poem insists on going where it will. Lucky you! This might happen a year after you decide it’s finished, yet feel obscurely it hasn’t come into its own.

40.

Trust your dissatisfaction. Provoke your dissatisfaction, cultivate it. If you’re satisfied, why bother going on?

41.

You know your poem is a dull lump, too clever, muscle-bound. You’re reluctant to admit it, you’ve laboured so hard and so long! But you must attack it ruthlessly until it twitches.

42.

Don’t try to find your voice. Listen for the emerging voice of your poem. Don’t shut it down by blathering over it, telling it what it should.

43.

Avoid the blank page. Keep a notebook, but also encourage a poem to seed into a sequence, even a book. Nourish a linguistic propagator.

44.

There is no such thing as a blank page. You are trying to expose a poem in the welter of revolting language, language pressing in with violent designs on you.

45.

Don’t think in terms of surface and depth. What sense can such vectors make when you’re working with words? Think of folds, tiles, echoes.

46.

If the poem feels inert, it can be revived by dropping in a piece of alien text—even from software Terms and Conditions. Remove the catalyst after it has disrupted and enlivened the inert poem.

47.

Your poem should feel conscious, even if you feel you’re merely part of the weather. Forget AI bots. The digital is scrim. Its consciousness-effect betrays the banality of ordinary usage. Can your poem develop an unprecedented consciousness?

48.

Write poems that upset readers without giving offence.

49.

A contradictory adage: the great potter Lucie Rie told her students to stop being so ambitious, and come back when they could make a teapot that works. But Lucie Rie could make a beautiful teapot that works.

50.

Writing poetry can make you out to be.

♦

JOHN WILKINSON is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English, University of Chicago, where he directed the Program in Creative Writing. His most recent books are Fugue State (Shearsman 2023), consisting of two clusters of poems, and Colours Nailed to the Mast (Shearsman 2024), an absentee memoir.

NOTES

These adages were first published in Fragile 1, no. 2 (April 2024): 19–25. They are slightly revised here.

1. Denise Riley’s four Clark lectures can he found here.