Keep a daybook

 Robert Pinsky in this interview talks about the practice of making your own anthology of poetry:

AUDIENCE: How would you say somebody could best develop their talent as a writer and poet?

ROBERT PINSKY: The answer is to read the way an ambitious athlete watches excellent athletes, to read the way a cook eats, to read the way, if you’re ambitious to be a filmmaker, you would watch Kurosawa and Keaton and Scorsese, whomever you admired.

My recent book Singing School–I call it an anthology/manifesto hybrid– has a subtitle: “Learning to write poetry by studying with the masters.” Here is the most specific, practical thing I can suggest (besides buying my book!): create your own anthology. I mean actually. Type up or write out with your own hand the poems you love by, it might be, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare, Constantine Cavafy. Whatever it is you love, style it up, and save it in a computer file called “anthology.”  You might cut and paste, rather than typing you more distinctly notice the lines of verse and their relation to the sentences.

In other words, if you’re serious young poet or writer, keep what people used to call a daybook. I’m making that daybook or anthology exercise the central requirement of “The Art of Poetry,” the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that I am teaching right now. If you go to favoritepoem.org–which I recommend for the videos– a little red stripe or banner at the top of the home page sends you to the “Art of Poetry” MOOC. I’m asking all of the tens of thousands of people registered for the MOOC to do this anthology exercise. People have used the assignment with eighth graders; I used to require it of PhD students of Berkeley. The exercise combines autonomy–your taste and your choice, nursery rhymes, song lyrics, whatever you want, it’s your anthology–with the physical experience of typing the poem. Autonomy and corporeality. That’s my practical answer to your question about developing one’s talent.

In this other interview he provides more information about the daybook "assignment."

I did write a little book called The Sounds of Poetry. It's very much written for people who are serious, even fanatical, about that subject. If you just want to learn scansion or the names of metrical feet, it is not the book for you. My shortest advice would be to find poems you love and say them over and over again. That's the best assignment I gave, possibly the most useful thing I do as a teacher of writing or reading: to type out with your own hands some poems you love, let's say 35 pages. And I don't judge the content. It could be nursery rhymes, something your mom read to you, song lyrics.

 In that same interview he talks about entry ways into poetry.  It's NOT to begin by being smart about it.

But the first challenge of reading a poem is not to say something smart about it; a poem is something that sounds wonderful when you say it out loud. It's moving or exciting or interesting, and if you experience that feeling, you will have an appetite for poetry. An appetite for information and analysis. You will analyze and interpret poetry in a way resembling how you ponder your family and friends—for the rest of your life, even after they die, you analyze those people, interpret their words or behaviors, their manners on this occasion or that. It is pleasure and feeling that leads us to analyze poems and interpret their manners and ask what they mean. But analysis doesn't make you passionate about poems. You become attached to them through physical encounters.