How to write a poem: 5 ways to find inspiration
BY Anthony Anaxagorou
28th Mar 2023
Anthony Anaxagorou is an award-winning poet and tutor of our six-week online Writing Poetry course. His poetry has been published in POETRY, the Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. Anthony is an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton, artistic director of Out-Spoken – a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre – and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. His latest poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics was published by Granta in 2022.
Here, he shares five ways for poets to find inspiration and conquer writer’s block.
1. Rebooting through reading
Usually when I get stuck, I read the work of another poet – just open a book and see what I find. My writing desk is full of open collections, sometimes journals and magazines too. I flick through at random places, read a line or two. I don’t copy the lines; I use them to generate energy, to inspire thought. Rarely, when I’m writing and using other poems as a means of inspiration, do I ever read the whole poem. It’s more like a quick dip in and out to reboot the engine. That’s one example of a way to get unstuck: opening a book of poetry, reading at random points, then seeing what it does to your thinking.
2. Finding fresh eyes
Leave the poem alone for a few days – or weeks or months even, then come back to it. It’s amazing to see what looking over a piece with a fresh pair of eyes does. I’m often able to identity the weaker parts of the poem that way.
3. Changing it up
Something else you can try when you’re stuck is rethinking and refreshing the order of your material and stanzas within the poem. Mess up the timeline of your poem; you don’t always need to take your reader on a chronological journey.
4. Inspiration from art
Once I took a painting by the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell and tried to write a few lines on what the painting meant to me. Yellow hills absorbing white. Before long I was halfway into writing a poem. This kind of style is known as ekphrastic poetry, and can feel very liberating once you get going.
5. Open free writing
Another technique to get unstuck is an open free write, or automatic writing.The traditional free write is taking a word or phrase and seeing where it can go. I like to sit in the morning, open my diary and write what I’m hearing around me. The dog next door just won’t stop barking. The drilling has been going on for three days. The idea is that I don’t finish the sentence. I leave it as a nugget of information to come back to later. Or you can take an object like a coffee mug or tea pot and try to write around what it represents without ever mentioning the thing itself.
There are endless ways to get yourself out of writer’s block and start creating poetry, all you need to do is sit and write and eventually you’ll get up into the jet stream.
This advice is taken from our six-week online Writing Poetry course. To learn more about finding your poetic voice enrol on the next course.
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