From an Introduction to English Poetry: A Special AP2 Supplement

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2002 by Fenton, James

There are courses in creative writing, and some of these courses are taught by distinguished poets, and it may well suit some temperaments to sign on for the tuition. But to pretend that such teachers are the equivalent of, say, voice coaches would be foolish. It would be very surprising to find a serious opera singer who had not been coached. It would be very surprising to find a poet of whom one could say: she was coached by X, in the way that Callas was coached by Tullio Serafin.

For the poet, there is no equivalent of tuition, and there is no equivalent to the practicing of scales or other finger exercises. How comforting it would be if there were, for then we would know about ourselves that we were working appropriately at our task. We could say: is there a quiet room where I can practice? I'll need to put in a couple of hours after lunch. We could reassure ourselves that we were keeping to a disciplined regime, or we could reproach ourselves with the opposite.

But there is no such regime, and any talk of one is best taken as an expression of personal preference. To have a favorite desk in a favorite room would be pleasant, and if the desk had to be entirely clear, save for a supply of blank paper and a pen, that too would be comprehensible. Equally we could imagine such a set-up to be inhibiting: we would feel reproached whenever we came anywhere near. A battered old notebook and a knee to rest it on, a stub of an old pencil and a seat in a quiet corner of the bar: that too could be idyllic.

Now when I say that for us, as aspiring poets, there is no such thing as the practicing of scales or five-finger exercises, no such thing as sketching from the model, I am aware that the worried reader may object: what about the learning of poetic meters and forms? What about writing sonnets and sestinas and villanelles? Surely that counts as practice. - I don't want my reply to be misunderstood. There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, not a `practice sonnet.' Throughout this book, in giving examples of meters and forms, I have tried to use examples of real poems, real lines of verse, not meaningless or flippant `demonstration models:

The reason is that a skillful versifier can construct a demonstration model of a complex form, and the thing can be metrically perfect and conform to all the rules laid down, but if we have to excuse it from having any meaning or any artistic value, it becomes a worthless model for us as poets. What the model teaches us is how to write meaninglessly. If the model is flippant, as they often are, it only teaches flippancy.

There is a difference here between, say, a Czerny exercise in music, and the use of poetic models for practice. The Czerny exercise has no pretensions of artistic value, only a technical usefulness. On the other hand, a Czerny exercise does not offend our notion of serious art, since what it is saying is not silly.