Rooney’s Rules:
Some useful guidelines for writing poetry.
Aidan Rooney, Summer 2009
Aidan is a friend and a colleague (master teacher of French and English at Thayer Academy, and a tiger of a soccer coach), who has published two excellent books of poetry: Day Release and Tightrope. The guidelines here come from my notes at our summer writing workshop at Aidan’s house in Digby, Nova Scotia.
1) Consistency in line length—aim for it. Good discipline. This teaches you to count out your lines (10—12 syllables)
2) Try to rhyme. “A bit like ballet class” Learn and train—good Russian training as your basis for breaking the rules of form
3) Make your lines end in a mix of end stops and enjambments
4) Be concrete. “Leave some psychic space for your reader.”
“Oh body swayed to music
Oh brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance.” (WB Yeats)
Form = How and Content= What. Poetry is as much HOW it is done as well as WHAT.
5) Have an opening line that’s very accessible—easy on the eye, head, words, mouth. It should feel like a welcome mat for the poem, for the reader. It’s like the top line on the eye chart. “You (the reader) shouldn’t feel like you’re breaking and entering” (That’s okay for later). After that, the poem is more like a “scroll down bar.”
6) “Show:” Narrate. Recreate. Speculate. Think of their opposites, and avoid.
“Lyric narrative is where you want to be at.” (Lyric/Narrative/Dramatic)
7) Think brush strokes. LESS IS MORE. Spaces left unfilled are as important as spaces filled.
8) Verse/Turn/Volta This is what makes a poem exciting. Make something happen.
9) Give the poem a Title.
10) You are your first editor. You need to ask “so what.” Why might my poem matter? “The challenge of the lyric is to overcome the limitation of the deeply personal…. The poem is free of you when it is done.”
