As much as poetry relies on form, it is also about experimentation and finding creative and impactful ways to discuss experiences. “Trust your reader. You don’t need to explain a thing,” says Carla Panciera, Guest Judge for our Poetry Competition. “Poetry is not necessarily about making sense. It’s about using language in a way people haven’t used it yet.”
Read on to learn more about her work, her advice for young poets, and how teaching writing has impacted her own craft.
When did you first start writing, and what drew you to poetry?
I have always written. I don’t remember a beginning. I loved everything about writing – the worlds I could create, the words I could use, even the feel of ink on paper. I wrote on every scrap of paper (and important pieces of paper, much to my mother’s horror!) that I could get my hands on. My kindergarten teacher noted on my first report card that I showed a special interest in poetry, but I didn’t start writing poetry seriously until my senior year in college when I took a class just for fun.
What would you say are the themes or ideas that you return to in your writing? Are there any recurring messages and values that you seek to convey?
Some themes change over the course of a writing career, but a constant for me might be observations of the natural world. Recently, birds have populated my poems, but this is most likely due to the fact that I started birding during the pandemic and bought some great binoculars. I grew up on a dairy farm, so cows definitely appear in my work. I don’t know about messages and values, but I do think my poetry is personal. When I first started writing poetry seriously, it was hard to imagine anyone would ever read my stuff. What a surprise it was when my first book was published and a reader said, “Your work is so revealing.” Oops. Hadn’t necessarily wanted that, but that’s just how it is for me.
What is your writing process like? How do you approach revision?
I love revising – especially with poems. The first draft of anything always intimidates me. I can’t squelch that critic’s voice that insists the idea isn’t good, or that the topic is one I’ve already done, or that the poem says nothing important. Once I battle through those obstacles and get something down that I think has merit, I love to go back in and see what I can do with it. It’s like a word puzzle. The solution is there somewhere, but what will it take for me to solve it?
You write fiction and nonfiction in addition to poetry, and you’re an English teacher. In what ways do different genres and pursuits inform and influence one another?
Having to figure out how to teach writing to students definitely made me someone who can produce work consistently. As I said, I’d always been able to write and I loved it, but I couldn’t necessarily repeat any success I had because I didn’t understand the process. I read a lot, so I could put words down on paper that sounded good, but how, exactly, did that happen, and how could I tap into that when I sat down to write? The answers to these questions came from breaking down this thing that came naturally to me into steps that were manageable for all students.
As for writing in all three genres, fiction reminds me how to tell a story and often helps me structure poems, but poetry really is the key to everything I write. Poetry is about playing with language, no matter the story you’re telling. Poetry has also taught me to find connections in things that, at first glance, don’t seem to be connected. That helps so much with creative nonfiction. I don’t worry about structure or transitions; I just have faith that ideas will come together from real-life situations the way they often do in a poem.
What poets or poems would you recommend to someone new to poetry?
I always find it hard to recommend poems to people if I don’t know them. But the good news is that there are so many resources for young poets to find those voices that will inspire them. I send my own students either to our classroom collections or to websites like the Poetry Foundation or poets.org. It doesn’t take long to read a poem and decide whether or not you love it, but I have a hard time predicting what might appeal to my students. I’m always surprised and thrilled by what poets and poems they choose.
What are you looking for in a winning entry, and any tips for our young writers—especially those who are new to writing poetry?
Trust your reader. You don’t need to explain a thing. Poetry is not necessarily about making sense. It’s about using language in a way people haven’t used it yet. Think about what songs or poems you love. When you hear a song or poem that you’re going to love for the first time, you connect to it emotionally without knowing quite why. You might not even know the words at first. That’s what you’re aiming for in a poem – to convey something about what it feels like to be human – the joy, the sadness, the surprise, the fear – not to state it overtly. For this to work, images are essential. From those concrete, recognizable sights, sounds, textures, movements, etc, readers experience your world. Poetry has the power to make people feel understood, less alone in the world. Yes, a reader might say (perhaps you have said this): this is exactly how I feel, too.
About the Guest Judge: Carla Panciera is a poet, author, and high school English teacher in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in several journals, including Poetry, The New England Review, and The Chattahoohee Review. In addition, she has published two collections of poetry—One of the Cimalores and No Day, No Dusk, No Love—as well as a collection of short stories, Bewildered, which received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. Her latest book, Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, details her life growing up on a dairy farm and is due out this April.