What counts in a poem?
"Count" meaning...
Dear beloved subscriber,
I hope this finds you pausing from your writing in deep satisfaction after a lightning-fire burst of inspiration.
This newsletter is from me to you. Read on for my thoughts on what counts in a poem. I presented a version of this newsletter live to a hundred teenagers this week. Read on to the end and you’ll find out how that went. And if you enjoyed this newsletter, don’t forget to share it with a friend.
Best poetry wishes,
Rachel x
P.S. if you haven’t already, do go ahead and…
What counts in a poem?
On Thursday 3rd October, it was National Poetry Day here in the UK. The theme of this year’s celebration was “counting”.
When I think of poetry and counting, I think of rhythm, metre, rhyme patterns, line lengths, stanzas - the formal puzzle of putting together a poem. I spoke to a poet the other day who said that writing poetry is “a lot of counting aloud to yourself”, which is why she feels it’s best done privately.
I think that this counting element of poetry can put a lot of people off giving writing poetry a go. Poets themselves even make fun of this absurd mathematics. Previous US Poet Laureate Billy Collins made up a joke poetic form called a paradelle which goes like this:
The paradelle is a 4-stanza poem.
Each stanza consists of 6 lines.
For the first 3 stanzas, the 1st and 2nd lines should be the same; the 3rd and 4th lines should also be the same; and the 5th and 6th lines should be composed of all the words from the 1st and 3rd lines and only the words from the 1st and 3rd lines.
The final stanza should be composed of all the words in the 5th and 6th lines of the first three stanzas and only the words from the 5th and 6th lines of the first three stanzas.
Make sense? Of course not.
But “count” doesn’t just mean counting numbers. Alternative meanings of “count” include - to count on someone, a count of murder, and of course, to matter.
So what counts in a poem? What matters? When I first started writing, I thought that for a poem to count the stakes had to be serious, solemn and sad. I was a card-carrying member of the Tortured Poets Department. My poetry pamphlet was written drawing on my experiences of the worst thing that ever happened to me.
But I found more and more that the poem I most often wanted to read from the pamphlet was this one:
Mae in France
Mae’s summer house, shuttered against midday;
blue, burning beyond the boat, beach, bay;
paella thick with chorizo, prawns, and peppers,
croissants slippery with jam and cake for breakfast;
the solid sunlight making paths untouchable;
and stretched, drowsy with dust, between the windows and the floor;
and waiting outside cool rooms full of books;
and lowering itself down into the sea, relaxed.
The slope of the hill past cypresses, tobacconists;
the nights, slight shadows on the bed covers,
slight glimmers in the water by the beds,
where Mae, Jo, Kat, Bella and Em all slept,
the room’s gloam carrying their secrets,
they swore never to tell or to forget.
A happy poem. And then I started the Writing Happiness project with my co-founder Elspeth Wilson and found more and more poems I loved that are about joy after adversity, or joy as resistance. And now I think that everyday joy in a poem counts for an awful lot.
This is especially true because writing a poem, or reading a poem, is a way of paying particular and close attention. In 2023, the global value of advertising to the economy was estimated at £640 billion. You can roughly think of that as the monetary value of everyone’s attention. Poets and poems compete for that attention, asking readers to direct it closely, perhaps to things that are hidden - like, for example, this poem of care and sisterhood which has had at least 150,000 eyes on it.
I’ll leave you with three ways to think about counting in poems, whether you’re reading or writing them:
What counts in this poem? - What’s at stake, what matters?
Count everyday joy in - What’s being included here? What’s considered worthy of attention in this poem?
Your attention counts for a lot - be thoughtful about what you give it to
And if you do really enjoy the literal counting side of poetry as well, you can always try writing a paradelle.
How did the presentation go?
Beloved subscriber, I was nervous. I have much more experience of teaching poetry workshops than talking about poetry to large groups of people. But a wise poet told me once that “nerves will push you through”. More teenagers signed up to join the workshop sessions I was running later that day after they heard the assembly, which can only be a good sign!