Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
This much I know: things happen when you work sincerely at a poem.
What kinds of things?
Wonderful things.
Certainly you are not the same person after working at a poem that you were before you began. The circle of your awareness has grown, by a mite or a mile. When you work at a poem, new pleasures unfold; creative energies begin to flow. The brain, which in our culture works mostly out of discrete compartments, recomposes itself and becomes a tapestry of unleashed and united energies. Public thoughts get together with private thoughts; public feelings get together with private feelings; and these unite with our imaginations, with our sensual memories, with our symbolic thinking and our dreams.
Time lengthens and slows down. To work at a poem is to enter a sacred and timeless space, the field of infinite possibilities. It is a place of silences wherein the chief activities are watching and listening. When I was young, my father unknowingly prepared me to be a poet by teaching me to fish. All those attributes essential to the fisherman—conviction, patience, stillness, attentiveness, intuition, curiosity, experimentation, and acquired knowledge and skills—are exactly the attributes of the poet. In the silences, associations and connections are assembled. Nature itself, which nourishes your body and provides you with sensual experiences, may now present itself to you as symbol, and nourish your soul.
The one who you were as a child reappears, and the marriage of innocence and experience takes place. Invitations for a great reunion go out; writing a poem is like calling the scattered children of your heart, your mind, your emotions, your memories, your dreams, all to come in to supper at the same time, perhaps for the first time in years. In this moment, your life becomes an examined life (Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”) and begins to offer up its meanings. With courage and honesty you initiate yourself as an artist-seeker, a lifelong learner, a worker in depth, in vertical perceptions, in discovered truths.
And, yes, angels appear at your side. Perhaps you remember the television advertisement in which a man remarks, “My broker is E. F. Hutton, and E. F. Hutton says...” and all heads in the room turn and lend their ears. One day you will know this: when you work at a poem, all the heavens and their hosts bend close, rejoicing that another human being has found the workplace and pathway of the poem. The assistance offered, the anointing, can hardly be described. From time to time, poems arrive on the page—little miracles of poetry—from where we know not. They seem to come through us but not from us. Poets everywhere know of this experience.
The path of the poet is indeed a master’s path. When you work at writing poems, you are no longer merely a reader of poets but their apprentice, their student, their colleague and compatriot in the country of poetry and its myriad kingdoms. Journeys and adventures begin. Dangers (to what you thought you knew) appear. The great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca likened the exhilaration of writing a poem to “hunting tigers without a gun.” Open and vulnerable, the new, the unexpected, can sometimes devour us. And finally, writing a poem is an act of surrender. One follows the poem wherever it leads. The great English poet William Blake wrote:
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
All this is to say that, for the person who works at writing poems, life is never again the same. Seeing is not the same. Hearing is not the same. Thinking is not the same. Remembering is not the same. And dreaming is not the same. Everything is bigger; everything is more palpable. Think of the painter Georgia O’Keefe, who, when she began to really see flowers, had to paint them huge to capture what she saw. Perhaps you remember the scene in the popular movie Jaws when Sheriff Brodie (played by actor Roy Scheider), alone at the back of the shark-hunter’s boat, suddenly sees the great white shark up close for the first time. Backing slowly into the cabin, he announces to his two comrades, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” After writing a dozen poems, you are going to say, “I’m going to need a bigger life.” Or you may think, “My life is bigger than I ever knew.” And it is, both wondrous and dangerous, requiring your vigilant attention and your courage (more on that later), and ultimately rewarding you beyond your dreams.
Yes, things happen when you work sincerely at a poem, and the only thing better than writing a poem is to write countless poems over a lifetime.
If you haven’t already, perhaps it is time to begin.
Oh, but where to begin?
As a practical first step, you are going to need a workplace, something in which to record your writing. I recommend buying a hardback blank book or journal (I prefer one with unlined pages). Mine is actually an artist’s sketchbook, in hardcover, purchased at an art supply store—five and a half by eight and a half inches. It’s durable and portable, and the texture of the paper is of good quality. I can feel the pleasure of it in my hand. It fits nicely in the pocket of the fisherman’s vest I sometimes wear when taking nature walks, in my travel bag, or on the seat of my car. It’s unobtrusive and easy to use if I’m sitting alone in an airport, a park, a restaurant, or a coffee shop. It is important to find the journal that’s just right for you. And as you get to know yourself better as a writer of poems, your choice of a journal may change over time.
The journal needs to be durable for the simple reason that poems, like fine wine or delicious melons, take time to age or ripen. We return to them again and again, adding to them from the perspectives of our new experiences, insights, and discoveries. Single poems beget families of poems, and they need a space in which they can be together—to enhance, borrow from, influence, and nurture each other.
Writing is a process of collecting and combining various elements of language—some intentional, some accidental—over time. Things written down on one page want to get together with things on another page. Words, images, phrases, sentences, and sentence fragments need time to sort themselves out, to free themselves from our thought pollution. To encourage this process, your workplace, your journal, should be one that you enjoy getting back to. Back in 1986, when I first started doing workshops on creative writing in the classroom with teachers at the Kennedy Center, I found myself calling the journal “the writer’s studio.” At the time, I was working on a combined poetry and art residency in a school with an artist, Judy McLeod. We frequently met in her personal studio to do our planning, and I always looked forward to returning to the vitality and inspiration of its bright and airy space.
If you have ever had the good fortune to visit an artist’s studio, you understand the importance of natural light. Typically the artist’s studio will have a bank of windows that not only lets in the sunlight but often affords a view of skies, treetops, the changing weather, sometimes streets or gardens, and the comings and goings of birds, squirrels, butterflies, and the like. On the walls the artist may have hung prints, photographs, picture calendars, sketches, cartoons, and all kinds of things to amuse, delight, and inspire. The top of the supply cabinet might hold a cow’s skull, and the windowsill might hold nests, driftwood, dried flowers, or stones. Cabinets and bins spill forth their canvases, colored and textured papers, crayons, pens and inks, paints, brushes, charcoals, and pastels. In short, an artist’s studio is a welcoming workplace, a place that awakens the creative spirit, a place that invigorates the mind and nourishes the soul.
A writer’s studio—the journal—should be nothing less. And so I see its pages not only as spaces for writing, but as walls to be decorated and windows to be opened. Variously, I have filled the pages of mine not only with “poem-sketches,” with drafts and finished poems, but also with pasted-in cutouts: photographs (nature scenes, objects, animals, and scenes from around the world of children and families, street scenes, and dwellings), vistas (cut-out artwork and cartoons— Far Side cartoons were my favorites for many years), and also fortune-cookie fortunes and my own drawings, sometimes using colored pencils or pens. And sometimes I copy the poems of others I like and admire and quotes that are meaningful to me. (In the nineteenth century, it was a popular practice to keep a “commonplace book” in which people copied passages from the Bible or from Plato or a novel, personal selections of words to live by.) And I write down my dreams, my memories, my hopes, my ideas (for all kinds of things, not just poems). Sometimes these split off into journals of their own. Once, I invited my wife (from a former marriage) to write on a page, and she wrote me a love letter that I could read again and again.
The purpose of the writer’s studio is to create a work space for your writing that you want to hurry back to, that immediately awakens your creative spirit the moment you enter it, that calls up your own imaginative and associative powers, your seriousness and humor, your wisdom and learning, your past, your present, and your vision for the future. Soon you will discover that writing poems frees not only your poetic impulses but all of your stored-up creative energies as well. The journal, I believe, must have an openness to receive all of them. When I allowed this openness (and joy) into my own journal, I began to find myself writing not only poems, but stories and fairy tales (eventually moving these ideas to journals of their own).
Before embarking on the approaches in these pages, I suggest that you go out and carefully select and purchase your journal, your writer’s studio. The exercises in this book are designed for your exploration and development over time in a journal, and the effort and thoughtfulness in choosing your writer’s studio will heighten your intention to discover and free the poet within.
Great is language… it is the mightiest of the sciences,
It is the fullness and color and form and diversity of the earth…and of men and women…and of all qualities and processes;
It is greater than wealth…it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.
—Walt Whitman, “Great Are the Myths”
It is amazing to me that people actually keep themselves from writing poems. It is in our very nature to write them. We are designed for it. The universe is designed for it.
When I was growing up, I first wanted to be an artist or an architect. I drew all the time. I filled up the Sunday church program with drawings using the little eraserless tithing pencils in the backs of the pews. In the first grade we had to do portraits of our fathers for a parents’ night. In mine, I had filled in the large head of my father below the nose-line with scores of dots. “What are those?” the teacher asked. “He needs a shave,” I answered. The pride I felt in being the only first grader to think of and apply this “realism” to my portrait cannot be described. You would think I had invented perspective in drawing and painting, so great my accomplishment seemed to me.
In the third grade, the teacher decided I was the only student able to draw faces that looked different from each other, that looked like “individuals,” so, when we made a chalkboard-sized mural of the first Thanksgiving, all the other third graders drew headless Pilgrim bodies, and I had the duty of filling in the faces. It was a duty undertaken with a mixture of pride and disappointment. I was proud of the variety of faces I drew in, but I was exempted from the fun of drawing any Pilgrim bodies, though I did get to draw and color a few turkeys and cabins. I’m sure the other third graders were just as unhappy not getting to draw any heads. I thought I would grow up to be an artist. My father thought so too. Most everyone in my life assumed this. Making pictures was an intense and indescribable pleasure to me.
I was not a big reader as a child, though in my drawing and in my playing—cowboys and Indians, pirates, knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood, WW II soldiers (our house was in a neighborhood filled with other playmates)—I lived a great deal in my imagination. Only my early years had any connection with poetry—nursery rhymes and A. A. Milne’s poems in Now We Are Six. My keen interest in drawing died by the end of junior high school, the casualty of an uninspiring art teacher who encouraged only representational art and frowned on (literally) all playfulness, imagination, invention, and experimentation. An interest in writing blossomed in the eleventh grade when we were assigned to write a short story for English class (the first and only creative writing assignment in my entire first twelve years of school). I also took a journalism class that year, and in my senior year I was one of the editors of the school newspaper. It was that same year that I wrote my first “serious poem.” But why all of a sudden a serious poem?
It was a day in late May of my senior year in high school when I wrote it, sitting in math class. Two months earlier, on my eighteenth birthday, my parents had given me a transistor radio strong enough to pick up radio stations in distant cities. My hometown was on the Ohio River in western Kentucky, but traveling across the dial, I could pick up stations in Nashville, St. Louis, and, late at night, Chicago. On a Chicago station, if I remember correctly, there was a disc jockey who loved and recited poems, sprinkling them in between the playing of records. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone read a poem for the sheer love it. What poems he read I cannot remember, but I believe somehow something of the reverence for poetry, the personalization of a connection with poetry, entered into me.
I can’t remember that first poem I wrote, but I can remember what it was about: my feelings over high school coming to an end, the ambivalence about new beginnings, and the sadness of good-byes. I remember it was raining outside as I wrote the poem, and I tried to make a description of the rain running down the classroom windows into a metaphor for the tears I felt inside. I remember the feeling of exhilaration at seeing this poem arrive on the page; the exhilaration, in fact, overwhelmed the feelings that had prompted the poem. At some intuitive level I knew that I had done something important for my life in writing the poem; later I would understand that with the poem I had created a mirror for my inner self (not the false self of the personality and the ego, but the true self), an invaluable tool for awakening. I handed the poem across the aisle to a classmate, a friend of mine. She read it, smiled, and handed it back. The circuit of a poem I had written, shared with another, completed itself for the first time. More than a year would pass before I wrote more, but in the fall of my sophomore year at college, I found myself wanting to repeat the act of writing poems again and again.
I’ve been writing poems now for over thirty-eight years, teaching poetry writing for over twenty-five. The path my life has taken is still amazing to me. In 1981, in an exercise in a personal growth seminar, listening to some music with my eyes closed, I had a dreamlike vision of an Inner Master. I saw him approaching me, dressed in embroidered robes, his head shaved. When he stopped in front of me, I instinctively cupped and lifted my hands. From his own cupped hands, he began to pour a stream of diamonds into mine, thousands and thousands of diamonds quickly spilling over onto the floor, forming an expanding lake of diamonds at my feet. There was a telepathic communication going on between us. I understood that these diamonds represented poems that would come through me into the world. I looked at him in a way that communicated—with some distress—“I can’t write all of these poems.” He just smiled at me and kept pouring. Minutes went by, but when he finally finished his task, we bowed to each other and he departed.
That evening, I wrote the experience down in my journal and pretty much forgot about it. It made little sense to me. I had been a lecturer in poetry writing at a university from 1978–81, but I had not liked the experience of “fixing” the poems of undergraduates in my seminars. I thought that their poems lacked life experience, that they would fix them on their own when their experiences had matured. When I had the dream-vision of the Inner Master, I had already decided to leave teaching (for what I had no idea), and I had almost stopped writing poems myself. Then, in 1983, I was invited for the first time to teach poetry writing as a “visiting poet” to some young people in a public school. It was certainly not a work I had ever planned for. The school was Kellam High School in Virginia Beach, Virginia. My students for those three days were seniors, and I was told they were “remedial English” students. In truth, I wasn’t sure what that meant. I walked through the door and found myself faced with twelve young men and two young women. Unsure of where to start, I found myself telling them that poems—in my way of thinking—are the fingerprints of our souls, that no two people write them in the same way, that poetry writing is about being yourself on paper to see what will show up. I added that poets write about the things they care about. And, I told them, poems don’t have to rhyme.
At that point, one of the students—a tall young man named Tim—took out paper and began to write. Tim wrote for a few minutes (he was the only one writing), then handed me his paper, asking if what he had written was a poem. The writing, which he had titled “When My Mom Went Away,” was about the death of his mother when he was in the ninth grade. In the poem, he described the snow that fell all day, his last moments with his mother, and her telling him to “take care of everyone.” He told us that he held her hand as she died and that he was glad “she got to see all her kids, and got to see the snow.” Written without line breaks in paragraph form, he ended the poem by saying, “When I walked out of the room, one of my nephews, who was five years old at the time, looked up and said, ‘Maybe God needed a good sewer.’ Maybe he was right, who knows. My mother was a seamstress.”
I was stunned by what I read—the straightforward honesty, the sensitivity to his mother not only seeing her children one last time but also seeing the beauty of her final snow, the instinctive ordering of the moments of the poem, the perfect ending, all pulled up from his indelible memories. “Yes, Tim,” I told him, “that’s a poem.” “Then I want to read it to the class,” he replied. When he finished reading his poem to them, their response was to start writing poems of their own. I’m sure they were thinking, “If that’s a poem, I’ve got a few things to say myself.” Tim and his classmates wrote dozens of poems in our brief time together, some serious and some quite humorous, most of them nakedly honest. With each hour that passed, with each new poem, I could see a change in the way the students thought of themselves and in the way they thought of the stories of their lives. “Speech is our second possession, after the soul,” Mistral wrote, “and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.”
We made Tim Sonderson’s poem about the passing of his mother the lead poem in the Virginia Beach systemwide poetry anthology that year. Years later, when I put together my first collection of poems by young people, Ten-Second Rainshowers, Tim’s was the first poem I included. It was clear to me that in the time I had spent with these young people, I was as much the student as the teacher. Those three days opened my eyes to the waiting joys and to the lifechanging potential of putting poetry writing newly into others’ hands. And a few years later, I remembered all those diamonds the Inner Master poured into my hands, all those poems I told him I couldn’t write. I’ve now taught poetry writing to over fifty thousand young people and to several thousand adults. Taken together, along with the students of teachers I’ve trained, they have written more than five hundred thousand poems. I am sure now that writing poetry is in the substance and in the very design of who we are.
Modern physics tells us that the universe of “solid” bodies is really an illusion, that all matter is really made up of energy, an amazing mixture of sound waves and light waves in various frequencies or “densities.” This concept is embodied in the poetry of religious literature: “In the beginning was the Word (Sound), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1–2). And in Genesis, of course, God said, “Let there be Light.” So, in the beginning, there was Sound (represented as Word), then Light, the first materials of the First Artist, a Poet.
We are told that we are made in the image of God. If that is true, then we also are artists—poets and creators in light and sound. For what is a poem but light (images) and sound (words written and vocalized silently in the mind, or spoken aloud), an extract of God, of the universe, of the created world? Every day we drink continually, multidimensionally, from levels of both light and sound. How can it not pass into the substance of who we are? What is human energy but creative energy, for good or ill, as we learn to become co-creators with God? Expression is as necessary to human beings as the exhalation of breath; we cannot hold back either. We breathe in the universe, and release it—as poetry, as light and sound. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American poet-philosopher, said this: “The universe is the externalization of the soul.” It’s a sentence you can think about for a year, for a lifetime, and not come to the end of its meanings; it resonates inside us. The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke believed poems to be new vibrations that created new stars in the heavens. And the great Sufi poet Hafiz wrote: “All the talents of God are within you. How could this be otherwise when your soul derived from his genes!”
We are living in a story, the Great Story. All the time we are living through beginnings, middles, and ends, transitions and changes that stir our thoughts, our emotions, our imaginings. We ponder The Beginning itself. We cannot help it. We are beings of wonder. C. S. Lewis said that we are living in a great and mysterious Story, and the great mystery is that we don’t know where we are in the Story. And so, wonderers and questioners that we are, we ponder also The End. We are living in a millennial time, a transitional time, not only the beginning of a new century but also the beginning of a new thousand-year cycle, when the imagination is ripe with ultimate questions. “Everybody is talented, original, and has something important to say,” wrote Brenda Ueland in her little masterpiece of a book, If You Want to Write. As living characters in a great Story, embodying light and sound, it could not be otherwise. We long to find the words that are ours. We long to connect with others through those words. The poet and seer Walt Whitman saw this day coming. In “Song of Myself,” he wrote:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and the sun…there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…nor look through the eyes of the dead…nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
We are living in the time now that Whitman foresaw. We are Whitman’s children. Drawn to poetry, the reading of poems will not alone satisfy us. We not only want to know what poets know, we want to know how poets know. We want the experience of coming to know things for ourselves; perhaps intuitively we grasp that poets come to their knowing in the act of writing poems. For years we have been gathering experiences. Our very cells are filled with the substance of poetry, are tingling with light and sound. Is it possible to remain silent any longer?
You are asking me questions, and I hear you;
I answer that I cannot answer…you must find out for yourself.
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
A caution before we go any further: The approaches set forth in the rest of this book, useful as they are, are offered as suggestions and nothing more. Their success will depend on you making them your own. Surely we have all observed how hard it is to give advice to people. Here’s one way to understand the difficulties involved.
Most people are familiar with the child’s game of Chinese Pick-Up Sticks. The game can be played two ways—with one set of sticks or with two. In a set of pick-up sticks there are typically forty sticks, each about eight inches long and in various colors—red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and brown.
When played with one set, one of the players holds the bundle of sticks in a fist just above the playing surface and then releases them so they fall into a haphazard pile. Each player’s goal is to remove the sticks one at a time without moving the pile. When one player disturbs or moves the pile, it is the other player’s turn to remove the sticks without moving the pile, alternating players until all the sticks have been picked up. The one who picks up the most sticks wins.
In the second version of the game, each player has a complete set of sticks, and each holds and releases his set, each making a pile. Alternating, each player begins picking up sticks, stopping each time the pile is moved. The first player to pick up all of his sticks wins.
Let’s say we are playing the second version and I’m teaching you the game. Each of us has a set of sticks. We both hold our sets of sticks and release them. Since I’m teaching you the game, I go first. In my pile, two blue sticks have rolled free of the others, easy to pick up without moving the pile. On top is a yellow stick, also easy to pick up. On my fourth attempt, this time on an orange stick, I move the pile and it is now your turn.
Wanting to be helpful, I could say, based on my attempt, “Get two blue sticks first and then a yellow, but watch out for the orange.”
You look at your pile, and all the blues are on the bottom. An orange stick has rolled free of the pile altogether. Trying for two blue sticks first doesn’t seem to make sense, but trusting me as the teacher, you make an attempt for a blue stick and in so doing, you move the pile. Frustration sets in. Obviously, trying to advise which sticks to pick up in which order based on my pattern of sticks, simply doesn’t work. It works better for me to say, “Look at your pile of sticks, their pattern and arrangement, and pick the stick that seems to be your next step.”
And that’s why it’s so hard to give advice, because most of us offer advice on the basis of who we are and what our experiences have been, assuming the patterns and steps for everyone will be the same. This is a common mistake of parents who are, nonetheless, trying their best to shape and guide their children. It’s like each of us have been given a set of pick-up sticks at birth, a set of human qualities—bodies of a certain type, particular talents, predilections, emotional patterns, learning styles, perhaps certain “handicaps” or challenges—and, of course, the circumstances of our birth. You may have more red and brown sticks, I may have more yellows and greens, but we’ve both been given an adequate set for playing life’s game. The wise parent says to a child, “Take your time, study, and be yourself. Follow your own lights, follow your heart. I will share my experiences with you so that if you find anything useful in them, you can take from them what you want and need. And I will give you all the support I can as you discover the steps of your journey.”
It is my job to look at my pile of sticks—who I am and what my experiences are and have been—and discern my next step in life, whatever it is I am doing. It is your job to look at your pile of sticks—who you are and what your experiences and circumstances are and have been—and discern your next step.
Just so, in this book, I am sharing with you the things I know about that have worked for me and for others in writing poems. It is your job to look over the things presented in this book, and based on who you are, based on the way you are put together and the way you understand your mind to work, discern for yourself the order of steps, and any adjustments in the steps, and any additions to the steps that will work best for you. In a very important sense, you are giving yourself the permissions you need to discover and write the poems that are truly yours. It will not only work better for you this way, it will most likely be a lot more fun.
When I think about it, the happiest, most successful, most fulfilled people I know are the ones who, over time, gave themselves the most permissions—in all areas of their lives. Guided by the compass of an inner truth, they did not wait for others to tell them what it was okay to do, or wait for others to tell them which steps to take. Through trial and error, they learned how to experiment with their lives. And maybe this is worth underscoring: The best writers give themselves the most permissions. The happiest, most fulfilled people give themselves the most permissions. The two go hand in hand.
Expressing and making are not the same thing. Let me explain. Breathing in, breathing out; this is life itself. It takes place automatically.
Likewise, we take in experience, hold it, and must let it out. We call this letting out expressing. Human beings must express themselves authentically or they create illness; they die.
Take in your breath; hold it as long as you can. Then let it go. Of course, we notice how good it feels to release the pent-up breath. It feels at least that good to express ourselves. In fact, we do it all day long. We talk, we laugh, we shout, we complain, we argue, we cry, we dance, we sing.
So, writing poetry starts with the need for expressing ourselves. But it goes beyond that. We are also creating. And for that we need materials. In creating, artists select materials—and they make something. Something new, or some new arrangement of things, is added to the world. When finished, others can see it, or in the case of music, they can hear it.
Painters get materials—charcoal, paint, turpentine, canvas, brushes—and make a painting. Sculptors get wood or marble or clay or metal or ice, a hammer and chisel or a welding torch, and make a sculpture.
And writers get words.
But there is something about materials: they all have limitations. You can do some things with them, but not other things. Watercolors produce one kind of look, oil and acrylic paints another. Wood cuts look one way, and pastels look another way. The effects are different. Artists must come to understand and appreciate these limitations.
But soon enough, all artists fall in love with the limitations of their materials. The limitations push artists to find possibilities they would not have discovered without the limitations. By interacting with the materials, artists discover aspects of expression that would not have occurred to them otherwise.
Michelangelo loved the challenges of the various shapes of the marble he used in his sculptures. In a sense, the diverse shapes were limitations. Yet Michelangelo knew that there were human figures hiding in the stones; the stones themselves suggested the forms that Michelangelo would set free. The limitations became his possibilities. With his artist’s vision, Michelangelo could clearly see the human forms within the stones. Think of Michelangelo’s David, carved from the severe limitation of a tall, narrow, columnar stone. The arms had to be carved close to the body, the legs together. Yet what the artist saw in this stone was the calm assurance of David, knowing the victory over Goliath is already his, promised to him by God. In one hand, dropped to his side alongside his hip, is the stone for his sling; the sling itself is held in the other hand, draped almost casually over the shoulder. Facing a skilled, experienced, and gigantic warrior, this boy gazes intently but without fear on his adversary, his own image an indelible expression of what it is like to live and act under the divine protection of God. Gazing on the statue, contemplating the moment, something of this awareness of the divine presence also slips inside us, becomes part of our soul’s awareness. In an important way, it was the limitation of the stone material itself that led the artist to this focus and not another, and became his gift to us.
The materials poets use are words, and like all materials, they have their limitations. By playing with the materials—by playing with words—poets discover their possibilities. Words capture us. Words provoke and excite us. Words absorb the thrust of our emotions and push back at us. Words make pictures in the mind. Words take on the shape of new ideas. Words, by their nature, lead and guide us. Emerson wrote, “Every writer is a skater, and must go partly where he would, and partly where the skates take him.” We begin by knowing a little of what we want to say and often end up saying something we did not comprehend or anticipate when we commenced our writing. Writing is listening—listening to the depths of the great multidimensional being we carry within. To go back to Blake, we follow the “golden string” of a poem wherever it goes. In large measure, it is this mystery of following the string or thread, this oftenrepeated surrender to surprise and discovery, this treasure hunt, which has kept me writing for over thirty years. And as you begin to select and explore your own materials, your own words, it is this mystery of discovery through the act of making that I want to put in your hands.