How to write a poem, and then stand up and say it

The 11 stages are not a theory about poetry. They are the order the work actually happens in when somebody who has never written a poem before writes one, reads it to a room, and then says it into a microphone. Spoken word poetry is written to be heard, which is why every stage after the draft asks the same question of the poem: what survives being said out loud. Beginners are usually handed the first 2 stages and left alone with the other 9, and that is where most first poems quietly stop.

What happens between a blank page and a microphone?

Between a blank page and a microphone stand 11 stages, and each one has its own job, its own way of failing, and its own signal that it is finished. Walk them in order the first time. After that, open the route at whichever stage the poem is stuck in, because a stuck poem is almost never stuck where the writer thinks it is.

1. Starting from a prompt: finding a door into the poem, and finding a second one when the first prompt produces nothing.
2. Writing the first draft: getting the whole thing down badly in one sitting, in images rather than in statements about how you felt.
3. Revising a poem: cutting, deciding where the lines break, and fixing the ending, once the draft has gone cold enough to read as a stranger.
4. Reading a poem aloud for the first time: hearing the draft in a small circle, and finding out which lines were only ever on the page.
5. How a writing circle gives feedback: being described back to by the people who heard it, under rules that let a room be honest without being unsafe.
6. Memorizing your own poem: learning it by heart so the page can be put down, which changes what the poem is allowed to do.
7. Performing your poem: voice, pace, breath, hands and eyes, none of which is acting and all of which can be practised.
8. Nerves, and what to do with them: the 90 seconds before you speak, and what to do with a body that has decided this is dangerous.
9. How a microphone works, and how to use one: the distance, the angle, the room, and the 2 or 3 technical things that flatten a good poem.
10. Putting on the showcase: the running order, the recording, and who agreed to what before anybody films anything.
11. Keeping going after the showcase: the notebook, the week after, and the second poem, which is harder than the first.

Stages 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 11 are the ones most published advice leaves out, and they are the ones that decide whether a young writer ever writes a second poem.

What do you write a poem about?

What you write a poem about is always smaller than the topics people suggest: one afternoon, one room, one object, one sentence somebody said to you, rather than family, identity or hope. Big topics produce essays. A poem needs a thing with edges, and the more particular that thing is, the more of other people's lives it turns out to hold.

The standing question, and the one to fall back on when every prompt has failed, is this: what do you know that the room does not? Not the biggest thing that has ever happened to you. The most specific. The route your bus takes. The noise your front door makes. The rule in your house that exists in nobody else's house. Starting from a prompt covers where to find a prompt when nothing has been assigned, and what to do when the prompt itself produces nothing.

• A place you go every week: the walk, the queue, the corridor, described exactly enough that a stranger could find it.
• An object that is not yours: borrowed, inherited or never given back, and what it does when nobody is looking.
• A thing you were told: one sentence, said once, that stayed for reasons the speaker would not guess.
• A first time: the first day, the first shift, the first funeral, held at 10 minutes rather than a year.
• An argument you lost: the version you did not say out loud, which is usually the poem.
• A word in another language: a word from home that English handles badly, kept as it is said.

The last one is not decoration. A young writer whose home language is Bengali, Polish, Urdu, Welsh or Hindi can leave the word in the language that fits it, and a room in a British school, library or youth centre usually hears it better than a translation.

How do you write a poem about yourself without writing a diary entry?

To write a poem about yourself without writing a diary entry, put down what a camera would have recorded instead of what you concluded. A diary entry reports the feeling and explains it; a poem builds the thing that caused the feeling and lets the reader stand inside it. The strongest line in a first draft is nearly always a physical detail the writer thought too ordinary to include.

Rhyme is a choice here rather than a requirement, and it is the wrong first decision. A poem about yourself that rhymes has to pass one hard test: the sentence must still be one you would say. If the rhyme is bending the sentence, every listener hears it. Writers who want rhyme in a spoken poem get further with half rhyme, and with rhyme that lands inside the line instead of at the end of it.

Is writing a poem the same as writing poetry?

Yes. Writing a poem and writing poetry are the same work at 2 scales: a poem is one object you can finish this month, and poetry is the practice you are in if you keep making them. The practical difference matters more than the definition. Set out to write poetry and there is nothing to finish and nothing to bring on Thursday. Set out to write one poem, about one thing, of about 20 lines, and the work becomes a series of decisions small enough to make.

Which 6 stages does most advice skip?

The 6 stages most advice skips are the ones that happen after the writing and before the applause, and each one is skipped for the same reason: none of them is about inspiration.

• Revising: the draft goes down for at least 24 hours and is then read as if somebody else wrote it, which is the only condition under which cutting works.
• The first reading: the writer reads to a small circle and hears the repetitions, the dead line and the ending that arrives 2 lines early.
• The feedback rules: the room agrees how it will talk about a poem before the first one is read, and that agreement is what makes honesty survivable.
• Learning it by heart: the page goes down, the eyes come up, and the poem stops being read at people and starts being said to them.
• The nerves: the shake and the dry mouth are treated as a physical event with a physical answer, not as a character flaw.
• The week after: the showcase ends, the group disperses, and nobody has said what the second poem is for.

Each of those 6 has a stage of its own on this route. Nerves, and what to do with them is the one adults most often try to solve with encouragement, which does not work on a nervous system, and the poem gets blamed for a problem that belongs to the body.

How does an adult run this route over 6 sessions?

An adult running this route over 6 sessions is timetabling stages, not topics, and the commonest mistake is spending 5 sessions on writing and 1 on everything that happens to a poem afterwards. One workable shape for 6 sessions of 60 to 90 minutes, for a class, a library group or a youth club, puts the reading and the feedback early enough that they can be repeated.

Poetry sits in a different document in each of the 4 nations of the United Kingdom, so an adult writing this into a scheme of work names the right one: the national curriculum in England, the Curriculum for Wales, Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland, and the Northern Ireland Curriculum. All 4 expect poetry to be said out loud, and the national curriculum in England requires pupils to learn poetry by heart and to prepare poems to read aloud and perform. What none of them does is timetable the route as a sequence, or give revising, the feedback rules and the nerves a session each, which is why a workshop is worth running alongside the English lesson rather than inside it.

Three failures recur in a room of students who did not choose to be there. Silence in session 1, solved by writing with them and by never asking for volunteers before the rules exist. Drift in session 3, because revising looks like doing nothing. And a showcase built around the 4 most confident readers, which teaches everybody else that the route was never meant for them.