The smile of poet Peter Mladinic
Today we have a very special guest post by the poet Peter Mladinic, titled On Poetry by Peter Mladinic. While NovelMasterClass focuses on novels, it's important to read widely. That means reading nonfiction, short stories, poetry, and dipping into genres that you may not necessarily enjoy or ever read. Not because we need to torture ourselves--we're already tortured souls, as we're writers, for heaven's sake! But because it's important to be able to understand and appreciate and steal/borrow from other types of writing. We often hear language is poetic, and what better place to hear it from than an actual poet, one who has seven books of poetry out there.
Peter Mladnic:
Others have asked me, and I have asked myself,
“What do you write?” Anything I can get away with. And there’s much I
can’t get away with, but I don’t know until I start putting words on
paper.
I have many false starts, and go down many dead ends; but that’s part of
the process. The main thing is to enjoy the process: the act of writing
poetry. I don’t have many absolutes,
but one is: there’s no formula for writing poetry. If there were, it
wouldn’t be poetry. What is poetry? Robert Frost said it’s a kind of
thing poets write. I say it’s writing that sounds different from prose.
I like to be open-minded, but in general I don’t write well off of
prompts. Poetry for me is a solitary act. What I like is the element of
surprise, writing something I like that I had no idea I was going to
write before I started putting words on paper. I was at a reading once
where the poet, Anselm Hollo said, “Anything can be a poem.” The person
next to me added in a whisper “If it’s good.” How do you know if it’s
good. I guess you just have to live with it for a while. Some poems are
finished in five minutes, others in five years. Sometimes I’ll write a
poem and know intuitively “this is good.” And that’s a good feeling. It
sure doesn’t happen every day.
Just as fiction writers have techniques such as setting, character, and
poet, poets have imagery, metaphor, rhyme, and others. The poet Miller
Williams told me that in fiction characters move through time and space,
and the basic unit of organization is the scene; in poetry language
moves through a patten, and the basic unit of organization is the line.
That makes sense.
I evaluate my poetry through familiarity with the techniques I’ve
mentioned. The best teacher for writing poetry is reading poetry.
Peter Mladinic lives in Hobbs, New Mexico. He was born and raised in New Jersey and has lived in the Midwest and in the South. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served for four years. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1985, and taught English for thirty years at New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs. His most recent poetry collection is Files of Information on People Who Don’t Exist, published in 2024 by BlazeVOX.
Click here to purchase Files of Information on People Who Don't Exist
To view Peter's other works, click here
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