Now, let’s go “fishing” for some poems. Let’s have some fun. Let’s see how easy it can be to begin.
And let’s invite the soul’s participation.
The beautiful thing about the soul is that it is not the ego, not the personality, and not the mind. It places no judgments; it is free from expectations. The nature of the soul is innocent, childlike. The essence of the soul is loving; its essence is joy. Sometimes it is the one unfading note of joy in an entire life symphony of suffering and pain. And the soul is active, dynamic. Its task is to gain experience of itself, the created world and universe, and the divine. The soul’s energy—in its human form— is creative energy; it is drawn to activities that are creative, especially those that mirror the soul itself, as poetry writing does. And the soul’s goal is to return home—whatever you imagine that to mean—as an experienced being. The Sufi poet Hafiz wrote of the soul: “We are like lutes once held by God. Being away from his warm body fully explains this constant yearning.” In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, it is not the elder son who stayed at home, but the younger son who tasted the waters of life, the experienced soul, for whom the fatted calf is killed, the experienced soul who is welcomed and celebrated on his return.
This first approach fits perfectly with the nature of the soul and its expression, for it is a playful, openended approach; it draws upon and uses the wealth of our experiences, provides a vehicle for the specialized intelligence and expressiveness of the emotions, occupies the mind with simple puzzles to solve (the mind enjoys puzzles), and, finally, is built on and requires the use of our intuition. And all of this happens in the blink of an eye; simultaneously, naturally, without our having to think about it. I call this first approach poem-sketching.
Beginning artists don’t usually start with a class in painting, but with a drawing class. We could say that the beginner is first learning to sketch. Again, when I was a boy thinking of becoming an artist someday, I was drawing all the time—trees, animals, hands, faces, knights, athletes, airplanes, boats, and on and on. I was practicing, sketching, learning the various uses of pencils, crayons, charcoal, exploring the looks of things on paper, which could then be combined into finished pictures.
So when I became a poet, or began to call myself a poet, sketching was already part of my practice, my approach to creating. In my poetry journal I “sketched,” but with words, filling pages with word images, phrases, sentences, and sentence fragments, exploring the possibilities of words, capturing ideas, keeping an eye out for possible poems. This was useful because my consciousness was still maturing, and I didn’t yet know what I really wanted to say. As a practical matter, it is in the very nature of words to draw things from deep within us to the surface of consciousness. Working with words and with our surfaced memories, and guided by a spirit of seeking and saying what is true, something within us is always trying to align our thoughts with our feelings, and when they align—when thoughts and feelings are in agreement—a channel is opened to our intuition. And intuition is the gateway to the Knower within, the voice of the True Self, the soul.
The truth is that everyone who writes a poem reinvents poetry. Would we really want it any other way? How boring if everyone wrote about the same things in the same way. Always, the idea is this: be yourself on paper. Or maybe I should say work at becoming yourself on paper. Often as adults there are layers of falseness we first have to penetrate. It took me fifteen years to get through the first layer; another fifteen to get through the second. Writing poems—hundreds of poems—was a way of penetrating these layers. (I did not know they were layers at the time; always I was just trying to write “my truth.”) And it may be that I am just now trying to penetrate a third. I say this not to discourage you (the last thing I want to do), but simply to say that writing poems is a combination of pleasure and work, inner work—a process of sharpening our inner and outer vision, a process of maturing the emotions, a process of being honest and eventually gaining insight. Our poems demand of us that we complete our growing up. Again and again, our poems march us back out to the world—to face the things we need to face, to change the things we need to change, and to have the experiences we need to have for our awakening and growth. In many things, I have been a slow learner, though never discouraged. Always, you start where you are. And I meet people all the time in my workshops who are taking up the writing of poems with far more wisdom, honesty, insight, and courage than that with which I began. Sometimes it was not apparent to people that they had these qualities until they began to write and share their poems.
Poem-sketching is a simple introductory approach that can be used, developed, and enjoyed for a lifetime. It is based on the concept that words are materials. You can go back to it again and again, just as artists never give up the usefulness of drawing and sketching. It is designed to help you begin to fill your writer’s studio with word sketches, quick word studies if you will, and, of course, poems. To me, it is the basic technique, and a shortcut to the poet we all carry inside.
With poem-sketching, you are taking a group of words (usually four, but actually any number) and developing them into combinations of sentences that “feel” like poems. Some sketches will become poems almost immediately, and others will be the building blocks of later poems. Sketches can have a beauty all their own. Museums frame and hang sketches by artists alongside “finished” paintings. We are moved by their suggestiveness and simplicity. Just so, your poem-sketches will soon have a poignancy and beauty all their own.
One function of poem-sketching is to awaken your ability to produce images in words. There is a kind of mystery with images. They often come as a surprise, and they allow us to express the inexpressible. The Phoenician philosopher and seer Jamblichus wrote: “Things more excellent than every image are expressed through images.”
Word images allow us to say things in a wonderfully concentrated way, sometimes summing up years of learning and personal experience in a single flash of language, sometimes giving form to a feeling otherwise impossible to express. Sometimes the images are simply descriptive: “the lean egrets wading with unbroken patience and attention.” Sometimes they are similes or metaphors, joining two things together to create a third thing: “Once, on a sandy shore / under moon and stars / I watched the waves / take snapshots of the deep.” Or (describing umbrellas): “Black stars wheel by / black jellyfish in the sea / of afternoon rain.”
As another example, an eighth-grade student of mine, James Powell, wrote in a poem (from Ten-Second Rainshowers): “When my mom died, / I was like the winter / with only a young pine growing, / just the pine and the stump of a great poem.” Oh so much love, so much loss, so much heartache and sorrow captured in so few words by this young poet. The images make the poem pass through our hearts over and over again. But that is what images make possible, and poem-sketching can help us to learn to find these images waiting inside us.
In a poem-sketch, you will be working initially with a selected word group of four words, for example:
Perhaps you already feel yourself being drawn to one of these word groups, or feel yourself wanting to recombine them. (Remember, the best writers give themselves the most permissions.) Perhaps you already feel the glimmer in your thought of images, word pictures, phrases, sentences, feel the stirring of that curiosity that wants to solve the puzzle of making a poem. Take a few minutes to glance over the pages of word groups at the back of this book. Which word groups are you drawn to? Which ones stir your memories, your emotions, your ideas, your imagination? Which ones do you already want to recombine? I am confident they are there. Maybe you want to open your writers studio and jot a few down.
I should say that for those of you who are learning English or have your greater writing skills in another language, I suggest that you translate the word groups into your native tongue and write your poem in that language. The poet in each of us is connected to our birth language, the language of our heart and its first affections, the first language we wrote in, our most fluent language, and perhaps not to an adopted language (though many people capably write their poems in more than one).
In a poem-sketch, the idea is to get the word-group words into sentences or sentence fragments that fit together, make sense (to you!), and feel (to you!) like a poem. It is a form of puzzle-solving that happens easily and naturally, drawing upon the inner resources we all have as human beings in the world.
It is important to understand that you may change the forms of the words (childhood, child, children; silent, silence, silently), use the words in any order, and repeat the words. You may also, of course, put in sentences that don’t use any of the words. You may drop any word-group words that don’t fit your poem, or substitute words (“crow” for “sparrow,” “pond” for “lake,” and so on) once you grasp the thread of the poem, once the poem is underway. Common sense and your own truthfulness will guide you.
It won’t take long for you to want to recombine the word groups, to make new combinations of the words. And most people gravitate toward making larger word groups containing five or six words or ten or a dozen or more. The poems naturally want to expand in this way. There is nothing sacred, nothing written in stone, about the word groups. I change them around all the time myself, and invent new ones. When I give pages with word groups to young people, recombining them is often the first thing they do.
The word group is simply a starting place, an “uncarved block.” Your task is to select a word group and then follow the thread of the poem-sketch wherever it leads you. And if you recognize that you have a problem with being rigid, if you know that you feel more comfortable “inside the box,” feel safer “coloring inside the lines,” then some of your first work with this approach will be giving yourself permission to be flexible and inventive. The rewards of doing this will be evident in the poems you write, and the flexibility and freedom (the permissions) you give yourself in writing poems can begin to spill over into other areas of your life, into the poem of your life itself. It can be life changing.
It is not necessary to “know” the poem before you begin to write it. It is very often preferable not to know the poem. (What we think we know is usually trite and uninteresting.) Keep in mind that this is play, even when the subject that appears is serious in nature. It is puzzle-solving; it is a process of allowing for surprise and discovery. You follow the thread wherever it takes you. Let me give you some examples.
Carol Beau grew up on a farm in the mountains of northern Maryland in a house heated with woodburning stoves, eventually “modernized” with a wood-burning furnace. Her father and brother shared the daily task of cutting wood to heat the house. As a child, Carol would often hide in the woods to read books. The first in her family to earn a college degree and trained as a social worker, Carol worked for many years as a highly paid project director with a company that designs and manages public sector health and human services programs. She is now an independent consultant, building websites and sometimes troubleshooting on projects for her former company. In recent years, she also taught herself—through an inner process of relaxed surrender—to paint wonderful watercolor landscapes. A friend for many years, I have often stayed with Carol when working with schools in the Washington DC, area. On one visit I asked if she’d also like to try her hand at poem-sketching. Here are two of her first poems:
(WORD GROUP: voices tractor child soul)
When I grew up
I heard talking far away,
walking on a dirt path
with ruts made by a tractor.
I followed those voices home.
I was my father’s child,
seeking sanctuary in the trees,
a soul reluctant to join the world.
(WORD GROUP: song throat life green)
I like to think my life
is long beautiful lyric
after long beautiful lyric.
Sometimes my song
sits in my throat
and I can hardly breathe.
It’s important to relax
at times like these
and listen…
to my heart beating.
Quick studies, these poems reveal something about the shyness and sensitivity that were hallmarks of Carol’s childhood and origins—traits, she will tell you, she shared with her beloved father. They also seem to point to the frequent stresses and restrictiveness of the corporate life as an adult, the challenge of personalizing and penetrating the life of work in organizational settings, and they give expression to some of the inner wisdom acquired on her journey.
Sally Dobyns grew up the daughter of a smalltown attorney in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky. Sally is currently an associate professor of curriculum and gifted education at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. For several years she has invited me to teach poem-sketching to her graduate students in a class called Social and Emotional Needs of Gifted Students. These graduate students are both current and future teachers. Sally and I see the poem-sketching approach as a useful resource tool for teachers to open up and reveal the affective intelligence in young people. On one of my visits to this class, Sally, writing along with the students, recombined the word groups to get the following poem:
(WORD GROUP: twilight bedroom silence face)
My mother sobs quietly in the twilight of the bedroom.
On the bed beside her my father sits, his hand on her back.
My fears bloom full in my little sister’s face
as the silent sorrow in the house pulls me in.
As often happens, a memory surfaced for Sally with the word-group choice, in this case the death of her fourteen-year-old brother, hit and killed by a train when Sally was sixteen. Sally’s father had wakened her mother from her daily afternoon nap to break the news to her. Sally was on a student trip to Europe when she received the news and flew home. Sally told us that she had many times tried to imagine the scene of her father breaking the news to her mother. She added that her mother never again took an afternoon nap, so painful were the associations.
Here again, so much is captured in just a few words. As they listened to her poem and heard the story that went with it, it was clear that the students were drawn by Sally’s openness into a safer and more intimate circle for their own writing. In that moment, there were no professors or graduate students in the room, only human hearts. Emerson wrote, “It is much that poetry is written this day, under this roof, by your side.” We cannot overestimate the value of such moments and the circles of awareness that go out from them. Carol’s and Sally’s poems are reminders that our own poems lie in wait, often just below the surface of consciousness, and can wait there for years. Their poems also tell me that other poems may one day follow on their heels, further explorations of these and other early experiences.
My partner, Fran Clarke, is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist in Lafayette, Louisiana, a certified MARI facilitator, and a Fellow in the Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music (GIM). Fran has designed Living Well with Cancer: A Program for Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit, an extended program for breast cancer survivors, and The Heroine’s Journey: A Woman’s Soul Journey Toward Authenticity, in the form of a one-day workshop and also in an extended year-long format. I’ve contributed
specialized word groups and the poem-sketching approaches for both. Betty Landreneau is an instructor of nursing at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, who has participated in The Heroine’s Journey. Betty likes to play with language, play with the possibilities of words. Here are two of Betty’s poems:
(WORD GROUP: beauty change love healing)
It is in changing that I learn
To love the beauty that I am,
For to change is to grow—
And growth heals the scars of change.
(WORD GROUP: before before before before)
Before I was even an “I,”
Before the lessons of childhood taught me of conditional love,
You sent me a life full of messages saying You are for me.
(I hear within me the melody: “If God is for us, who can be against?”)
All of Your lessons tell me to
be – for – me
be – for – me.
The first poem expresses so beautifully and succinctly the inseparable relationship between self-love and growth and change. If only everyone who tries to cling to the familiar, to what must inevitably pass away, could understand this. The word “scars” in the poem tells us that the growth has not always been easy or free from pain, but it tells us that the scars are not healed by complaint or feelings of victimization or any other form of holding on, but rather by the next forward step, by change itself and the addition of new circles of awareness. The reward is knowing and loving who we are. The second poem, which has in it some of the ecstasy of the poet Hafiz, breaks the bonds of conditional love. Perhaps the poem also speaks to a form of self-denial familiar to so many women in their roles of sacrificing for others, an often unbalanced role that leaves many women actually unfulfilled and depleted. Reading the poem, we also want to re-embrace our seminal beginnings and be for ourselves.
Here is a word-group poem by Jalyn Ayo, a gifted and talented fourth-grade student I worked with in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:
(WORD GROUP: wheelbarrow soil compost seeds)
THE FLOWER
My mother
was hauling soil
in a wheelbarrow.
To me
she was
hauling a heavy
burden.
My mother
mixed the soil
with the compost.
To me
she was
mixing her happiness
with her
sadness.
My mother
was planting seeds
in the ground.
To me
she was
hiding her fears
under lies.
My mother
was watering
the seeds.
To me
she was
crying.
My mother
gave the flowers
time to grow.
But to me
she was
trying to find
out who
she really was.
What a powerful and remarkable portrait of a mother-daughter relationship. Of course, parents try to hide certain hardships and difficulties from their children. Children see them anyway. Here, the daughter recognizes the coping mechanisms of the mother, but more important, sees her mother using all of the experiences of life to grow, and in so doing, modeling the path for her daughter. It is a poem of love and admiration—and profound wakefulness. One can only imagine the richness of the lifelong relationship that lies before this mother and daughter. And far from being the exception, this kind of insight and understanding appears over and over again in poems by young people. A classroom teacher told me it was the innocence in children that let them see and speak in this way, without the self-censorship learned and practiced by adults.
Scott Laffler was a fourth-grade student of mine in Alpharetta, Georgia. Scott discovered the poet within him through the poem-sketching exercises, but quickly found his way to his own voice and method. His poems have a kind of metaphorical and linguistic daring rarely attempted in the poetry of young people, or for that matter, of most adults. He was the winner of the national River of Words contest in poetry and art at the fourth-grade level. He was the national runner-up in the same contest as a fifth grader and seventh grader. As a sixth grader beginning middle school, his new teachers found his poems “inaccessible” and so they didn’t submit them to the contest. Working on his own, his poetry continues to grow and grow. Here is one of his sixth-grade poems:
NATURE’S WINGS
The wind is pure.
The blinking dream catches images of darkness.
The clouds discover tomorrow.
The woods wave a mystery.
The dawn purples the dusk.
The light suffers the air.
The murmur of a shadow silences the river.
The tired whistle looms in the thunder.
The secret of the morning travels past.
Nature’s wings listen to the day.
The depths of the mountains branch angels.
The autumn’s frost motives the truth.
The future’s past lies in the summer’s love.
You’ve noticed by now that these are free verse or unrhymed poems. When I work with young students, I always ask them not to rhyme their poems (unless the poems happen to rhyme accidentally). I want the students to follow the thread of the poem, not rhyme the poem mechanically. Many young people know poems only from rhymed models, and so the unrhymed or free verse poem is something new to them. Writing without rhyme liberates their voices and imaginations. The same is true for adults. I also recommend to my young students that they try to get the four words into three or more sentences. This gives the poem a better chance of having a beginning, a middle, and an end, but sometimes the poem has fewer sentences, perhaps even just one. Sometimes the one-sentence poem develops the look and feel of wholeness simply by being broken into three separate lines.
Like Michelangelo looking into marble stones for the figures hiding within, you are looking into word groups for the possibilities of poems. I use poem-sketching as a means for practicing the instrument of poetic thinking in much the same way a musician does warm-up exercises or practices scales on a musical instrument. I also use it as a means for generating not-yet-comprehended possibilities for poems. When I was recovering from cancer surgery and chemotherapy, I used poem-sketching to kick-start the poet that had become dormant within me. Here are a couple of examples:
(WORD GROUP: crossroads float mist night glad grieve notes margin rain swordpoints rivers streams)
CANCER
I was at a crossroads
I had not planned on.
I floated there in cancer’s night,
its mist on my skin,
I was actually relieved to grieve awhile.
I wrote a few notes in my life’s margins.
The poetry would come later.
I was slowly awakening,
swordpoints of rain becoming
rivers and streams.
(WORD GROUP: road armadillo mirage dust mice farmhouse dresser lace)
CANCER
This is not a mirage, not some
armadillo in the dust of the road
that vanishes.
The mice of the farmhouse
do nest in the dresser.
They leave their black cards
in the pure white lace.
I don’t want to give the impression that poem-sketching subjects must be so serious. They may also be humorous, light-hearted, even whimsical. Keep in mind that poem-sketching is play.
(WORD GROUP: peony bee lustily oh public private hidden shared)
Is nothing private, bee?
Nothing you’d like to hide?
Must everything be shared so publicly?
Do you just not care,
lustily nuzzling the white peony? . . .
Oh!
Though this book will introduce you to other ways of generating poems, poem-sketching is something you can return to again and again.
Poem-Sketching
Open your writer’s studio to a blank page and select a word group from the word-group pages at the end of this book. You are watching inwardly for the experience of being drawn to a word group. Once selected, write the word group down at the top of a blank page in your journal for easy reference. Sometimes you will find “images”—word pictures, sentences, and phrases—coming quickly to mind to be written down. If not, simply write down a sentence incorporating one or two of the words (but usually not three or all four; poem-sketching seems to work best when the words are scattered into different sentences; but again, don’t take this as a rigid edict). Don’t be concerned with knowing the entire poem beforehand. Write down whatever comes to mind. Trust it as your starting place. You can always change it if you like. Now the puzzle of the poem is activated. Or, as I tell young people, you have “hooked the fish.”
Continue adding sentences, adding in the other words in the word group wherever possible. Feel free to rearrange the lines, alter the word group, and make any other adjustments as you go. Continue until you feel you have “a poem” or until you run out of ideas. Then select another word group and write a second poem-sketch, and then a third. Nothing says you must complete a poem-sketch before starting a new one. I sometimes work on two or three simultaneously, going back and forth between them as ideas occur to me. I like to keep the creative energy flowing. And always leave room below them to return and make changes and additions. Don’t crowd the poems.
Keep in mind that every person who writes poems reinvents poetry. Don’t judge your poem-sketches (more on this later); don’t compare them with poems you know from books or elsewhere. I sometimes fill two or three pages (or more) with sketches before I find things I really latch on to. Sometimes I go back and underline the lines I like best, usually with a different color ink. These lines often migrate to join lines on other pages.
Looked at this way, you are fishing with a net, the net of your writing. In the net, at any one time, you may find many fish worth keeping or only one or two. I heard the poet Robert Bly say once that he typically kept only ten lines of poetry for every hundred he wrote. Thirty years of writing my own poems has taught me this is so. A lot of writing is process writing, getting us to the place we want to go, sweeping aside the “junk” in the mind to get to the “jewels.” It is important for the novice writer to know this. To expect anything else is to invite discouragement.
Writing finished poems is a process that takes place over time. Keep in mind the attributes of the fisherman: conviction, attentiveness, intuition, the steady acquisition of knowledge and skills—and patience! Not catching a fish on a certain day is not a sign to me that I will never catch a fish again or that there are no more fish to be caught. A fisherman does not tell himself that he has “fisher’s block.” I might change my bait (my word group, for example); I might change my spot (literally). And some days the fish (and the poems) just aren’t biting. I’ve enjoyed the fishing (the process) nonetheless—the stillness, the quiet, the beauties of shoreline and water, the changing sky and weather, the time with my own thoughts. It is the whole process of “fishing”—for fish or poems—that is to be enjoyed. And if not today, tomorrow I may catch one! And yes, sometimes I “catch a boot!”
Using the word groups provided here, I’m going to suggest that you spend time poem-sketching for the next several days. The portability of this book and your writer’s studio will allow you to try this out in different settings, both indoors and outdoors, at home or away from home, even at work. Some people like to do poem-sketching to music. When possible, take at least thirty minutes to an hour for this process, but even five, ten, or fifteen minutes can be time well spent.
For starters, make a goal of doing perhaps ten poem-sketches. Take all the time you need, but fill up a few pages in your journal. Give yourself permission to go off on tangents, to capture thoughts and even whole poems unrelated to the practice with word groups. Once you have tapped your poetic impulses, all kinds of things may begin to appear spontaneously. You are getting to know yourself in a new way. You may discover talents for descriptive poetry, metaphors, narrative poetry, dialogue-poems, portrait-poems, aphorisms, humorous poetry, or inspirational or religious verse. A man in one poetry workshop, tapping into the poet inside himself, also took up the trombone!
One of my own pleasures in conducting writing workshop retreats comes from observing the depth of intimacy that always appears when people write and share poems. These workshops usually last for two days, and invariably the participants say they have gotten to know each other better than people they have known for twenty or thirty years. Our poems are the mirrors of our souls; it cannot be avoided.
Remember to use the pages of your writer’s studio not only as spaces to be written on but as walls to be decorated, as bulletin boards for pictures and drawings, as windows on the world. Be open to your whole creative spirit. The purpose is to have fun, to play, to make explorations, to make the process yours. Everyone I’ve taught this to eventually finds his or her own way with it. Many people use the word groups as prompts also for writing prose. Keep in mind that there is no right or wrong way to do poem-sketching. The only wrong, perhaps, would be not to try it at all!
(For a complete overview of the poem-sketching process, see Appendix B: Poem-Sketching.)
My current “fishing spot” where I do much of my writing is a weathered Adirondack chair placed near the edge of the small lake that is my home now in southern Louisiana. The lake is in a small circle of low hills in a part of the state that is otherwise almost all flat prairie, a place where great cloud shows drift in from the Gulf of Mexico. There is a saying in southern Louisiana: “The clouds are our mountains.” And it’s true. I came here in 1995 to lead some workshops for teachers and fell in love with the landscape of prairie, swamp, and bayou, and with the music, food, culture, and friendliness of the Cajun and Creole people. In the summer of 1998, I moved to Lafayette, and in the summer of 2001, my partner Fran and I found our lake house—a board and batten Cajun cottage that feels like the first real home of my adult life.
Sitting this morning with my journal, the day started with “walking mists” crossing the silver surface of the lake. Across the lake, cypress and “chicken trees” (the Chinese tallow) line the shore, along with clusters of dark green elephant ear plants. Great blue herons occasionally land on my lawn. For a time there was a heron with two legs but only one foot who could not perch in the trees. He somehow survived the first two years I was here. Sometimes the herons are joined by great white egrets, and by cormorants, mallard and Muscovy ducks, and a kingfisher or two. Occasionally an osprey joins us, soaring and then diving, suddenly and masterfully, for a fish. The turtles pop up their heads—they are everywhere—then quickly vanish. Some mornings the changeable weather makes the lake look like China, mystically shrouded in hanging mists, other mornings like Turner’s England, washed in watercolor golds. There have never been two sunrises the same, and there are many warm and balmy nights with a full moon, even in January and February. It is the world of forms.
The Creation is surely a work of art. In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson wrote: “The world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.” Out of the formless (the Taoists call it “the Uncarved Block”) all things come and enter into the world of multiplicity, the world of forms. Just so, our poems arrive and also want to find their appropriate forms. Probably you have already begun to experiment with this in your poem-sketches.
Unlike rhymed and metered verse, the free verse poem must search out its form. Sometimes I write the first drafts of my poem-sketches haphazardly in paragraph form, and sometimes I begin to break the lines (provisionally) right away. There are many ways to break lines. Sometimes I break the lines according to “phrases,” syntactical or grammatical elements; sometimes, as a starting point, but rarely any more, I am counting the syllables of a line (4–8 syllables in what I call a “short-lined” poem, 9–14 syllables in a “longlined” poem). Sometimes I am paying attention loosely to the rhythm, the texture, or the movement of lines; and sometimes I am mixing up all these choices—not analytically, but intuitively, quickly, on a gut level. Over many years of writing, I have found a rhythm of my own, and most of my writing forms itself in and around this rhythm.
But basically I am deciding one of three things, or all three together:
1. What do I want the reader to read and think about on each line (the focus of the line) before going on to the next line?
2. Where do I want the reader to pause or rest?
3. How do I connect the reader’s interest or movement to subsequent lines in the poem?
By making line breaks, we are instructing the reader in how to read (or perform) the poem—just as musical notations in a score instruct the musician in how to play or perform the music.
I once started a poem this way—in paragraph form:
Such soft winds carry the small, pale leaves of the persimmon tree slant-wise across the open field. Slowly, they ride out to their resting places, among cropped grasses where the horses nod.
This was a poem of direct observation, writing down what I actually saw in front of me. It was one of those occasions where the poem was actually writing itself, coming as if through me. Almost immediately I began to pen in some possible line breaks, marking the poem this way with “cut marks”:
Such soft winds / carry the small, pale leaves of the persimmon tree / slant-wise across the open field. / Slowly, they ride out to their resting places, / among cropped grasses where the horses nod.
I then recopied the poem’s beginning on a neighboring journal page like this:
SUCH SOFT WINDS
carry the small, pale leaves of the persimmon tree
slant-wise across the open field.
Slowly, they ride out to their resting places
among cropped grasses where the horses nod.
I found myself immediately interested in the relative weight of the first three words. Which word, in the developing context of the poem, should get the most emphasis? With the first line break, I hoped to draw the reader’s attention to their mercurial importance, perhaps insist the reader weigh just these first three words several times before going on in the poem. Doing so, the reader can place a little greater emphasis on any of the three words (or give all three an equal emphasis) at the onset of the poem. Each word seems to me to have a different emotional register.
I could also see that I wanted the next lines to be longer, perhaps on some level wanting to hold the leaves aloft as long as possible. The poem was becoming an elegy. I decided to fill in the fourth line, make it even longer—maybe some part of my hearing wanting to take advantage of the many o’s and a’s of the preceding and following lines—and rewrote it this way:
Slowly, they ride out to their most common resting places
And here is the completed poem:
PRAISE
Such soft winds
carry the small, pale leaves of the persimmon tree
slant-wise across the open field. Slowly,
they ride out to their most common resting places,
among cropped grasses where the horses nod.
No one goes out from the porch step now
to find where they land, admired, it seems,
only for the grace of flight and the journey itself,
and not its end. But the wind itself comes
from the resting place of all things,
and it is this
that I praise.
This is the thing to remember: In finding the form of the poem, you are considering the potential reader of the poem. How do you want the reader to read and experience your poem? How do you want to attune the reader’s attention and sustain his or her interest? What do you want the reader to focus on in each line of the poem?
By making line breaks, we often discover weaknesses in the poem, lines that are insubstantial in some way—not condensed enough, too wordy, repetitive, not descriptive enough, vague, or simply insulting to the reader’s intelligence, filling in too much, overstating the obvious, or falling too much into clichés. If you’ve ever walked across the wooden floor in an old house, you’ve probably felt the weak spots in the flooring. Often in walking our minds or voices across the divided lines of a poem, we can detect the weak spots in the poem. Experiment with form and line breaks in the poems and in poem-sketches in your journal. Make it fun, not a chore. Play. I once did twenty drafts of a poem doing nothing more than changing the line breaks. There wasn’t one right way to break the lines, but eventually I settled on a preference. Be open to making changes in your poems as you do this.
If you’d like a poem to experiment with, here is a short poem written in paragraph form. I’ve selected one of my poems that can be divided into lines in many different ways. Copy the poem in your journal or on a sheet of paper, then cut the sentences into pieces using “cut marks.” Then rewrite the poem with line breaks. Make any changes you’d like to make in your choices until the form of the poem feels right to you.
A SNEEZE OF JOY
Three times, a sneeze of birds flew out of a tree, circled twice, then flew back in. I did not see a breeze to shake them out, nor any force to draw them in, but their sudden movement made me shout with joy, again, and again, and again!
Another form you might like to consider is the centered poem, imagining a straight line down the center of the poem with the lines arrayed symmetrically along it, like branches on a fir tree. Daniel Ladinsky has translated the great Sufi poet Hafiz (The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, in the Suggested Reading appendix), and has structured all of the poems in this way. There are many more things to consider in finding the form of a poem, but this will help your poems to look and feel more like poems. This will get you started. And when you read other poets, you will naturally begin to absorb the possibilities of forms.
THE AGE OF BEAUTY
For the thousandth time,
I sit beside
the goldfish pond.
I no longer know
which are more beautiful—
cattails, or stars.
One purpose of poem-sketching is to increase our sensitivity to words themselves and to the interactions between words. After some time experimenting on your own with poem-sketching, limbering up your poetry-writing muscles, familiarizing yourself with the approach and your way within it, here are some exercise suggestions you might like to try.
1. Choose a word group to work with (for example, early thunder webs porch). Now look for a second word group that you think will fit with the first (for example, ideas sparks listen afternoon). Often, it is just a hunch we have that they will fit together. In this example, webs and porch might seem to go with afternoon. Thunder might seem to go with listen. Thunder also suggests rain, and maybe rain spoiled one’s ideas for how to pass the afternoon, or simply changed them. Or maybe with thunder there was the lightning strike of an idea. And there are endless other ways to make these words fit together in a poem. Once you have matched the two word groups, see if you can combine them in a poemsketch. Try this a few times. Side by side, here are some other examples of fitting two word groups together:
As a variation, choose a word group, then a second that you think doesn’t fit. Then see if you can make a poem-sketch from them. You are challenging yourself to find a way to make the words work together. Sometimes you come up with a poem that is really surprising and striking in its content.
2. As a variation on Exercise 1, choose a word group and add a second word group to it. Again, with the first word group, it is important to find one you are drawn to. The first word group will then draw you to the second. Combining the two word groups, write a poem. Then, keep the first word group, but add a different additional word group, and write another poem with this combination. Then, add still another additional word group to the first word group, and write your third poem. Here’s an example:
Reflection: How did adding different word groups to the first word group change the poems? What did you learn from this exercise about the nature of words and memory, or the nature of words and imagination, or the nature of words and associations or ideas? While writing poems, take time to become familiar with your own process, to recognize what works for you and what doesn’t, how you get in your own way, and how you step aside. Take time to write down in your writer’s studio or another journal what you are learning about yourself. Make notes about the permissions you are finding you need and are granting yourself.
3. Again, one of the purposes of writing poems is to surprise ourselves, to say things we didn’t know we were going to say. Writing for the surprise is one of the ways we add new circles to our awareness of ourselves and our awareness of life and the world around us. Choose a topic for your poem (it is important that the subject of the poem be something you care enough about to spend time writing about it). Choose a title for your poem (you can always change it later). Write a poem to go with the title, but without using a word group. Just write the poem as it comes to you, whatever it is. Then, write the poem again, using the same title, this time choosing and including a word group or combination of word groups.
Reflection: Was there a difference between the two poems? If so, what were the differences (what did you say in one poem that you didn’t say in the other)? Did the word group get you to say something you wouldn’t have said without it? Can the two poems be combined in any way?
4. Try writing to music. You should use instrumental music, for obvious reasons. Listen to the music you have selected. Let yourself feel the rhythm or the mood or emotional quality of the music. You may want to close your eyes as you listen. Then, with the music still playing, open to the word-group pages and allow yourself to be drawn to a word group or word-group combination. Write the word group down at the top of a page. Continue listening to the music, its mood and rhythms, and write your poem-sketch.
5. Writing in different settings can also draw you to different word groups, different memories, different associations. Find different places to write, some indoors, some outdoors, some in public places, some in nature. (Make a list in your writer’s studio of places where you would like to spend time writing.) Write in places that have an emotional charge for you—the home of your parents or grandparents, an uncle’s farm, your childhood room, a lonely stretch of beach, a favorite garden, your workplace or office, a favorite park, a place where you had a revelation or made an important choice or decision. You may also want to make a conscious choice to write in different kinds of weather—when it is snowing, when it is gently raining, when there is a thunderstorm. Once you are settled into the place of your choice, look in your word-group pages. What word group or word-group combination are you drawn to? Make a selection and write your poem. As always, these are all suggestions, just starting places. Give yourself permission to change them. Always, make them your own.
Poem-sketching, as presented in the previous chapters, is designed to introduce you to a kind of play that may take place with words, openended explorations with the materials of poems. In the process, all sorts of discoveries may take place. You are free to manipulate the materials unfettered by any preconditions or expectations. This next technique returns to the use of a title and is designed to narrow the focus of poem-sketching, adding a limitation that actually opens up other possibilities for poems.
As a first step, open your writer’s studio and jot down possible titles and topics (subjects) for poems that you might like to write sometime. Take your time. Making up topics and titles can be a writing session all to itself. Make the list as long as you like. Have fun with the list. Use both your seriousness and your humor. Search your memory for experiences or feelings you might like to write about. Here are some titles/topics I jotted down once in my journal:
My Father’s Passing
soul-work
tumbleweeds
a family photograph, early 1900s
Dürer’s Young Hare
Human journeys: trails of tears
A Difference
mysteries—letting go
gifts
silence and snow
Once you have finished your list, select a topic or title and write it at the top of a blank page in your writer’s studio. Then go back to the word-group lists and select a word group (or combination) to match the topic or title. Your match will be a gut feeling that the word group somehow belongs with or has a connection to the title. Follow your intuition; again, you do not have to “know” the poem to begin working on it.
As an example from my journal, I once chose the title “My Father’s Passing” and then selected the words “boat rope bread.” There was no fourth word; it was these three words that drew my attention. My father’s love of fishing and boats was probably coming to mind. My father lived almost all of his life in Kentucky, but I had lived briefly in Point Judith, Rhode Island, in my twenties. The word group brought to mind scenes of weathered rowboats and dinghies in New England harbors, and one in particular—a boat tenuously moored to a buoy with ropes aged by wind and rain and impacted saltwater. I remember thinking that simply blowing on the ropes might cause them to come apart. I wrote in my journal:
MY FATHER’S PASSING
Soon you will be free,
___________ boat,
your ropes as soft
as rain-soaked bread.
It was a start. I liked the image, but it was certainly not yet a poem. In my mind I connected the lines with the memory of my father’s condition—weakened by heart disease—in the last year before he died. The poem stayed in my journal unfinished for years; I added only one word, so it read “ancient boat,” a symbol for my father.
Years later, I connected the poem also with my mother, herself weakened with heart disease and the early onset of Parkinson’s, her physical body becoming more and more of a burden to her. My mother had a remarkably positive outlook on death. In the year leading up to her death, she began to have dreams at night about the loved ones she would be reunited with. And she was planning her next lifetime! After my mother died in 1992, I came again across the poem-sketch in one of my journals. I decided it was time to finish it.
This time I altered my approach and began to look for the possibility of rhymed words, a rarity for me. For “boat” I thought of the true rhymes “float” and “coat” as possibilities and the slant rhymes “wait,” “weight,” “plight,” and “light.” For “bread” I thought of “dead,” “bed,” and “dread,” and I wrote all these down in the margins next to the poem-sketch. Remembering my mother’s rather joyful anticipation of her life to come in the spirit—and wanting to honor that—I found myself inclined toward the more positive word choices, and in just a few minutes, the poem finished itself this way:
FAREWELL
Soon, soon,
you will be free,
ancient boat,
your hour come
without the dread,
without the weight,
your ropes as soft
as rain-soaked bread—
and then the light.
I think my mother would have liked this poem. Like many of us, she had heard or read that when people die they enter a “tunnel of light” where they are greeted by their departed loved ones, that this experience is accompanied by a sense of an all-enfolding love. A matching poem (matching a topic or title to a word group), the above poem is also a reminder of the importance of keeping one’s poem-sketches in durable journals and returning to them over time. Some poems need time to ripen, to bring in associations not available to the first draft. The wait can be worth the rewards.
Surely, so much is waiting inside us to be expressed. The wisdom, truth, and beauty of what we carry inside us can appear on the page at any time, at any age. Here is another example of a matching poem (from my book Soft Hay Will Catch You), this time by a fifth-grade student, Andrew McKee, who lived in farm country in Lawrence, Kansas. For his title, he chose “The Magic Touch,” and for his word group: black white winter barn.
THE MAGIC TOUCH
cut through the cold blast of air
to the barn, warm with a herd of cows,
the white snow pounding me
with the blackness of winter.
I tread to the barn
and feed the newborn calves,
feeling their warm, rough tongues over
my bitterly cold hand.
Take the next few days to try out some matching poems in your writer’s studio. Keep adding lists of possible topics and titles to draw upon. When using word groups, remember that they may be enlarged and recombined. Or simply write a poem to go with a title without using the word groups at all. Give yourself permission to use all the adaptations and strategies you uncovered in doing open-ended poem-sketching. Again, you are “fishing with a net,” collecting finished poems that you want to keep and those you want to develop further.
Beginning writers often fall into the dead-end of falling in love with their first drafts of poems. This is certainly understandable. In a very real sense, our poems are our children. Who would change even one hair on the head of their firstborn? We love our poems just as they are, blemishes and all.
But poems, like children, need to mature; they need to be challenged. To the extent that it is useful, they need our guidance and prodding and attention in order to reach their fullest potential. But like children, poems will tolerate only a certain amount of such interference and, in the end, announce to us who and what they really are. We do our best to give them the benefit of our wisdom and experience, and then they go out and make their own way in the world. That’s the fact and beauty of it—with poems and children.
The exercises in the next two chapters are designed to help poems reach a greater potential.
In this first exercise, you are to choose a word group of four words from the word-group lists. You may recombine the word groups in making your selection, but settle on four words. Your task now is to write three separate and different poems, employing the same word group in each poem. You may use different forms or modifications of the four words in each poem (childhood/child/children, sunrise/sunset/moon, pond/river/lake, and so on), but all four words should (if possible) appear in each poem.
In this, you are developing flexibility or “alternative thinking,” exploring a range of possibilities. More specifically, you are looking into the variety of “colors,” nuances, and meanings to be found in words.
One way to do this is to make one of the poems “positive” (something positive happens or there is a positive feeling in the poem; you decide on your own definition of positive). Make another poem in the set of three “negative.” In the third poem, a negative changes into a positive, or a positive changes into a negative; the poem somehow contains both or is somehow neutral.
Here’s an example I put together following the positive-negative-change strategy, using the word group: samurai village marigolds rain.
1.
No villagers come out today.
When the samurai is angry,
heads roll—
easy for him, like slicing blooms
from the marigolds.
A thousand days of rain
cannot wash away
the sorrows.
2.
Hard to appease the angry samurai
from the mountain glens.
His rain of wrath has lasted years.
“Nothing works,” the villagers say,
“paying ransoms, making a stand.”
But today they kept his anger out
with a border of yellow marigolds.
3.
When the samurai is old,
he trades his sword
for a goldfish pond
and a bed of marigolds.
When it rains, he aches—
like any elder in the village.
When he sleeps,
he dreams an old man’s dreams—
a wife taken in love,
one child in the ground.
What lights await him now
beyond the mountain pass?
It is not necessary that the three poems have a connection to each other, as in the above example. The purpose of this exercise is to bring flexibility into our writing, to get us to see other possibilities for our poems.
And it’s not necessary to use the strategy of positivenegative-change. Another strategy is to make three matching poems, employing the same word group in each poem but matching it to different titles or topics from your topics/titles lists. In each instance, a different title should produce a different poem result. You may have already experimented with this in matching a single word group to three other word groups in Exercise 2 in Chapter 8. The important thing is to make each of the three poems different in some way.
Set aside some time to try out this exercise, working with different word groups, trying out different approaches. You may also return to earlier poemsketches in your journal, adding a second and third alternative poem using the same word group as the initial poem. When you have finished a set of three poems, you may find that you can take selected lines from each of the poems and recombine these lines into other poem combinations. You are training your mind for alternative thinking, for seeing lots of possibilities within a given set of conditions, a creative capability useful not only in the writing of poems, but in our relationships and in our work in the world as well.
EMPEROR CHILDREN FIREFLIES MOON
1.
The emperor is in the garden.
He came there to admire the moon,
as emperors do.
His children hide there,
covering their laughter with their hands,
wishing not to be seen.
They, too, came out for the moon,
but they also came to catch the fireflies.
2.
The moon is emperor tonight,
slowly crossing the garden
of the sky,
no children to accompany him,
an emperor alone.
Perhaps he came to play with
the starry fireflies.
3.
How sad the emperor seems tonight,
and lonely as the distant moon.
The burdens of ruling are great,
and assassins could be anywhere.
He remembers his days as a child
when his only care
was catching fireflies in the summer night.
4.
The emperor invites the children
to his summer garden.
They think he wants them
to admire the moon.
No, he wants them to teach him
the art of catching fireflies.
5.
I want to grow up to be
the emperor of my life someday.
I want someone to love me, to think
that I’m the sun and moon.
But I will never outgrow
the solitary joy of catching fireflies
in the summer nights.
6.
No moon tonight.
No matter.
Let him sleep,
that golden emperor
of the summer night.
I will be like children
happy in the dark,
their hearts made bright
in chasing fireflies.
7.
Winter night, so cold,
the emperor moon
a frozen statue
in the glistening sky.
Icicles hang from
the pagoda roof,
twinkling here and there
like summer fireflies.
Here, too, the snowman
left by playing children
to help us set aside, for now,
the joys of summer days.
8.
My father thinks he’s emperor
of our house.
His watch is ruler of his days.
He whistles from the porch
to call me in.
It’s time, he thinks.
No moon tonight to give away
my hiding place.
I’ll come in soon, but for a while
I want to linger—
and you can guess—
the summer night is full of fireflies!
As you have seen by now, writing poetry is about playing with words, exploring the possibilities of combining words into sentences and fragments, rearranging lines into finished poems. Somehow in this playful process something of who we really are begins to show up and express itself. Now it’s time to “shake up” what you have written. For this, you will need your writer’s studio and a good dictionary.
Open your writer’s studio to a page containing one or more poem-sketches and select a poem-sketch to work with. The poem-sketch may be one that seems finished or one that seems to need more work.
Now open the dictionary at random and look for a word that can somehow be added to your chosen poem. The dictionary word may replace a word already in the poem, or you may need to add a new phrase or sentence to the poem in order to work the word in. If you do not find a dictionary word you can use right away, close the dictionary and open it again at random. Keep doing this until you discover a word that can be added to the poem. The added word may also lead you to make other changes in the poem. The painter Cezanne painted landscapes by building up squares of added color. In one painting, the addition of a final square of color caused Cezanne to repaint the entire painting, one that was true to the relationships discovered in that final placement.
Something similar can happen when we place new words into a poem. Of course, you may add as many new words as you like. The new words have a surprising tendency to jar or shake up the content of the poem, to reveal new potentials and new directions. This is only an experiment with the poem. If you do not like the resulting changes, you can always delete them. Once you have worked with one poem in this way, you can then move on to trying this with other poems in your journal. Many poets keep word lists of interesting words in their journals for future use. The dictionary is always a source, but you may also gather word lists from your reading—botany and zoology guides, geology books, weather manuals, books on word origins, and so on. By researching and collecting in this way, you are growing your sensitivity to words, their pleasures, and their possibilities, and in the process, you are also growing the circles of your awareness and adding layers to your poems.
Here is another way to shake up your poems. Type one of your poems onto a blank sheet of paper. Then cut up the poem with scissors and lay the words down individually on another blank sheet of paper. Now, moving the words around with your fingers, rearrange the words into another poem. It isn’t necessary to use all the words again; wherever there are blank spaces, write in the new words as needed.
As a variation on this exercise, you can also type, cut up, and rearrange the words of a familiar poem from the canon of literature—Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” is an example I sometimes use with students. Think of the permissions that must come into play! Whether you use your own poem or one from literature, the exercise reinforces the idea that there are always poems hiding within poems, that all poets—through the serious play of writing poems—can claim the ownership and use of all words.
When you are satisfied with the new arrangement, tape the poem down with clear tape. One of my adult students named this Ransom-Note Poetry—for the look of the poems when they are finished. You can then copy the new poem back into your journal. This is a liberating exercise and one that can be very useful in restoring a fresh sense of discovery to the writing process, even for practiced writers.
Great are yourself and myself,
We are just as good and bad as the oldest and youngest or any. What the best and worst did we could do,
What they felt…do we not feel it in ourselves? What they wished…do we not wish the same?
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Every poem we write is in some way a self-portrait. The German mystic Jakob Böhme said it this way: “Whatever the Self describes, describes the Self.” Or to put it in more contemporary language: “Whatever I describe, describes me.” It is important not to be in denial about this if we are to grow as poets.
Bü’s idea, as I understand and apply it to the teaching and writing of poetry, is this: stand two people in front of the same picture window on a rainy day, ask them to look out for a time, and then ask them to write down one sentence, each truthfully telling what they see. After a while, one writes: “The rain collects in cold, miserable puddles on the ground.” Soon after, the other writes: “Silver raindrops are dancing on the telephone wires.” Each is looking out the same window. Each is telling the truth. Yet the sentences are vastly different. What makes them so?
Looking at the same scene—there are literally thousands if not millions of details to choose from— each has made his selection (and his interpretation) based on something inside, something—a mood, an emotion, a memory, a point of view—near the surface of consciousness. In describing something outside, they are, in fact, describing something inside, the Self.
It was this idea that guided me in putting together the word groups in the poem-sketching approach. The page of word groups becomes a picture window, and each person selects the word group right for him or her in that moment (sometimes by recombining them), according to something inside or near the surface of consciousness. If you have been doing poem-sketching as you read this book, you can look back in your writer’s studio and see that this is so. Knowingly or unknowingly, you have been writing all manner of personal poems, calling up all kinds of experiences, truths, half-truths, judgments, and insights, perhaps some with considerable emotional charge.
You may recall in Chapter 1 that I said it took vigilance and courage to follow the path of the poem. That’s because the poem—by virtue of what it includes and sometimes by what it excludes—is a mirror of who we are, the false self and the true self included. It is not guaranteed that we will always like what we see, but we must learn to know—and to love—all that we are.
If I am truthful, the three example poems I wrote in Chapter 10 using samurai village marigolds rain are a kind of self-portrait. It is a painful thing to recall, but people I knew in my twenties tell me candidly that I had a “sharp and destructive tongue” in those days, that they had to be on their guard for it when around me. I was the samurai “slicing blooms from the marigolds.” The birth of my daughter and certain lifechanging experiences in my thirties softened my expression, moving it from my head much more to my heart and eventually making my work with children possible and giving me a new way to teach adults as well. In a real sense, for me, the “intelligence of the heart” replaced the “intelligence of the mind” in my relationships—and in the writing of poems. As with the samurai, the accident of “the border of yellow marigolds”—the life-changing moment, perhaps unforeseen, yet somehow prepared for and finally no accident at all—awaits everyone somewhere on their journey; or there are many such experiences, perhaps a series of experiences, all designed to awaken us, to bring a renewing balance to the heart and mind. The word group boat rope bread was lying in wait for memories of my father and the experience of caring for my mother in her last years and her acceptance of death as it drew near.
Our poems are also instructive by pointing out to us what they exclude. It was years before I got over what I felt was the intellectual embarrassment of using the word “God” in a poem, a considerable impediment to my writing and its connection to my spiritual growth. From time to time it will be useful for you to examine the mirror of your poems (you may want to find a place in your journal to write down what you are learning about yourself from your poems), acknowledging yourself for the journeys you’ve made in writing them, finding in them the seeds of journeys you’ve yet to take.
When Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost sat down to write a poem, they believed they were poets. We could say they were in touch, at a very profound level, with the substance of who they were—the light and sound of their being—and believed they could express that substance in finished poems. Their beliefs empowered them.
In my workshops with adults, I’ve found that many of my students are simply out of touch with this substance. And what gets in the way, I’ve discovered, are their beliefs:
“I’m not creative.”
“I don’t know enough words.”
“I don’t know the right words.”
“My grades in English class were always poor. My seventh-grade teacher said I’d never be a writer.”
“I haven’t read enough.”
“I don’t have enough time to write.” And, of course:
“I’m just not a poet.”
Well, some beliefs are valid. Believing the hot stove will burn me is a fact. I need only one demonstration to prove it. But whole areas of beliefs are often just opinions (though they carry the weight of truths in our minds), and often they are arrived at on the basis of partial and even cursory evidence. “I tried writing a poem once or twice, but it didn’t work out.” No one would make up their mind whether they could play the piano or the violin or the saxophone on the basis of the first lesson, but people do this with poetry writing all the time.
Beliefs are our programming, our internal taperecording, if you will. Much of it is useful—and much of it is not. “The only luck I ever have is bad luck.” “A woman over thirty-five has a better statistical chance of being hit by lightning than of finding a husband.” “I’m just a chip off the old block.” The tapes run us, and wrong tapes can ruin whole areas of our lives.
One solution is to tape over the erroneous programming, putting in a new track that simultaneously erases the old one. A quick way to do this is with affirmations, statements that affirm the life experiences we would like to have. For affirmations to work, it is important for them to be positively focused, concise and to the point, and stated grammatically in the present tense. It isn’t necessary that we believe the affirmations in the beginning. Here are some sample writing affirmations:
1. I am writing what is mine to write.
2. I forgive myself for thinking I cannot write.
3. I no longer accept the judgment that I cannot write. I am as expressive and creative as I choose to be.
4. Words are my friends.
5. God writes all the poems, including mine.
6. I am growing younger, lighter, and happier with every word I write.
7. All barriers and blocks between myself and my words are dissolved and dissipated. My thoughts and imagination move easily into words.
8. It is easy for me to write.
9. The more I write, the more I relax. The more I relax, the more I write.
10. There is always enough time to write what I want to write.
11. As my heart opens, my writing improves.
12. I am pleased with the way I write.
13. I accept my writing the way it is.
14. I am writing freely and clearly, and punctuating with ease.
15. I am contributing to my life and to the world with every word I write.
16. I am enjoying sharing my thoughts, feelings, and imagination through my poems.
17. I am enjoying solving the “puzzles” of writing poems.
18. My emotions and imagination cooperate in everything I write.
19. I share easily without judgment of myself everything I write.
20. I trust what I write.
21. I am pleased with my progress in writing poems.
22. My imagination and my words serve me perfectly.
23. My words are beautiful and wise, reflecting the beauty and wisdom I have within me.
24. Everything I write brings me closer to God and to the truth of who I am.
25. I courageously write and revise all my poems.
26. In writing my poems, I always give myself the permissions I need.
The possibilities for affirmations are endless. They may be used separately or in combination. Many people like to incorporate spiritual beliefs in the wording, calling forward divine guidance and inspiration. Certainly not everyone is comfortable with that approach; if that is so for you, then use only affirmations with a secular wording. As a starting place, the reader may want to use and adapt the sample affirmations. But best of all is to come up with affirmations of your own that fit your own particular aspirations or address your own sense of limitations. I once had a fourth-grade student who came up with this affirmation: “I am a poem-writing iguana.” I questioned him as to whether that was really the affirmation he wanted. “Yup,” he replied, and he proceeded to write poem after poem about lizards. At the end of our time together, I had the pleasure of telling him that he was the world’s most prolific lizard poet.
The idea is for the affirmation to reflect the experience you want when writing poems. It is important that the affirmation not be stated as a future possibility: “I will” or “someday I am going to.” That keeps the result, the experience you want, always ahead of you and just out of reach.
To activate the affirmation, you will want to memorize it and begin repeating it over and over to yourself. It is a good idea to do this for a minute or more at the beginning of each writing session. Over time, the new programming—the affirmation—will put you in touch with both inner and outer resources that will bring to you the experiences you want, sometimes in surprising and even immediate ways. There is actually a law in operation when we do affirmations that goes like this: When the intention is clear, the methods show up. The affirmation is a way of getting clear about what we want in the writing of poems. In doing affirmations, I often find myself fine-tuning the wording as my real intention clarifies itself. The principle behind affirmations is actually quite ancient. Biblically, it is stated this way: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so he becomes.” In her amazing book on the principles and uses of affirmations, The Game of Life, Florence Scovel Shinn writes:
To play successfully the game of life, we must train the imaging faculty. A person with the imaging faculty trained to image only good, brings into his life “every righteous desire of his heart”—health, wealth, love, friends, perfect self-expression, his highest ideals.
The imagination has been called “The Scissors of the Mind,” and is ever cutting, day by day, the pictures man sees there, and sooner or later he meets his own creations in his outer world. To train the imagination successfully, man must understand the workings of his mind. The Greeks said: “Know Thyself.”
There are three compartments of the mind, the subconscious, conscious, and superconscious. The subconscious is simply power, without direction. It is like steam or electricity, and does what it is directed to do; it has no power of induction.
Whatever man feels deeply or images clearly is impressed upon the subconscious mind, and carried out in the minutest detail.
When you begin doing affirmations, you may want to do them with your eyes closed. In a sense, you are breathing the affirmation in and out. That’s the way I usually do them, but I also do affirmations (silently or out loud) when I’m driving in the car. Some people do them while they’re working in the garden, washing the dishes, or preparing a meal.
It is normal in the beginning to notice all sorts of negative thoughts arriving on the heels of the affirmation. “This isn’t true.” “Who am I kidding?” “I’ve never been able to write. What makes me think I can now?” This is the old programming speaking through from underneath. You can expect this to happen. In time, with your continued experience in using affirmations and in actually writing poems, the old self-sabotaging programming will disappear.
Sometimes I will discover some new direction I want to take with my poems, so I design an affirmation for that purpose. For years, my poems were visually based; they relied on word images to make an impression on the mind and memory of the reader. I structured my lines syntactically or by counting syllables. I couldn’t hear my poems, and I had pretty much decided that I was a poet with a wooden ear. But I wanted to write poems that would enter the ear of the reader as well as the eye. I didn’t know how I would accomplish this. So, I devised the following affirmation, repeating it often to myself:
Easily I fill my poems with light and sound.
The law says: When the intention is clear, the methods show up. It wasn’t long before a new writing exercise came into my thoughts. I’ll share the actual exercise in Chapter 19, but suffice it to say, it involved writing sentence fragments purely for their sound, without any regard to their making sense. In doing the exercise I was simply playing with sounds, and it worked! It wasn’t long before my poems began to ride in not just on images and their sense, but on sound. Here’s an example:
THE DOUBLETREE
If there’s a tree
that’s half in leaf
and half in flame—
and I believe there is,
in distant Wales, in everywhere—
then I believe I have
in me the self-same seed.
I close my eyes
and lay my hand upon
the trembling room.
I shut my ears and hear
the roaring of the inward fire.
This poem, based on the image of a magical and symbolic tree in The Mabinogion, a book of ancient Welsh tales and mythology, is a poem filled with sound, with repetitions of the consonants “r,” “f,” and “s.” They are the three consonants in the word “fires.” In a certain sense, the poem itself “catches fire and burns” with these sounds. The “v” in “believe” is actually a hardened “f” and implies the replacement of the conditional “if” with conviction and resolve. All of this seemed to arrive in the poem automatically, as if the affirmation and the invented exercise had automatically tuned me in to a new and different way of writing.
Here’s another instance. A “short-lined” poet for most of my life, I wanted to see if I could write poems with longer lines. The affirmation (of course!):
Easily I am writing poems with longer lines.
Again, it worked. Without effort, the lines of poems grew longer while keeping the strength of the shorter lines intact. Here is a poem I wrote with longer lines, a poem also filled with textures and sounds that pleased me:
WITH PLEASURE I THINK OF THEM
Those Louisiana boys who attended my springtime class,
who marveled even themselves with new poems flushed from their silences,
are in the fields now, or the curved bayou, dressed in camouflage,
still as leaves themselves, their oiled guns on their shoulders,
the young eyes that gathered, without intent, origins of poems
intent now on the hieroglyph of autumn leaf, trunk, shadow,
their unspoiled ears filled with the requiem of tell-tale sounds,
their youth, their light breaths, their poised purpose
all going into the place of the heart where poems are shaped or stored,
written or not.
And several years ago I adopted the affirmation “I am writing what is mine to write” and soon found myself writing not only poems, but stories and fairy tales for the first time. It was as if the affirmation uncovered an entire continent of writing hidden from my view. Similar surprises lie in wait for you.
The spiritual path of life and the writing of poems both draw their power from our unfolding capacity to give ourselves the permissions we need to grow and expand. Whenever we stop ourselves by our own thoughts, we have come against a belief of some kind that is working against us. Some thoughtful reflection will reveal to us what that belief is. Permission to give up that belief, permission to go beyond its boundaries, will get us moving again. How many permissions did Joan of Arc give herself to go beyond the boundaries of being simply a religious teenage farm girl? The experiences those permissions brought to her, she was willing to die for. That’s how powerful this process can be.
Hang around people writing poems long enough and you will inevitably come across the concept of “finding your own voice.” Many beginning poets—and many, too, who have been writing a long time—fret over this issue. “Have I found my voice?” “Do I have a voice of my own?” It gets a little silly, actually. It’s like someone standing in front of a mirror asking herself if she has an “appearance.” The answer is, of course, yes.
Having a “voice” means simply being yourself on paper, sticking pretty close to your natural speech, the language you use every day, and allowing this language to be charged with your natural and authentic feeling and expressiveness.
Juan de Mareina, a fictitious high school rhetoric teacher invented by the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado, wrote on his classroom chalkboard one day: “The quotidian events of the highways and byways.” He then asked if any of the students could go to the chalkboard and rewrite the phrase as poetry. For a while, no one moved. Many, impressed by the high rhetoric, thought the phrase was poetry. Then one student walked to the board and wrote: “What goes on in the streets.” “Not bad,” said the teacher with a smile.
Taking a walk with a friend in the woods, I don’t suddenly say, “I love all this verdant lushness.” I would more likely say something like, “It’s so green here!” In fact, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca began a poem once this way: “Green, how much I want you green. / Green wind. Green branches.”
In truth, our voice is probably made up of many voices. “I sound just like my mother when I say that,” a woman remarks. “You tell that story just like your grandfather,” a man tells his grown son. Among our peers as teenagers, many of us—as an act of forming our own identities—invented a language of our own.
Every day we are surrounded by all kinds of language, written or spoken, and all of it enters into the substance of who we are. The cadences, the accent, the rhythm, and dialect of the region or regions in which we were raised and live, all become part of us. The late great poet James Wright, who grew up in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, said the language or speech of his truest poems was “Ohioan.”
In a classroom one day, a fifth-grade girl, whose name I did not think at the time to write down, said the following:
We had a dog once,
and we live right by the road,
and one day I wasn’t watchin’ him,
and he ran out in the road
and was hit by a car.
And I ran to the house and got
my mama, and my mama came
to the road and she said to him,
“Sparky, are you livin’?”
And he was, barely. And my
older sister got a garbage bag
because he was goopy,
and she didn’t want to mess up
her new car. And we drove him
to the vet’s, but the vet said
he was all broke up, but he
could fix him up, but
it wouldn’t be much of a life
for a dog livin’ like that,
so we put him to sleep.
This girl’s remarks appeared as part of a class discussion on poems of loss. That night, describing the day’s events to my family, I found that I could remember word for word what the girl had said. I dashed off to my office and typed it all down, adding in the line breaks.
The next day in class, I put the paper on the girl’s desk where she would see it when she walked in.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Take a look,” I replied.
She read it slowly, and then looked up.
“That’s what I said yesterday!” she gushed, a puzzled look on her face.
“What else is it?” I asked.
She looked at it for a minute, and then it hit her.
“It’s a poem!”
And it was, perfect as a poem can be in every way. I knew it was a poem the moment I realized that the girl’s remarks were indelible in my memory. I thought about how many words, how many sentences, it would have taken me as an adult to try to describe the dog mangled by a car lying in the road. She captured it all in a child’s one perfect word, “goopy.”
Voice, as I apply it to my own poetry and the poetry I admire, has four aspects:
1. Awareness: This is just what it says—the poet becomes aware of something. The “something” may be inner or outer, or both. The awareness or perception has a “freshness” or “newness,” is charged with a sense of discovery, value, importance, meaning. The poet sees something in a new light, and the reader will, too.
2. True Feeling: The poem rides on real—not manufactured—emotion or emotions. We, as readers, can tell that the feeling of the poem is honest, that the poet has gotten beyond what he or she thinks they should feel to what they really feel. As in a conversation, the honesty, the frankness of the poet (whatever the emotion) “opens windows so all can breathe freely.”
3. Intimacy: The artist is close to and cares about the subject of the poem, whatever it is. There are billions of subjects—“billions of suns left,” as Whitman told us—to write about. The individuality of the poet as a living character in the Great Story, as someone living a particular story, observing particular things, shines through the poem. The poet isn’t writing about what he or she thinks a poet writes about, but about what they must write about out of the perceptions, urgencies, and passions of their own lives.
4. Memorability: Awareness, true feeling, and intimacy combine in some way in some kind of language to make a memorable impression on the reader; they create something that haunts the consciousness of the reader, stays in the reader’s memory, or causes the reader to return again and again to the poem.
It is a good idea to examine the poems in your writer’s studio for “voice.” It is a valuable way of determining what you have done and it is an indispensable way of determining the path that lies ahead. You may also want to design and use affirmations that support the presence of voice in your poems. For example:
As my awareness grows, poems appear. As poems appear, my awareness grows.
My true feelings move easily into poems.
The things that matter most to me become my poems.
My poems are alive with memorable things.
The word groups provided in this book can actually be recombined into countless thousands of possible word groups for use in poem-sketching. Still, if you haven’t already, you should experiment with creating word groups of your own.
A successful word group is like a kernel of corn that pops from the heat of the writer’s mind. In my experience, successful word groups often (but not always) have three things in common: variety, concreteness (they make pictures in the reader’s mind), and surprise (an unexpected word that pushes at the inner resources and imagination of the writer). Making up word groups that work (for yourself and others) takes a little practice; you are developing a sensitivity about words coming together that will turn into poems. I like to make word groups that make use of these categories: emotions (angry, sad); human roles or conditions (blind, homeless, mother, farmer); indoor and outdoor places (creek, hill, kitchen—but no proper nouns like McDonald’s or Disneyland); regional words; the seasons; weather words (rain, wind); specific creatures (crow, dragonfly, fox); general or specific plants (trees, flowers, dogwood, cattail, rose); mineral objects (stone, sand, silver, diamond); man-made things (fence, chair, overpass); spiritual things (God, angels, church); celestial things (moon, star, comet); things from literature, history, or the imaginary world (warrior, emperor, dragon); and earth, air, fire, and water in all their forms (ice, flame, dust).
Ideally you want three words that come from different categories but fit together (tower, falcon, storm) and a fourth surprise or “energetic” word that ignites the poem (tower, falcon, storm, praise).
I usually make up five to ten word groups at a time, then move the words around from group to group until they seem right. You don’t really know if you have workable word groups until you try them out. The proof is in the pudding.
I think concrete nouns are extremely important in successful word groups, but word groups also want to contain verbs (jingle, touch, shatter), adjectives (red, rough, quick), and abstractions (truth, mercy, time). I draw my word-group words first from the things around me, from my experiences, and then from my reading—poems, fiction, guidebooks and manuals, and, of course, random words from the dictionary.
In developing word-group pages for students, I found The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson to be an immensely rich source for word-group ideas. Dickinson was a master at mining the hidden resources of a wide and varied vocabulary. In translation, the poems of Basho and Issa and other Japanese masters of haiku have been another rich word resource, as well as the poems of great Spanish-language poets— Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Federico García Lorca.
Take some time in your writer’s studio to create some word-group lists of your own for poem-sketching. First, scour your own experiences for words. Words often have an emotional charge if they are connected to strong events and impressions in your past, especially the memories and experiences from your childhood. For someone with strong rural-life experiences, “barn” or “hoof” or “milkweed” might be emotionally charged, while having little charge for someone raised in the environment of a city. Conversely, for someone with strong urban-life experiences, “park,” “stoop,” “bus,” “pigeon,” or “skyscraper” might be more emotionally charged. If you work in an office or corporation, words may come from this world as well, or any world in which you work. This is all quite individual.
Take time also to investigate the dictionary and your own library, your favorite reading, for possibilities. Ask friends and family to contribute possible words. I should add that all this can be as simple as using words that pop into your head.
On a repeat visit to an elementary school, a student from the previous year’s workshop stopped me in the hall and told me that he had taught poem-sketching to his entire family, and they had turned it into a car game for their summer vacation. Each family member took turns making up word groups that included things they saw along the roadside and in their surroundings—barn, field, bridge, cow, hawk, kudzu, cornflowers, cloud, and so on—which they then turned into poems. All the family members took part. They repeated the game at the beach, the destination of their vacation. When they returned home, they made an album of their vacation containing both photos and poems! First my student and now my teacher, he added, “Maybe you’d like to pass this along.”
Great is the quality of truth in man,
The quality of truth in man supports itself through all changes,
It is inevitably in the man.…He and it are in love,
and never leave each other.
—Walt Whitman, “Great Are the Myths”
The path of poetry is a path of truth. Ultimately, it cannot be avoided. In writing poems, you are establishing the relative truth of the poem, perhaps to be replaced by the relative truth of the next poem, or next week’s poem, or next year’s. In this process, life is the teacher, and to pay attention to your teacher you must pay attention to your life.
In writing poems, you are teaching yourself to become an observer. You watch the world. You watch the emotions. You watch your thoughts. You write down in your journal what you see and hear. You are learning to express—for you—what is so. The universe is designed as a mirror to awaken you; it is, as Emerson wrote, “the externalization of the soul.” With each day’s experiences and with the writing of each new poem, you are expanding your awareness, your knowing.
In his essay “Circles,” Emerson wrote: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. … The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small rushes, on all sides outward to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. … The only sin is limitation.”
Poem-sketching is a starting place and an approach you can always return to, as artists always go back to drawing. But the most important work you will do as a poet is the work of watching and listening—watching your inner and outer worlds, listening for the voice of the Knower within. There is a great being within each of us. That being—I am sure of it—is divine. We are sleeping giants. Two thousand years ago, Jesus, speaking of all of us, said, “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” And he added, “Ye are gods.”
Our word education derives from the Latin educare—to call forth or lead out from within. The Greeks said: “Know Thyself.” But who is the one we are calling forth, the Self that we are to come to know? Thoreau wrote: “I have read in a Hindoo book, that ‘there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father’s ministers having discovered him, revealed to him who he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul,’ continues the Hindoo philosopher, ‘from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme.’”
One day we come to know ourselves as a soul, as Soul, a divine being. The paradox lies in the fact that we come to know this great being through our ordinariness, our humanness, through the simple tasks and relationships and circumstances of our daily lives. As observers we are surrounded with a host of “daily relationships,” things we are connected to, things that influence or affect us, for good or ill. The Chinese poets were master observers, and if you examine their poems, you will find that they were paying attention to these daily relationships again and again:
THE WEB OF LIFE: DAILY RELATIONSHIPS LIST
Self (mind, body, emotions, imagination)
Others (physically present or in our thoughts)
Places (indoor and outdoors)
Weather (rain, mist, wind, heat)
Seasonal Details (falling leaves, new buds, insects)
Time of Day (sunrise, morning, noon, twilight)
Animal Kingdom (frog, cat, cow, sparrow, cricket)
Plant Kingdom (apple tree, sunflower, grass, leaf)
Mineral Kingdom (stone, boulder, gold, diamond)
Man-Made Things (boat, spoon, pillow, blouse)
Celestial Things (sun, moon, star, Milky Way)
Spiritual Things (God, soul, dream, angel)
Elements (earth, air, fire, and water in all their forms)
As a starting place, a Chinese poet almost always included self, place, and seasonal details in his or her poems; in doing so, the poet was including the learner, the learner’s circumstance, and a ready and poignant reminder of the world of influence and change. Here— in a translation from 100 Poems from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth—is a poem by the great T’ang Dynasty poet, Tu Fu, which includes all of the “daily relationships” in the daily relationships list:
JADE FLOWER PALACE
The stream swirls. The wind moans in
The pines. Gray rats scurry over
Broken tiles. What prince, long ago,
Built this palace, standing in
Ruins beside the cliffs? There are
Green ghost fires in the black rooms.
The shattered pavements are all
Washed away. Ten thousand organ
Pipes whistle and roar. The storm
Scatters the red autumn leaves.
His dancing girls are yellow dust.
Their painted cheeks have crumbled
Away. His gold chariots
And courtiers are gone. Only
A stone horse is left of his
Glory. I sit on the grass and
Start a poem, but the pathos of
It overcomes me. The future
Slips imperceptibly away.
Who can say what the years will bring?
In this poem, Tu Fu, the learner expressing himself, is looking closely at the world, watching his emotions, watching his thoughts, and also listening—deep within—for the voice of the Knower. That Knower always begins with what is. From a million details before him (the picture window of choices), the poet is selecting, collecting, combining, arranging; line by line, he is drawing himself closer and closer to his subject, watching the rise and movement of his emotions, growing the circles of his awareness, interpreting what he sees. By the end of the poem, he has come face to face with the mutability, the impermanence, of all things in this world, and face to face with his own mortality. He is overcome with the emotion. “Whatever the Self describes, describes the Self,” wrote Jakob Böhme. “The universe is the externalization of the soul,” wrote Emerson. Always, we are looking into a mirror.
It isn’t necessary, by any means, to include all of the daily relationships in a poem of observation. Here’s one of my favorite poems by a contemporary master of the poem of observation, Richard Jones.
BIRDS DANCING
Scratches on the white page
of snow, on the white ground
where birds danced around
the bowl they found,
the bowl filled with seeds
and set down in snow,
speak a poem of thanks
written by birds, written in snow
beside an empty bowl
we come with seeds to fill.
This poem makes a miraculous circle. The origins of the gratitude expressed in the poem are multiple and complex and beautifully interconnected—the gratitude of the birds for the seed, the gratitude of the poet for the beauty of the scene itself, which he will renew each time he replenishes the seed. My own gratitude to the poet for writing the poem also becomes part of the experience of the poem. As a reader, I become part of the circle of the poem. The circle of awareness of both the poet and the reader have grown. “And God has not made some things beautiful,” wrote Emerson, “but Beauty is the creator of the universe.” It is a privilege to read a poem like this. Its careful attention, its tenderness and delicacy, resonate so deeply, so humanly and humanely, inside us. Because I love and admire his work in this vein so much, here is another poem by Richard Jones (from At Last We Enter Paradise), written consciously in the manner of a Chinese poet.
BOUNDARIES
After Ma Chih-Yuan
If the crow
perched on the dead branch
of the apple tree,
his back to the dark,
sees the sun setting
behind the ridge of pines,
the broken fence where a skinny horse
searches for grass,
the spring brook flowing
between the road and my house,
then he also sees me
opening my door and crossing
the rickety little bridge
that connects me to the world.
Always, in writing “Chinese poems” or observation poems, we are bringing our attention to something for contemplation; we are betrothing ourselves to something so it may reveal something about itself to us. Louisiana poet Darrell Bourque writes “large poems” that I love, poems rich in textures and allusions, poems that show the layering of things that make a human life, but he also has the capacity for observing some simple thing very closely. In doing so, he is never afraid of being sentimental, as in this poem on the fingers of his young grandson, William (from The Doors Between Us).
PUTTING WILLIAM TO SLEEP FOR WILLIAM BOURQUE TURLEY, BORN 11 FEBRUARY 1992
He puts his index finger and his middle finger together
when he loves you with his hands
or when he is touching meaning into things
he is bringing himself to for the first time.
The thumb and the other fingers fold
over the mysteries in his palm.
It is some kind of sacred gesture he has carried
into this new world where nothing has a name yet.
He is touching the thumbnail on my left hand
as I stand swinging him in the hammock
I have made for him of dark and arms,
of chest, of cricket sounds outside and smells
inside clothes and skin and room and house.
I sing to him of orchids in rain forests
and how they touch everything around them like that.
He could be that kind of orchid lover,
I sing to him. I sing to him of loving
by brushing holiness against everything
he comes to and everything that comes to him.
He presses the skin on my shoulder near my neck
just barely and then his hand slides down.
His whole arm is loose and heavy, falling with him—
his benedictions now for some other darkness, some
other namelessness he might grow to imagine, loving
that it always waits for him in the dark, loving
that it always waits for him on the other side.
Ted Kooser, the thirteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, is an American master in the vein of that other master poet, Carl Sandburg. His poetry has the same potential for reaching a wide American audience, if they could somehow only discover him. His poems drip with details of the American scene, or more particularly, the American Midwest landscape. His poem “The Giant Slide” (from his collection Flying at Night), stops to look at details we ourselves might have observed, details we have passed by perhaps (thinking them unimportant most likely, not worthy of our attention). Yet when Kooser includes them in the poem, we say, “Yes, I’ve seen that. And that, too.” When he accumulates them all together and finds words for them, they begin to take on meanings. The poem becomes very much like the Tu Fu poem “Jade Flower Palace,” touching us with the mystery of impermanence, and the mystery of life’s movement and change.
THE GIANT SLIDE
Beside the highway, the Giant Slide
with its rusty undulations lifts
out of the weeds. It hasn’t been used
for a generation. The ticket booth
tilts to that side where the nickels shifted
over the years. A chain link fence keeps out
the children and drunks. Blue morning glories
climb halfway up the stairs, bright clusters
of laughter. Call it a passing fancy,
this slide that nobody slides down now.
Those screams have all gone east
on a wind that will never stop blowing
down from the Rockies and over the plains,
where things catch on for a little while,
bright leaves in a fence, and then are gone.
Poet, essayist, teacher, and anthologist Naomi Shihab Nye is an important American voice, in part because the “web of life” in her poems is cast so sharply, so tenderly, and so wide as to contain the world itself. Palestinian American by birth, she is possibly the most widely traveled of American poets (Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and the breadth of the United States), and her poems reflect both the rich particularity and the shared humanity of people everywhere. Making her home in San Antonio, Texas, the poem here is again one any one of us might have chosen as an experience to write about—a late-night walk alone in a familiar neighborhood. Like so many poems, it is a poem of solitude and of the calm attention, inwardly and outwardly, that comes in such times. Sometimes in writing our poems, a word appears that weaves itself through and carries the emerging awareness of the entire poem, as the word folding does in this poem.
WALKING DOWN BLANCO ROAD AT MIDNIGHT
There is a folding into the self which occurs
when the lights are small on the horizon
and no light is shining into the face.
It happens in a quiet place.
It is a quiet folding,
like going to sleep in
the comfortable family home.
When everyone goes to sleep
the house folds up.
The windows shut their eyes.
If you are inside you are automatically folded.
If you are outside walking by the folded house
you feel so lonesome you think you are going crazy.
You are not going crazy.
You are beginning to fold up in your own single way.
You feel your edges move toward the center,
your heart like a folded blanket unfolding
and folding in with everything contained.
You feel you do not need anyone to love you anymore
because you already feel everything,
you feel it, you fold it, and for a while now,
it will quietly rest.
In my teaching and travels, I often find myself writing observation poems, by habit drawing upon the daily relationships surrounding me. For five years, I presented poetry writing workshops in the Lawrence, Kansas, schools. Kansas was a landscape that had a deep and powerful pull on my consciousness; it had a familiarity, as if I had already experienced it deeply in another past. Here is one of the poems I wrote:
KANSAS
Out on the round, green hilltop—almost a roar;
the lake below is a broken, gray, windswept moon.
Big plains winds traveling swiftly without destination,
a madness in the grasses.
My braids and feathers are blowing.
My pony stiffens, tosses his head, taps the sod.
Dizzy grasshoppers leap away among stems and blooms.
Raindrops and sun both fall on me at the same time.
Another wind, without larynx yet, blows through my heart.
There is no end to the possibilities of such poems. The poem’s subject may be anything—the touch of a hand, a fragrance, a taste, a conversation, a broken cup, an egg fallen in the grass, a curled leaf on a sidewalk, a droplet of water on a windowpane, the line of moonlight on the water. Anything! Whitman observed, “All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.” Each person on the earth sees and experiences things missed by others. No one sees and experiences everything. Poems by others address our inevitable omissions and add to our appreciation and thankfulness. There is a story of Chinese poet Li Po writing to his colleague Tu Fu thanking him for his new poems and adding that reading them was like “being alive twice.”
Joy, love, lov-ing, are the very nature of the soul. Poems, born of our solitude, often from our pain, nevertheless at some level always touch the loving that is in us at the level of the soul. That loving draws us toward sharing the poem with another, with others, begins to build a new community between us and others, the community of poets sharing with one another. What happened to you? What have you seen? we ask. What have you felt? What do you know? Share it with me. I am here. What poems have you written? Here are mine. Let’s sit together awhile. What words have you found? What have you struggled to say?
In this chapter, you will be learning an approach to writing poems of observation and contemplation. The poems may include any of the “daily relationships” (see Chapter 16) in your observations and may be of any length. In a marvelous short observation poem titled “Beginning of Fall” (from Ten-Second Rainshowers), a sixth-grade student of mine, Summer Hughes, wrote: “Our beautiful sky darkens for fall. / My heart jumps out to the falling leaves. / But at least they die in their best look.” The lines delight us in that they express something seen by everyone—the falling of the autumn leaves—in a fresh way, captured in the last line by a wonderful turn of phrase. We are amused, too, by the humor. Wouldn’t we all like to die in our best look? The Cajuns in Louisiana even have a saying, “Die young, and make a beautiful corpse.” Even with its brevity, you can see that the poem has voice: awareness, true feeling, intimacy, and memorability; in fact, its brevity—somehow incorporating so much richness in so few words—is partly what makes it memorable.
Here’s something I’d like you to try. I don’t want to give you a complete poem example because I don’t want to influence your result. Open your writer’s studio and at the top of a page write a sentence that is an expression of something “inner”—an emotion or mood or state of being. It can be as simple as: I am sad today (or peaceful, or content, or stressed; it can be any feeling). Or maybe you write: This is the winter of my life. Or: The world is mine today. It doesn’t have to be what you are feeling right now; it is whatever mood or feeling you want to work with in the poem.
In the next sentence, put in something about the sky, or something in the sky, or something you would see if you looked up. What you describe may be a match or mirror for what you wrote in the first line, or it may be something opposite, or it may just be an additional detail of the moment. I am angry today. Black clouds boil across the sky. This would be an example of a match. I am angry today, yet there is a blue sky with a bright yellow sun. This would be an opposite. Simply adding detail, you might write: I am angry today. A flock of crows noisily fills the morning skies.
In the next sentence, put in something about a tree, or trees, or parts of trees (branches, leaves, trunk, roots, etc.). The kind of tree might be important. Weeping willows add one thing to a poem; oaks or pines add a different thing; magnolias or Japanese maples still something else.
In the next sentence, put in something about a bird or birds; it might be the sight of a bird, or its sound, or its absence. Again, the kind of bird can be important. If a bird or birds were included in your first sentence, then add something else from the animal kingdom (an insect or insects can often be interesting).
Looking at what you have already written, keep adding details from the daily relationships list—and any other thoughts or associations—until the poem feels complete.
Usually with this exercise, we begin to see that the things of the outer world—when we introduce and describe them in the poem—give us another language for talking about inner things. You may want to try this exercise a couple of times to see what you discover.
Now here’s the primary approach I’d like you to try.
Take this book and your writer’s studio and find a comfortable place to do some writing, preferably out of doors or with a view of the outdoor world.
Open to a blank page in your journal and draw a line down the center of the page to a point about halfway down the page. At the top of the page, to the left of the line, write the heading “Inner” and to the right of the line at the top of the page write “Outer,” like so:
Sitting quietly, jot down in the left-hand column anything you notice in your inner world: feelings, memories (from the morning, yesterday, last week), a dream from the night before, inner images, a piece of conversation, disturbances, problems, questions, ideas, whatever seems “inner.” In the right-hand column, jot down or describe what captures your attention in your outer world in this moment. Use the daily relationships list in Chapter 16 as a reference for directing your attention. In time, you will have incorporated this list and using it will be second nature. You are simply collecting—in language—what you “see” in your inner and outer environment.
You are not trying to write down everything you see or think, only what captures your interest. Your attention may be drawn to a field of things (sky, weather, birds, the motion of wind in tree branches or over water) or to some discrete thing (the journey of a caterpillar along a leaf or stem). The bottom half of the page will be used for selecting language from the Inner and Outer columns and actually pulling together the poem.
Here’s an example from my own journal:
The day I wrote these jottings in my journal I was teaching a weekend poetry writing workshop to adults. The setting was Round Oaks Creative Center a few miles outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Created by Phyllis Frame and her late husband Doug, Round Oaks was a retreat and workshop site tucked into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was in the years of its existence a peaceful and beautiful place, and a wonderful site for poetry writing workshops.
On this particular day I had sent my students off to walk and to write observation poems, and I decided I would do some writing myself. All during the previous week, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings on Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court had been on the television. I had watched hours of the hearings. It had been a deeply troubling event to me, as it was to many people. Two respected and accomplished people— Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill—had told diametrically opposing stories about the same event, the alleged sexual harassment of Hill by Thomas. How was one supposed to sort out the truth? Usually in cases of sexual harassment the alleged incident is part of a pattern; other cases come to light, but not in this instance. On the other hand, why would Hill make up such a story? Hill, it seemed to me, had been a reluctant witness, not someone looking to grind an axe, as it were.
All this was on my mind as I took my journal and started off on my walk. Somewhere along the way, climbing one of the fields of the farm, I found myself thinking that only two people on the earth really knew—and perhaps would ever know—what had happened. What others thought was most likely a reflection of their own biases—sexual, political, perhaps even racial. The Senate hearings were simply another one of those mirrors or projections in which everyone watching was actually looking at himself. I found myself trying to imagine a day in the future when either Hill or Thomas—unknown to and unrecorded by the world—would apologize and the other forgive, setting both free from what had taken place in the past.
Making notes of my thoughts and what I saw as I walked, I finally sat down and pulled my jottings together this way:
WALKING A FIELD, OCTOBER 1991
I walk
till elevation comes.
The field of flowers
tells no lies,
nor harasses one bloom another
with its incumbent power.
None hold an office;
none are impaneled to judge.
Each is en-sunned
with its own mysterious angel
of color and form
to make a field of flowers,
harmonious, far-flung,
and free.
In writing the poem, I saw that what I needed was not some conclusion about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, but my own “altitude.” My disturbance at the Senate hearings was just that—my disturbance. I needed to regain my balance. I needed to draw to myself what I knew, and what I might know. Always, when working sincerely at a poem, an opportunity is created to bring parts of ourselves together— thought, feeling, imagination, sensory memory (or put another way, heart, mind, body, and spirit)—in service to the poem.
In the last poem, the common beauty of things I saw in the field called up a reservoir of thoughts—from reading, from experiences, from times of solitary and silent reflection. For myself, I found in the vegetative harmonies of the field (an autumn mixture of spent forms and late bloomers) my own reminder that all people (as I see them), all souls, are on a journey, that each soul’s journey is perfect, that we lose ourselves in our fears (illness, death, restriction, poverty, loneliness) and attachments (sex, money, power, material things, the opinions of others), then find ourselves again, remember again who we truly are. Eventually, we return to “being,” forming ourselves into fields of flowers, “harmonious, far-flung, and free.”
But that is how I saw things in this poem, after a long time of not seeing things in this way. My poem contains my spoken and unspoken thoughts, hints at the history of my visible and invisible processes. Your job is to find out and express how you see things; that is what this way of writing is about. What you are trying to do in an observation poem is to capture a moment in time. That moment is made up of things present in their physical actuality, combined with your own associations, allusions, and symbolic thinking. I know from my workshops that for many people the journey of writing poems begins with grief, with bitterness, and sometimes resentment and anger, doubt and fear. I have been in those places myself. Everybody suffers. Always, you start where you are.
With your daily relationships list and your journal, you are the observer. Your life here and now—not anyone else’s—is your teacher. You must be open to your seriousness, but also to your humor, your lightness of being, and to both the ordinariness and the nobility of who you are. At times your gaze may be more directed to inner things, and at other times to outer things, and at times to both. The key is to be attentive and truthful, to the best of your ability. In time, you will find yourself seeing the inner and outer things simultaneously, fashioning a language of your own that embodies that simultaneity.
Know that all poets embellish (lie), when embellishing makes for a better poem. Sometimes the poet’s lie comes closer to the truth. The actuality of your here-and-now experience may in some instances serve simply as a starting point to following a thread through your inner worlds. Notice the ways in which your imagination, your powers of association, want to become part of the poem. Again, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of recognizing the permissions you need, and taking them.
When I write observation poems, I begin by making line breaks right away. I find that doing this sharpens my attention to detail and strengthens the things I write. You can try this, or you may want to write things first in paragraph form, adding line breaks in later drafts. Again, you may want to sit with your journal and a pocket dictionary, opening the dictionary at random to find words that will direct your attention or enrich your sentences as you describe things in your inner and outer worlds. It is important that you experiment and find what works best for you. As Emerson said, in growing the circles of your awareness, “the only sin is limitation.” Be yourself. There are reasons—which are yours to discover—for you being you. Again, each soul’s journey is perfect, and each soul’s journey is different—and that extends to the writing of poems.
I can’t conclude this chapter on inner and outer observation without a poem by the poet Mary Oliver (from her book Why I Wake Early), a master of such poems. Mary Oliver is now the most widely quoted and perhaps best known and most beloved contemporary American poet. Her audience is wide, perhaps because her poems call us to awaken to our own better angels, to live more fully each day of our lives. To read her books is to follow a heroine’s journey of earthly and spiritual awakening; it is the return of a fully conscious and engaged adult woman to the heart and wonder of a child. Read five of her poems, and you are no longer the same person. There is a good chance you will set down her poems to go to the door, perhaps picking up your journal on the way, to stand yourself on the threshold of the world.
There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.
The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing from the unreachable top of the tree.
I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.
And thinking: maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree—
they are all in this too.
And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.
At least, closer.
And, cordially.
Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky
of God, the blue air.
—Mary Oliver
All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments,
It is not the violins and cornets…it is not the oboe nor the beating drums—nor the notes of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza…nor those of the men’s chorus, nor those of the women’s chorus,
It is nearer and farther than they.
—Walt Whitman, “A Song for Occupations”
What sounds do you love best? Oh, for me it is water sounds—fountains, streams, the ocean waves, rain, and the “silent” water sound of falling snow. What other sounds do I love? The purring of a cat. (Is that another water sound?) Bird songs. The laughter of young children, which trills like water. And, of course, music—Celtic fiddle and harp most of all, and female Celtic singers, and children’s choirs, and the classical trumpet of the Frenchman Maurice André, which is like a voice.
It was a revelation to me that we can improve—open up—our hearing. I couldn’t really hear music, wasn’t moved by music, until I heard Albinoni’s “Adagio” when I was a student at Oberlin College. I was nineteen, and until that time a whole world of sound was not available to me. That one piece opened my musical hearing. My dreams now are often filled with sound, with a music so rich and full—sometimes with my own singing—that I wake up actually trembling with joy. And once, walking in a public garden, I heard a “singing” coming out of the trees—my first experience with the “inner ear,” my first encounter with the devic kingdom.
But for a long time, my poetry had no sound. Well, it had a sound, but not a sound that made an impression on the reader’s or listener’s ear, not a sound wedded to the content of the poem; it did not have any memorable sound, did not resonate in the head or heart or stomach of the listener.
I noticed in my adult poetry writing workshops that few poems of the students had any memorable sound either. All the poems had some kind of sound, and most poems sounded better when read aloud by the poet—sounded better than one imagined they would sound once they were wedded to the timbre and emotion of the reader’s voice. But in only one student out of every twenty or so would you have the experience of the poem riding into your attention not only on its images and ideas, but on its sound as well. And in this one person it would not be something he or she was laboring to achieve; most, in fact, were writing poems for the first time. It was inexplicable, and it was just there. And it seemed like the rest of us—including the teacher—would just have to make do without it.
Except that I didn’t really want to do without it, and not knowing how to find it, I decided to surrender it to the universe. I designed and began to say to myself the affirmation, Easily I fill my poems with light and sound. I decided to trust the law that when my intention was clear, the methods would show up.
And a few days later, the following exercise presented itself to me, an exercise in alliteration.
Pick any two letters of the alphabet (vowels or consonants) and write them down side by side this way:
Then write sentences or phrases that incorporate the two letters at least twice in each pairing, spliced together by a comma. The letters may appear anywhere in the words; it isn’t necessary that they be the first letters of words. Under the two selected letters, make a long list of phrase and sentence combinations. I like to do at least ten combinations. It isn’t important that the sentences or phrases make sense or that they be connected to each other. You are just playing with sound, awakening the poetic ear. For example:
When I do this exercise, I alternate between the letters when creating the phrases and sentences. I don’t do all the o’s and then do all the t’s, for example. By alternating, I am guessing that I am awakening the brain to more complex patterns of sound. In developing the exercise, I noticed that the repetitions of the two letters often began to invite in repetitions of other sounds. “A cove on a narrow coast” also brings in the repeated hard “c.” And sometimes the two letters begin to cross-pollinate the phrasings. “The tango’s not a fox trot, Tom” incorporates both the “o” and the “t” sounds.
Sometimes the sentences and phrases can be brought together in the service of making a poemsketch or poem. From the phrases in the example I made the following combinations.
Owls float in the dark,
governors of gloom.
And mice, like truths,
are tucked in holes.
Over and over,
the owls glide down.
And:
I have had enough of woe.
My dog has such soft ears;
and like him I prefer the clover now
and grass and winds
to taller blooms in gardens.
Sometimes the makings of a poem are there, and sometimes not. These examples actually remind me a little of poems by Theodore Roethke, a great sound poet. The purpose of the exercise is simply to awaken one’s sensitivity to sound. Do at least one set (ten pairings) using two selected letters.
Do the exercise from time to time to see what happens. Many students have found that their poems begin to ride in not only on images and ideas, but on sound. In all candor, I should add that for the first few days of doing this exercise, I was patting myself on the back for its invention, and then realized that the pattern I was using was actually derived from Old English poems, in particular from Beowulf. How many years had gone by since I’d read or even thought about that poem, first read in high school, but my affirmation had called the power of its sound structure from the depths of my memory in service to the possibilities of sound in poems of my own.
To fully mature the poet within, it is important to be a reader of poetry. I say this with a caution. Read for pleasure, for ideas, for things you can “steal.” But don’t fall into the trap of comparison. “I’ll never be this good.” “I can’t write like so and so.” That is the voice of the false critic within you, the saboteur!
No one can write like anyone else, nor should they want to. You should want to find out who you are as a poet, and be that. You don’t really have a choice. But we can learn from each other. And we can lay our own poems down more easily and more fruitfully by exploring tracks of poems laid down by those that came before us, the poets of the past and better yet our contemporaries.
An acorn seldom has to root itself and grow on entirely new soil. It spreads its own tender root system along the decayed root lines of ancestor oaks that have lived a hundred years or more (themselves nourished by more ancient tracks), one day themselves renourishing the ground below. It is a paradigm for our own work as poets as well. Reading to enrich our own writing is also simply a way of honoring our poetry fathers and mothers, acknowledging the intergenerational design of life.
I would say half of my ideas for poems come from my own experiences or from occasional and thoughtful play with words (from writing exercises like poem-sketching or the exercise with letter sounds, for example), and the other half comes from my reading, from other poets and their poems. Their permissions become my permissions. Their subjects help me to root out and bring to the surface subjects of my own. We profit greatly from the cross-pollination that can only come from being in a “field of poets.”
If you are not already a reader of poetry, how do you begin? I recommend that you do the obvious— make a visit to the library or a good bookstore, and head for the poetry section. Start with a look at anthologies, especially anthologies of modern and contemporary poets. (As a starting place, a suggested reading appendix is provided at the back of this book.) Take your time. Browsing in this way, you will find poets you like and some you don’t care for at all; some you will understand, and some you won’t. When you find poets you really like, really connect with, I suggest you find out what individual collections of their poems are available and check out or purchase them.
These poets are probably your brothers and sisters “under the skin.” Making a deeper connection with these poets will stimulate and enrich your own writing. Give yourself permission to emulate these poets, to write in the style of their poems for a while—as an apprentice, as someone exploring the possibilities of poems. In the right moment, you will step free of any emulation. If you do find yourself being swallowed by a poet, set that poet aside and do not return to those poems until you’ve begun to establish and recognize who you are in your writing. Whitman says rightfully that the poem of emulation will not last. But apprenticeship often comes first.
Follow the threads of your discoveries. I shared my discovery of the poet Robert Bly in an anthology of contemporary poets with my college girlfriend at the time, and she surprised me on my birthday with his book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields. I soon learned that Bly was the editor of a literary magazine called The Sixties. I subscribed—following the thread. Through his magazine, Bly introduced me to the great German poets Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke, and to some of the great Spanish-language poets of the twentieth century: Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel Hernández, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, and Antonio Machado. On my own I also discovered the American Zen poet, Gary Snyder, and through Snyder, the great poets of China and Japan who had influenced him. To this day, my poems have echoes of these poets, for which I am ever grateful. In recent years, I have been learning much from Polish poets like Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zagajewski. On a trip to Kodiak, Alaska, to work with classroom teachers, I rediscovered the work of Alaskan poet John Haines, and now believe he is one of the truly great American poets of the past fifty years. And among women poets, I greatly admire and feel enriched by the poems of Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, and Naomi Shihab Nye, and the Polish poet Anna Swir.
One of my favorite books of poetry is a self-published book (the poet used an on-demand publisher) titled Native Joy, by Geoff Oelsner—forty years of poems gathered into this single collection. Geoff was two classes behind me when I was a student at Oberlin, and a few years ago located me to tell me that I had helped and encouraged him to write his first poems. Sending me a copy of his book was his way of thanking me, and the renewed connection has become one of my most cherished friendships. Geoff and his wife Leslie are both clinical social workers in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and accomplished folk-tradition musicians. Geoff is also a songwriter. His book makes me wish all my friends had written poems as logs or diaries of their lives; I’d know them so much better than I do.
What touches me the most in his collection is this: the poems explore and join the inner and outer worlds of Geoff’s experiences and show the pathways that led him to spiritual insights and deeper understandings. Thoughtfully crafted, they are inspiring reminders of the hidden texts inherent in everyone’s experiences if we would only look, if we would only take the time to write and reflect. The book is filled with delights and surprises. From time to time, he simply lists titles he has given to his nightly dreams. The lists are almost poems in themselves, and add a wonderful note of humor to the seriousness of the poems. He is the only American or Western poet I know who has written about Tantric sexual experiences, about the mystical union in intercourse, and the fall of the soul into the body at birth. I envy him. His poems will make you want to live your own life as fully as you can, as openly as you can, and they will make you want to write down and share your life with others, with family, with friends, with coworkers, to tell your story in your own words, published or not.
Finding a poet we love and admire keeps us on track with our own purposes in writing. And finding one poet often leads us to another, and that to another, and on and on—for a shared lifetime journey of enrichment and pleasure. I’ll end here with one of my favorite Oelsner poems.
FIRST WAYS OF FLIGHT
When in my teens I found
a red-winged blackbird link
to fly my slightest dream
across the prairie, wireless,
tree to tree. Then some trees
splintered into fence posts
in my dreams, and later
became phone poles. Barbed wire
and taut black talk-lines
sliced my flight. They stung
and nettled my dream-body,
just as they overhung and netted
this country. Encroaching suburbs
sometimes held me from
full span. Clenched fists
of smoke from factories;
dense inner cities pulled
on me. Yet I was willingly
drawn to certain altars,
shrines, archways, parks,
side roads, homes, and human
gatherings where primal silence
reasserts itself. Then I could begin
to glide once more on amber
waves of light East-West
above the land. My being
sought sanctuary in mountains
and rivers, estuaries of Spirit.
I rested in slow-breathing meadows
far from men. Night after night,
God moved me in vision-flight
beyond a life I had thought mine,
on through the gray where worlds meet,
into a country where all colors
are sacred and alive.
Throughout this book I refer to the inevitability of growing “circles of awareness.” The American poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that we are in the world to become more and more awake, that the world is designed for the true self or soul’s experiences and awakening. Again in his essay, “Circles,” he writes that the beauty of a circle is that another greater circle can always be drawn or envisioned around it, and that adding circle upon circle can go on infinitely and perhaps forever. He makes us think of a stone thrown into a pond. After the splash, the ripples begin to go outward, ever expanding. Emerson saw all this as symbolic of our consciousness and its growth; inevitably, there is no shore, no limit to our knowing.
What kinds of things grow our consciousness, our circles of awareness? Living—life itself—will grow these circles. That’s in the design of life, for life is movement, change, and, therefore, response and hopefully reflection, new insights and understandings. Reading will grow these circles. Talking with others will grow these circles, especially if we talk with interesting people, people who are also awake and expanding their awareness. Emerson—like his student Henry David Thoreau—also believed that walks in nature expand our awareness. Emerson called nature “the great unread book,” and he thought our time in nature was essential—indeed, indispensable—to our growth. And again, writing grows these circles, for in writing we enter our own silence, our own stillness, and listen.
I want to underscore that growing circles of awareness is not the same as intellectual growth. A person may fill the intellect with all kinds of things and grow very few circles of awareness; in fact, addiction to intellectual learning may even contract one’s circles. Emerson said his work in the world was “to take men drenched in time out of time, to taste their native, immortal air.” He was talking about something far different from the life of the mind. He was talking about moving our consciousness slowly and steadily into a wider, transcendent, or multidimensional awareness.
In today’s terms, we could rightfully call his students “initiates.” In his own day, people who attended his lectures sometimes spoke and wrote afterwards about out-of-body experiences. Some wondered openly if Emerson was an angel visiting the earth. (Emerson would have said emphatically he was not.) Teachers such as Emerson are said to have the ability to open the consciousness of initiates with a word or a look, what Hindus call the darshan. Emily Dickinson met Emerson once, and there are poems by Dickinson that can only be understood if we grasp that she was “soul traveling” in other dimensions, experiencing other realms of both light (often as specific colors) and sound (I heard a fly buzz is not about a fly).
The writing of poems certainly begins with our journey in the physical world. The physical world calls to us, enamors and charms us. It is the place of our first steps, our first understandings. Rightfully, it is so. But then it is our choice whether our consciousness stays there or over time moves beyond the physical into something else. Much has to do with our intention—and much has to do with our commitment and courage.
Almost everyone who knows the name Walt Whitman thinks of him as simply the poet, as the robust, rough-hewn, expansive, and incomparable American bard. But like Emerson, he was so much more than a poet—and like Emerson, Whitman, too, had his followers and initiates. It was no small thing to walk with him in his company. As with Emerson, there was another level of work going on. As with Emerson, the journey was dangerous—a threat to what one already knew or believed, to one’s conditionings, preconceptions, and assumptions. Quite early on in Leaves of Grass, in his poem “Whoever You Are, Holding Me Now in Hand,” Whitman sets forth his call, and his warning.
Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?
The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,
Your novitiate even then would be long and exhausting,
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you
would have to be abandon’d,
Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand
from my shoulders,
Put me down and depart on your way.
The foundation of such a relationship between teacher and student is always unconditional love. Whitman liked to call such a relationship simply “comradeship.” In his own time, and in ours, many have wondered at and questioned Whitman’s relationships with men, missing, I think, the esoteric levels of both his life and his poems. Emerson, in one of his several visits with Whitman, also raised the subject, saying to Whitman that his relationships with men troubled many observers and many of his readers. Whitman asked Emerson, “What do you say they are?” And Emerson replied, “I say they are beautiful.” Emerson and Whitman both understood who they were. They understood the work that was theirs to do. And not needing to, they did not speak about that other subject again.
Emerson’s idea, then, is quite simple. Take whatever you think you know about any subject, about any area of your life—your identity, your childhood, your relationships, your worldview, God, religion, the Spirit, anything—and place it in an imaginary circle. Around that circle, another greater circle can then be drawn. There is more yet to know! In this way, every poem we write—if we write it honestly, if we write it sincerely and with every ounce of truth we possess at that moment—is, or adds, a circle of awareness. Everything we write we will one day revisit. Everything we know will one day be set aside for a wider knowing, a deeper understanding, a still greater awareness.
When I was a college sophomore, one of the first poems I wrote was about the small birds called sandpipers. I had seen them for the first time on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama, when I was a senior in high school. I no longer have a copy of the poem, but the poem was about my identification with the sandpipers, the sense of my own smallness and mortality next to the vastness of the Gulf and the constant and endless breaking of the waves. Thirty years later, sitting with my journal on the boardwalk in Virginia Beach, Virginia, I found myself falling into a conscious but undeniable state of bliss. It was one of those times when a poem wrote itself.
AFTERNOON
The ocean is in me now,
blue distance and white depth,
and their eternal flame.
The tides are in me now,
rocked by the sphere
of the round song.
And that child on the sand
with his pail of toys,
looking out,
it is me he contemplates;
and in the white shell
of his ear,
it is me he hears.
From the beginning this was so,
and is so again.
At twenty, I could never have imagined writing such a poem, but then neither could I have imagined the journey that lay ahead and what my life would become. It always starts with the only life we have. It always starts with the only words we have. It always starts exactly where we are.
• are experiential in origin
• are earned and often involve some form of risk or letting go
• are reached through openness, trust, surrender, acceptance, and humility
• change one’s perceptions
• change the way one lives one’s life
• lead to new experiences
• are sometimes openings where grace pours through (And, for educators):
• are not knowledge found on any standardized test