When writing poetry, the smallest details and language choices are just as important as overarching themes. “Poetry and life both invite us to pay attention: to notice big meaning, both beauty and sadness, in small, ordinary moments and objects,” says Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, Guest Judge for our Poetry & Spoken Word Competition. “A poem is probably the smallest unit in literature—a wonderful practicing ground for writing (or reading about) a truth told through imagery.”
Learn more about her genre-ranging work and her advice for budding poets!
You have written 13 books of all different genres and forms—poetry, novel, memoir, short story, essay, biography, and writing for children. How do you move between such different genres, and how do they inform one another?
I think of each book as an opportunity to grow as a writer and as a human. I don’t buy into the publishing advice that writers should “stay in one lane.” Instead, I favor the idea that a long-game career is one of growth. I tell my students that our ambition as writers should always be higher than our current skill levels so that we will grow a psychic inch (or two!) with each project.
In terms of how I shift between genres, I read a lot of the best books I can find in each genre that I wish to enter. I look to them as “model books,” and I try to learn from them. Also, I know that regardless of the genre, each book I write will contain a seed of my most essential curiosities: life writing, fairy tales, accepting one’s wisdom, and how we become.
Every week for seven years, you asked a stranger for a word to use in a poem, for a project aptly called “Poetry for Strangers.” What was that experience like? How does input from a stranger help inspire and motivate your writing process?
Poetry for Strangers was the project that turned me into a writer. It was an opportunity to engage weekly in all stages of the writing process: the composting, the creation, the crafting, and the connection—what I think of as the Writer’s 4 Cs. Each week I had to go into the world and try:
- To live interesting experiences and meet interesting people (compost experience for writing);
- To summon the discipline to sit down at the desk and write something new (create);
- To read poetry and other literature with a keen eye for what I could learn, and take those lessons back to the week’s poem for a few more drafts (craft);
- To send the poem, along with the story of its creation, to my email list, and eventually publish many of them in journals (connect the writing to the world).
The stranger and the word both helped shape what the poem would be about—I needed both to honor the word and the stranger who gave it—and so the two became an organizing device for deciding how to shape my own observations about the world, my own life, into a worthy poem. Poetry for Strangers was a wonderful project and I miss it, but I feel that it ran its course. It left my readers with several hundred poems, and left me feeling like a poet.
A common theme in your work is using fairy tales to tell stories from one’s life. You once wrote that fairy tales offer “protection” for writers by giving them the liberty to “not tell the exact factual truth.” Can you explain what exactly you mean by “protection,” and how writers can use non-truths as a way to bravely expose parts of themselves?
Our lives, as living writers, are open books—not over until we stop living. That separates life writing from fiction, which has a definite ending. When we write about our lives (whether in memoir, poems, or adapted into some other genre), we must keep in mind that whatever happens, life goes on. Fairy tales can help writers isolate a period of life—with a definite beginning, middle, and end—and write that story confidently, with the authority of seeing a true personal story run its course.
Once we write with the “container” of a borrowed form of a myth or fairy tale, we can turn experience into art. We focus less on our feelings or vulnerabilities about what happened, and more on what wisdom the experience yields or how the story works. They can also help us figure out which images we can use to tell a “reflective” story—one in which our reader will see themselves. Thinking with fairy tales as we write can also help us curate truths, not get mired in facts, such as transcribing an entire conversation or writing someone to be identifiable in real life by readers. Instead, we can focus on composite characters that reflect the story’s main dilemma and theme, which also protects the living people in our lives.
In short, by tapping into the essential stories that humans have always told—versions of heroes on journeys, or humans facing monsters, or experiencing rises (comedies, happily ever afters) and falls (tragedies, rebirths)—we tap into the universal stream of story. Our own life details become less about us, and more about the human condition. We see our lives on a different scale, both bigger and smaller. We become braver through the writing.
Your latest book, Edit Your Life, gives tips for how to declutter one’s life, in the same way a writer has to declutter their latest draft. In your 2019 TEDx talk on the subject, you said: “One of the things I love about poems, both reading them and writing them, is their deliberate attention to detail.” What other commonalities do poetry and life share? What other lessons from poetry can we apply to our life—or vice versa?
Poetry and life both invite us to pay attention: to notice big meaning, both beauty and sadness, in small, ordinary moments and objects. A poem is probably the smallest unit in literature—a wonderful practicing ground for writing (or reading about) a truth told through imagery. When we read a poem, we are left with a feeling. We analyze that feeling to see what the poem is about, and how the parts of the poem (line breaks, imagery, relationship of title from beginning to end) work together. Poems often come from observing some ordinary element of life closely, and seeing something universal in it. The idea may originate from what feels like magic and serendipity; the crafting then comes through careful drafts upon drafts. Poems just feel good to read and write. They are humble and wise and very often beautiful. Which, I feel, is a useful template for living a life.
What are you looking for in a winning entry? Any tips for our young writers, especially those who are new to writing poetry?
I am looking for writing that gives me goosebumps! Writing that feels true and surprising, whose title invites me in, and whose last line feels inevitable (and also somehow a shock). Also, writing that feels universal in theme and human-sized in specific details.
My best tips for writers of any age:
- Read excellent work in the genre in which you wish to write. Study how it’s built and why it works. Look big (to the story and theme) and small (to the images and sentences).
- Set a writing schedule (even if it’s just one hour each weekend). This enables us as writers to edit out inferior sentences and ideas, while trusting that we can write more. Just because you wrote it doesn’t mean you have to keep it.
- Read fairy tales and myths, and try out writing with them! They are the stories that have quickened human hearts for millennia. By understanding ancient plots, and retelling their themes with the details of our modern world, we can create work that feels both fresh and eternal.
- Keep a journal. Of any sort! Perhaps try one just for poems.
- Make writing a pleasure. Treats at the desk help. Treats afterward, too.
- And for poets: do not waste line breaks! End lines on interesting words.
About the Guest Judge: Elisabeth Sharp McKetta is the author of thirteen books and on the writing faculty of Harvard Extension School and Oxford Department for Continuing Education. She is recognized as a leader in creating community in the online classroom and is the recipient of Harvard’s Excellence in Teaching Writing Award. For seven years she wrote a weekly poem for a stranger in her Poetry for Strangers Project. Her PhD focused on the uses of myth and fairy tales to structure life writing, an idea that informs her work today. Elisabeth lived three years in a tiny house with her family, an adventure she discusses in her TEDx talk, “Edit your life like a poem.” Elisabeth’s writing has won awards and been featured widely, including in The Poetry Review and Harvard Magazine.
