However exhausting or demoralizing writing may be at times–when the pen makes contact with the page (or the fingers with the keyboard) and nothing happens–it often feels better to be a frustrated writer than just plain frustrated. To have a sense of oneself as someone who has a vocation is a rare thing, whether we speak of writing or any other kind of calling. Who needs affirmation when a security of identity is available? All of which is a preamble to a confession. I am a miserable amateur. That is to say, I’m bad at many (or most) things, but most activities elicit little passion. Constitutionally, I’ve never been able to stay with hobbies. My desire has been either to pursue diligently, successfully, and with excellence (which pertains to very little I do) or not at all. While I know this to be a failing–and a rather serious one–such knowledge doesn’t disarm my suspicion of other avowedly amateur projects (especially writing projects).
As a writer and a teacher of writing, I’m never quite sure how to take popular poetry manuals. While creating lifelong writers is a worthy goal, I am also skeptical of the ease by which so many are advised to cough up their latest misery or joy on the page and call it art. Everyone suffers and rejoices, but the shaping of work from that art takes almost infinite patience. I confess, for all that I teach the history of poetry (including whole centuries of formal verse) I’m sometimes skeptical of prosody manuals. Picking up Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within was, then, an exercise in both patience and tolerance. The title alone makes me shudder. Pick it up I did, though with lead gloves and a hazmat suit.
It is always one’s great good fortune to find the world not restricted by one’s own limitations. Certainly, Stephen Fry isn’t limited in his love of the aspects of formal poetry or in his rigor and work ethic in approaching those aspects. One might initially cringe at some of his framing rhetoric about primal universality of poetry (rhetoric which may not necessarily be incorrect so much as it can often be effusive but vague). I did, but I’m flawed. But what follows is light in tone but serious in its diligence. Fry, a novelist, essayist, and actor (who you know from A Fish Called Wanda), admits his deep dark secret of writing verse, and his coming out heralds a versifier capable of deft and lucid explanations of meter, rhythm, verse forms, and diction. The book includes exercises designed by a strict task master with a great sense of humor. Who else can dissect limericks and define quarternary feet with such aplomb? Apparently, not even Nabokov. This is certainly the manual I’ll use in the next prosody class I teach (with grateful thanks to Stephen Fry).