What factors, in your view, best encourage the writing of good poems?
The most important is having an interesting subject that we care about. The subject can be large or small, weighty or light, and can involve any number of things, from an emotionally charged personal experience to an idea that arrests us in a more or less purely cerebral fashion. We should, however, feel genuinely compelled to write about it. It’s fine to noodle around—to write exercises exploring, say, different kinds of sonnets. And occasionally such exercises may lead to a poem worth sharing with others. But for the most part, we should leave such efforts in our notebooks (or our computer files). Unless we have vital material and focus it in an engaging way, it isn’t fair to readers to ask them to devote time and attention to our work.
Probably the next most important factor is patience. Even when we feel or think something strongly, it often takes us a while to understand and illuminate its significance. To be sure, it is possible to be overly conscientious and to wind up like those perfectionistic artists whom Balzac and Henry James write about and who never can finish anything because of an insane scrupulosity. Yet, generally speaking, there’s a natural and necessary gap between the inspiration for a poem and the realization of it in words. As we work our way across or through this gap, it usually benefits us to look at our material from different angles and to try different ways of expressing it to see which works the best. And if, after finishing a poem, we think we could have done significantly better, we should set it aside, give our thoughts about it time to mature, and then have another go at it to see whether we can improve on our initial attempt.
