Just this past week I had a conversation about craft with a fellow writer of poetry. We talked about style, tone and voice; about the work of drafting and revising; about converting experience from raw thought and feeling into cooked art, through the medium of language. We talked about mistakes and the problem of recognizing when a poem is finished and "good," and, in this context, about intention and outcome.
The subject of discipline came up several times, explicitly and implicitly--discipline and its mirror opposite, indiscipline. That idea has stuck with me.
Discipline is the same in any human endeavor, be it poetry writing or dribbling a basketball. Skill comes from it. Mastery never comes without it. No matter how talented or precocious you are--and there have been many, many precocious poets (Rimbaud, Paul Muldoon)--discipline determines how good you really become, how you improve, even if you start out writing from a higher plane of capability than most.
What's discipline exactly? There's nothing exact about it. Discipline is as various and personal as every writer, like voice and style. Your discipline may be my deathly writing process. Mine may be your stone wall beyond which you can never go. Another's may be our slippery slope to mediocrity.
If you scroll through the many entries of this ongoing blog, you'll find I am sure that discipline is a frequent subject by some other name. I've written about the importance of making a commitment to writing poetry. I've written about the need, or at least benefits, of making poems internally consistent. I've written also about revising a poem especially when you think that first draft is the one. I've done a series on the "habits" of writing poetry.
One thing poetry writing discipline is is simply getting down to the task of it, sitting down at your desk and doing the work. If you want to write poetry, then get busy writing poems.
But I think I am talking now about a different sort of discipline. It's the discipline of keeping your poem aloft while gravity constantly pulls its parts and pieces down around your feet. (I like this metaphor because I once taught myself how to juggle!) How does one do that?
Discipline means understanding, eventually, what your poem tries to be, then channeling everything in that direction: diction, image, tone, voice, line, figure of speech, detail, point of view, persona. Discipline can also mean not overdoing these things, concentrating too much on mechanics and technique so that your poem starts to feel bolted together rather than something grown organically from an idea and a feeling.
Above all, discipline means recognition: seeing in your draft that this line contradicts the sense of the earlier line; that this image isn't quite appropriate to the feeling, or is cliched; that the flow you achieve in the draft makes for pretty sound, but not much else; that a reader who is not you might not hear or see or feel what you do when you reread this passage or that sequence of words. Discipline means recognizing that your poem has achieved its becoming, it has become, and it is finished, and any further editing will only detract.
This kind of discipline is hard; it's the hardest work of writing poetry and the part that most weekend poets abandon with abandon. If what you want is to be a weekend poet, more power to you, so long as you don't believe that you're writing real poetry, that is, making art.
I can always tell when I'm writing in an undisciplined way--I'm paying close attention to everything but the verbal icon at hand, or to its possibilities and limitations, at least. A voice inside my head tells me this is good stuff, that's a neat way of putting it, this obscure reference is okay because it's the only one in the draft, that lazy locution is acceptable (because I am too lazy to think up a better one), this draft is good enough, or, worst of all, THIS IS HOW I FEEL. I am a poet. I get to break all the rules, or, the rules don't apply. It's how I feel.
I don't have to show such work to too many people to confirm what I think is true about my draft. It's clear in their reactions: either they find the poem "perfect," "beautiful," "n'ere so well express'd" without having taken more than a few seconds to scan it; or they say something like, "Well, I never understood this stuff anyway." Of course, I knew this before I handed the draft to these readers.
Is there some conclusion here? Not really. Well, maybe. Discipline is not peculiar to poetry or even to art. But it is vital. Indiscipline is fatal.
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