The Science of Poetry

The Science
of Poetry

CONTENTS

Introduction
A Summary of My Writing
Finding Inspiration
Writing Strategies
Editing and Revising
Example 1: Shaping Mud Into a Form
Example 2: Inventing a Form
Why Poetry

The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art.

Leonard Cohen, in How to Speak Poetry
(from Strange Music by Leonard Cohen,
Vintage Books, 1994)