Writing tip for the day: Get a dog. (I will explain later.*)

Guest blogger, Penelope Scambly Schott

Many poets today have tin ears. If you try to read their poems aloud, the lines are clunky. A poem is a made thing and even if its subject is harsh or painful, I want the language to sing.

Perhaps my obsession with the sound of a poem comes from my early training. I grew up on rhymed metrical poetry, mostly what my post-Victorian grandmother liked to read to us on the porch after dinner while fireflies danced in the bushes. From when I was about five years old, the iambics pounded themselves into my brain so that I could almost jump rope to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”—

I WAN dered LONE ly AS a CLOUD
that FLOATS on HIGH o’er DALE and HILL

and on and on, the slap of the jump rope, more familiar than “Miss Mary Mac Mac Mac” and those other kid lyrics. When I started writing, beats insisted themselves into my poems—not just iambs but dactyl and anapest. I couldn’t have named those poetic meters, but there they lurked.

Once I got older and met free verse, I still detected the old meters and how they haunt the lines. Although I no longer write traditional ballads or tidy sonnets, what I do write always starts with a rhythm and develops by being spoken.

*Here’s where the dog comes in:
Every morning of my life starts with an early dog walk, just me and Ms. Lily Schott Sweetdog, a fifty-pound happy-tailed off-white poodle mix. When we set out, I am often half asleep, in that lovely sleep-toward-waking hypnopompic state where you still connect to dreaming. As we circle our hilltop, she sniffs and I sing without choosing what I am singing. Music and words come all on their own. After awhile I am reciting different words, words that weren’t part of the original song at all. I am writing a poem. Meanwhile, because I am walking, there’s a steady underlying rhythm that shapes or plays counterpoint to whatever phrase I am muttering.

I don’t write the whole poem while we’re out walking, but when I hit a few phrases or ideas that I actually like, I repeat them all the way home (partly so I won’t forget them) and as soon as we come in the door, I scribble them down. I suppose I could take paper and pen with me—I would on a long hike—but the process of repeating the words sometimes changes or deepens them. Much of what I have written in recent years has started with these morning dog walks. It’s a space without interruptions or any crap I have to deal with except dog crap I pick up in a plastic bag.

So that’s my writing tip. I guess you don’t really need a dog. What you might want to try is to be outside without another human being and to keep moving rhythmically while your inner censor is still asleep.

And here’s a poem in which I describe my process:
How to Write a Poem
Let light wake you.
Abandon the nest of your bed.
Pull up the quilt to keep the sheets warm.
Kiss somebody.
Don’t speak.

She lopes
through prairies of kelp.
She knows all the words.
In earliest morning,
her words are yours.

Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of five chapbooks and seven full-length books of poetry including the verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth which received the 2008 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and most recently, Crow Mercies, 2010, winner of the Sarah Lantz Memorial Award from Calyx Press. She writes, grades papers, hikes, paints, and spoils her family, especially her grandson and her dog.

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