How and How Not to Write Poetry (published by the Poetry Foundation) includes a list of responses about poetry from the Nobel Prize winning poet from Poland Wislawa Symborska.
Among my favorite bit of writing theory and advice included in this Symborska montage that appears on the Poetry Foundation’s website is one that reminds me of the Greek word that the English word for “poetry” comes from “poeisis,” a verb that means “to make” or create. Poetry is not noun but action. As was mentioned in “What Makes a Poem…a Poem?”, poets master their craft by using raw materials that come from noticing the details and making clear-eyed observations of our every day lives.
In How and How Not to Write Poetry, Symborska writes:
“In poetry the description itself must ‘take place.’ Everything becomes significant, meaningful: the choice of images, their placement, the shape they take in words. The description of an ordinary room must become before our eyes the discovery of that room, and the emotion contained by that description must be shared by the readers. Otherwise, prose will stay prose, no matter how hard you work to break your sentences into lines of verse. And what’s worse, nothing happens afterwards.”
