Why poetry?

Wandering through a local bookstore the other day, I came across Dorianne Laux’s Finger Exercises for Poets (Norton, 2024) on the poetry shelf, and, intrigued by the title, read a few pages and couldn’t resist buying the book and taking it home.

Laux, a poet whose work includes Only as the Day is Long, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, teaches in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University. Her book is filled with the kind of wisdom about writing and poetry that will inspire you to rush to your desk and begin writing. 

“This is what I think all poetic narratives seek to do,” writes Laux, “create stories within stories, layer upon layer of feeling and meaning, spinning it out like a spider, weaving this delicate net that holds time and space, image and language, clarity and mystery.”

Have you ever wondered what happens when we write a poem? 

Here’s Laux’s response to that question: 

“When we write a poem, we dissolve into the universe, and wake up refreshed and alive.”

“Each poem,” according to Laux, “is a thank-you note to that miracle. To each day we have been given as a gift.”

And if you’ve ever wondered why we write or read poetry, you might enjoy what Laux has to say in the section of her book, “Why Poetry?”:

You may as well ask, Why sunsets? Why bicycles? Why gnats and human beings? Why trees? Why the small and larger things that make up this world? Why stars? Why dust? We swirl around and inside of chaos. The word we’re born into is a noisy, messy, confusing place full of moments of boredom and surprise. We are in the center of our lives always, and yet there are times we feel on the outside looking in, a question on our lips, unable to formulate it, or if we do manage to find words, speak them, we can only hope they can capture some of what that chaotic world inside feels like. And if we do, if we are able, for a moment, the world both without and within simultaneously stills, sits motionless between ourselves and others, ourselves and the world. We feel a semblance of satisfaction and achievement, something like joy.

And she shares what Tu Fu, who is considered one of China’s greatest poets of the Tang dynasty, has to say about poetry: “Poetry is like being alive, twice.”

In Laux’s words, “poetry is a place set aside in the imagination, in the soul, for pure making, pure being. Most of our lives are spent in prescribed fashion, where to go, what to wear, who to meet when, to what purpose? Our thoughts are taken mostly with questions of preparation, execution, completion.”

“This is why poetry: to carve a moment out of the chaos,” writes Laux, “to live the moments we are most alive into what we are built to be, sense-making and nonsense-making machines, all our powers working together: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, fully being in this world we’ve been given as a gift, making it ours through art, and then giving it away.”

For more information about Dorianne Laux and her work, visit: https://www.doriannelaux.net/

Between the lines: Nadia Colburn’s "I Say The Sky"

A good friend who knows how much I love reading (and writing) poems mailed me a copy of Nadia Colburn’s collection of poems, I Say The Sky (University Press of Kentucky), which contains the kind of poems that help open a reader’s eyes to the wonders and beauty of our world.

In one of the poems, “March,” I love the way Colburn explores the passing of winter and the coming spring and how she draws parallels to what might be melting in us.

“What in you needs melting?” she writes.

“What do you do with your anger and your hope?”

And I love the way she begins the poem:

All winter, we walked on the fallen sky,

walked on clouds until we fell, thigh deep, to earth.

How do you make sense of the line “All winter, we walked on the fallen sky”?

What image does “the fallen sky” bring to mind?

When I read the next line… “walked on clouds until we fell, thigh deep, to earth”… I felt as if the clouds themselves had fallen to earth.

And that image of walking on clouds, as if the sky has fallen, led me to wonder how and why Colburn was comparing the clouds to snow, or snow to clouds.

It’s as if the snow itself is made of clouds, and, to carry the image further, as if we ourselves are made of the same stuff as the clouds— the condensation that forms the clouds— so that it’s as if we ourselves have fallen to earth.

And listen to how she takes the image of clouds further in the next stanza:

Now the clouds are running down the side of the mountain

in small hidden rivers.

Isn’t that just how spring comes?

Snowmelt runs swiftly down mountainsides in small, almost hidden rivers?

Clouds turn to snow that turns to streams… in the way that each spring the world transforms itself, changing again from one form of being to another.

Just like humans, who, like the earth, change and awaken in hidden places that we cannot see until growth occurs.

Colburn alludes to these hidden changes:

All night, down the side of the mountain,

Waters run together where we cannot see.

And again: “Underneath, the earth is awakening.”

And spring comes again each March:

Once more the tips of bare branches

put out new buds.

And in a final stroke of brilliance, she writes:

Again they clasp

their small palms together in prayer.

It’s this final line that brings together heaven and earth in such a powerful way, a moment of new buds clasping one another like palms brought together in prayer.

In making this connection, Colburn takes her readers into an annual rite of passage, the transformation of the earth (and of us), a moment when human and divine seem to come together.

“March” is a poem that contains these gem-like miracles, just as the other poems in this collection contain similar gems.

Thanks to Colburn for bringing such a wonderful collection of poems into the world, and thanks to my good friend for sharing Colburn’s work with me.

If you’d like to read more about Nadia Colburn, visit: 

https://nadiacolburn.com/

You can read her poem, “March,” and other poems here: https://nadiacolburn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Ten-Poems-revised-2.pdf

Waiting for as long as it takes

No matter how many poems you’ve read or
how many pages you’ve turned,

no matter how many rhymes and
line breaks you’ve heard,

no matter how much you want to add your voice
to the poems already in the world,

no matter how long you hold your pen
over the page,

you still have to wait for the words to come,
still have to learn patience

and how to surrender
to the mystery of silence,

still have to admit you don’t know anything,
still have no idea where the words come from

or how they make their way from their source
onto the page (through you),

still need to close your eyes and pray
words will appear on the page,

that your hand will welcome
whatever comes,

still need to promise you’ll wait
for as long as it takes

because it’s what you do
for what you love.
—

On the power of poetry

Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the US, shares her thoughts on writing and the power of poetry in a slim volume, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry (Scribner). 

When she begins writing, Limón notes, she wants to make something true and asks herself questions: 

"Do I want to break something, or do I want to mend something? Or simply try to carve out a small place to breathe?"

And if she's lucky, she says, "if I'm quiet enough, lines of poems I love start to move through me. They come to me as if through a necessary beckoning."

Limón suggests that one of the secret powers of poetry is the way a poem connects us to other voices. 

"This is the secret power of poetry. Little engines of sound urging us on, telling us we are not alone, because we can't be; we are  connected to the readers and writers of poetry."

Is any poem ever a failure, she asks, because it goes unpublished or unshared?

"No, because didn't it make you pay attention, the act of writing? Didn't you, even briefly, feel as if you inhabited the world? Didn't it, for a moment, make you feel connected to language? Didn't you find a container for your heart?"

Is there a way to learn how to write a poem?

"While there are ways to teach poetry," Limón says, "mostly we learn by reading and writing, writing and reading, and then going out into the terrifying world and feeling so much that those feelings threaten to collapse us onto the concrete, facedown and forever ruined by human cruelty or even love. And then something happens; there's some moment when you think, a little gravel on your cheek, 'This suffering might make for a good poem.' Or, 'This wonder might make for a good poem.'"

One of the other secret powers of poetry, she writes, is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make money writing poems, which allows poetry to remain subversive. "Poetry has the benefit of being outside economic systems."

"Is that a fancy way of saying that poetry doesn't make money? Yes. But it's more than that: Poetry is meant to be free, it's meant to be given, it's meant to travel one poem at a time, like pollen from a tree floating through the air to make more trees. Poems travel that same way. And because of that, they remain sacred, unbothered by trappings of the usual oppressive systems."

Another reason why poetry is powerful, according to Limón, is because of its existence in questions without forcing answers. 

"It's the opposite of a polemic, or a prescription; instead, it's an interrogation of the world and one's place within it. That said, even though it doesn't hold answers, perhaps it is an answer."

Why write or read poetry? 

"At this very moment we need to gather strength and resilience and compassion in any way that we can," Limón writes. "Perhaps poetry, for you, is the secret place where you can get to be as free and as safe as you can; perhaps you can make that blank page a place where you can lay down everything you need to lay down. Maybe it's where you go to get stronger; maybe it's where you go to become softer. But know there is a place that you can make on the page that no one controls but you. In that, right there, is a mighty power."

To learn more about Ada Limón and her work, visit: https://adalimon.com/

Between the lines: Jody Gladding's "Blue Willow"

 I found Gladding’s poem, “Blue Willow,” in Poetry 108, an anthology of poems that Billy Collins selected, and immediately felt as if her words cast a magic spell, pulling me into the poem so strongly that I wasn’t just reading the words on the page, I felt as if I was inside the poem, somehow inhabiting the space she had created with the words on the page. 

How did she do that?

Reading between the lines, there’s a mystery contained in the poem’s first line:

A pond will deepen toward the center like a plate

There’s the image of a pond that she brings to mind, not just any pond but one that “deepens toward the center,” and you can almost see the pond getting darker in the middle where the water is deepest, in the center. 

And then she compares the pond to a plate—and that comparison helps you to see the pond even more clearly because we’ve all seen how plates have that slightly deeper area in the center.

And it’s not only that she’s showing you the pond, she’s raising the question: who is giving this description of the pond? And why?

And she gives us the answer to these questions in the next two lines:

We trace its shallow rim my mother steering

my inner tube past the rushes where I looked

This is where I think she’s pulled me fully into the poem by adding to the vision of the pond. Now we’re in the shallow edge along the rim, and we discover the narrator is a child floating in an inner tube, being pushed/steered by her mother. And I feel as if I’m in the inner tube with her, part of this memory she’s sharing, and, like her, trying to see past the rushes. What’s there? What’s she looking at? What comes next?

And the answer is revealed in the next line: 

for Moses we said it was a trip around the world

How I love the way the rushes remind the narrator of a memory, a story that she’s read (or been told or heard) about Moses, the baby, placed for safety in the rushes… 

And I also love how the mother and child say their joint venture—the mother steering the inner tube with her child in it—is a trip around the world, and the child imagines sailing around the world. 

And we become part of their imaginary game, wondering where we’ll go next. 

I’m fully inside the poem here, inside the child’s imagination, inside the adult poet’s memory of this precious time, this scene of childhood unfolding, this time without punctuation, a time when moments and imaginings flow one into the next, as if time is an endless river that will never end. 

And the poem goes on, taking the reader on an imaginary voyage to China, pushing through willow branches overhanging the shallow rim of the pond that tickle her neck, seeing swallows overhead that later the child dreams about joining. 

This is a poem about childhood and feeling safe within a mother’s grasp yet curious about exploring the world around her and in her imagination. And it’s a poem about how time feels to a child like it will last forever, and how the adult poet (in the last line) knows it can’t last… 

If you’d like to read the poem, visit: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-146/blue-willow/

And if you’d like to know more about Jody Gladding, visit: 

https://www.jodygladding.org

Letter Box: The geometry of loss

It's excruciatingly hard to describe the pain of losing a young mother, to return to the moment when she took her last breath and then, filled with grief and anger and pain, to try and move on.

But that's what award-winning poet Rick Black has done in his newest book, Letter Box: the geometry of loss, as visualized by illustrator Warren Lehrer. 

For years Black (full disclosure: he's my brother) searched for a way to write about his grief, anger, and pain. 

Only after years of mourning was he able to find the balance between silence and the words that would help him heal from the loss that he suffered as a young man.

His haiku-like vision of grief probes the very essence of what it means to confront death and suffer loss, while in the process he reveals the discovery that led him over time to a place of acceptance, a place where he could begin to understand the pain he felt as part of life and which, ultimately, led to healing.

Letter Box reads like an intense graphic poem thanks to the powerful illustrations that Lehrer has created to interpret Black's words. 

Some pages have only a word: "Why?"

Others have multiple combinations of words: "We all live between parentheses."

He asks questions like "How do I turn the page?"

And he makes statements like "Grief isn't about understanding."

In the end, he provides an Afterword offering some background to how he came to write the book.

I confronted a dilemma. I was looking for a new way to write, a way for words to carry the full weight of their meaning. Neither established forms of poetry nor prose but something different. Was there a way to write about my grief, to remember, but also to let go, too?

For more than 40 years, I had been trying to tell the story of my mother's death, her painful last months and our family's struggle to deal with it. Words always piled up inside; they got in my way or in the way of each other. What would come first? Or second? How to describe what she had endured? How to convey the depth of emotions inside me? 

If you get a chance to read a copy, you'll find that Black gives readers a remarkably fearless and honest account of the toll that mourning can take. 

And he gives readers hope, too, that in time one can overcome grief and find a way to heal.

For more info about Letter Box, visit: https://www.turtlelightpress.com/products/letter-box-the-geometry-of-loss/

And for more info about Rick Black, visit: https://www.turtlelightpress.com/about-us/rick-black-owner-founding-editor/

To learn more about Warren Lehrer, visit: https://warrenlehrer.com/

Prompts for poems

Prompts for poems

can come from anywhere.

An unexpected letter from a college friend

that triggers a memory.

A slant of light that rekindles

another time and place.

The taste of chocolate (I'm remembering the taste

of chocolate icing on my grandfather's cupcakes).

The smell of the sea, 

of saltwater.

The memory of summer vacations at the shore,

the sound of a seagull's laughter.

Poems are like the air--

invisible but everywhere.

You can inhale them

with each breath.

You can taste them before 

the words form on your tongue.

You can see them

if you open your eyes.

Letters between friends

There’s a special feeling that you get when you hold the new book of an author whose work you've loved in the past. 

It’s a little like when you meet an old friend on the street and she shares good news with you, or maybe like when you return to a favorite spot and find it’s the same but different, still special but with a newness that wasn’t there before. 

That’s how I felt when I held my copy of Joyce Sidman’’s Dear Acorn (Love, Oak): Letter Poems to Friends by Joyce Sidman (Illustrated by Melissa Sweet). 

What a remarkable collection of letters in the form of poems that friends send to each other. 

The “friends,” however, are different than you might expect. 

Imagine an oak tree sending a letter to an acorn, or an acorn responding with a letter of its own. 

And what if a bubble could write a letter to sky?

Dear Sky,

Hello! It’s me, Bubble!

I’m here!

Someone breathed me

awake!

Or what if baby sea turtles could share a poem with the ocean, and the ocean could respond with a poem of its own to all the creatures who live in its water?

Not only is Dear Acorn a collection of love letters between friends, it’s a book where each poem and illustration connect us more deeply to each other and to the world around us, and encourage us to use our imaginations to envision the world in a way that makes it clear how all of life is interconnected. 

Melissa Sweet’s illustrations are perfect compliments to the poems and equally wonderful, bringing to life Sidman’s words and offering readers a world in these pages as colorful and enthralling as the world itself.

Here’s Oak writing to Acorn:

Dear Acorn,

I feel you there,

a tickle at my twig tips,

a plump promise

against my rough bark.

Your whole life ahead of you

and weeks till you fall.

Take a good look around, Acorn.

Drink in the view.

The next stop is earth.

Then years upon years

until you see this sky

this high

again.

I’ll be waiting,

Oak

And here’s Acorn’s response:

Dear Oak,

I am round and ready. Bursting

with hope, crammed with possibilities.

I know I must drop and sleep andrtificate

sprout and grow. So slow! But then,

Oak, I’ll stretch up my arms,

strong and true. I’ll be your

friend, the one who rises

up beside you.

Love,

Acorn

For budding poets (young and old), Sidman includes a handful of suggestions for how to write your own letter poems, such as how to choose a subject, what to think about, and how to begin writing a poem. 

I hope you’ll get the chance to pick up your own copy of Dear Acorn (Love, Oak): Letter Poems to Friends from a bookstore or library near you and enjoy Sidman’s poems and Sweet’s illustrations. 

It’s a marvelous collection that helps both adults and children see the world anew. 

Out of nowhere

It’s so strange how poems

come out of nowhere

like clouds passing by

like birds soaring overhead

fluttering to a branch for just a moment

suddenly still

then flying off again

or like rabbits 

hiding in the grass

playing a game of hide-and-seek

or peek-a-boo. 

Catch me if you can!

What if you think of your pen 

as a butterfly net chasing words, 

trying to catch your thoughts 

before they disappear?

Or maybe writing is like fishing—

casting your line into the water, 

waiting for something to bite, 

an odd mix of waiting and hoping, 

trying not to get discouraged,

wanting words to appear on the page.

And when they appear, 

you have to act quickly, 

your pen racing across the page 

trying to capture the words 

as they spill out of your heart.

It's quiet this morning

Poems are hiding lately--

playing hide-and-seek

over the past few weeks--

unwilling to answer

the door when I knock.

Are they sleeping

or just shy?

Too tired to play

or busy working 

on a secret project?

The page is lonely and

sad without words

running across it today, 

words chasing words 

playing tag and peek-a-boo

laughter and cries of glee

rising from the page.

It's quiet this morning

the page wrapped in silence

the words still asleep

hibernating 

waiting, perhaps, 

for spring 

If you stay in bed

This morning I lay in bed before
the alarm went off wondering about
the shape of my day and what would
happen if I didn't go to my desk to
write before doing anything else.

It was the first time in months
that I thought about switching
my routine.

I lay there thinking
I don't have anything to say,
so why bother to get up and
sit at my desk with pen in hand
waiting for words that will never come?

But then my alarm went off and
out of habit I went to my desk
and sat down and took a pen in hand
and opened my journal to a blank page
and found the words waiting there
I couldn't see while lying in bed.

Maybe I'm just inherently lazy?

Or maybe it's just an illusion,
and you can't see it as an illusion
(that's the nature of an illusion)
until you get out of bed?

Or maybe writing comes down to habit--
a routine, a reminder to sit at your desk,
a need to find, through the familiar,
what's not yet known?

You don't know what you'll write
until you pick up your pen and begin.

If you stay in bed or go for a walk
instead of sitting down to write,
you'll never know what words are
waiting to give themselves to you.

Some Mornings

Some mornings

I sit at my desk

the way a man

might sit on the shore

and gaze out at

the water of a lake

or the sea watching

the patterns of light

and clouds shifting

on the surface.

Some mornings

I sit at my desk

and gaze at the

empty page as if

it’s the still surface

of a pond, unruffled

by the wind, undisturbed

by the fish swimming

below, a mirror reflecting

the sky above without

giving a hint at the mystery

that is hidden below.

Some mornings

I sit at my desk

and wait for words

to appear, for the slightest

hint of movement,

for a sign of life,

and I listen to my

breath and close

my eyes and wait.

Some mornings

I sit at my desk

and nothing appears

and I hear only

the drone of the fan

spinning on the ceiling

and the sound of

my breath when I inhale

or the sound of someone

else in the house putting

a teapot on the stove

to boil.

Some mornings

I sit at my desk

and watch the surface

of the page ripple

with life, words swimming

across the paper tugging

at the lines I dropped

in the water, filling

nets, the page awash

with words, overflowing

with words, words spilling

over the edge of one page

and falling onto another.

Some mornings

I sit at my desk

full of faith

that words will

come and I will

be able to catch

them with my pen.

Some mornings
I sit at my desk

not knowing if anything

will appear, filled

with doubt and anxiety

that I’ll starve,

that I’ll hear nothing

but silence the rest

of my life, that I’ll

drown not in words

but in the pages

of an empty journal.

Some mornings

I sit at my desk

and wonder

at the miracle of

creation—of love

and life, and words

and stories,

of ink and charcoal

and wood pulp

and forests and

rivers and seas,

of clouds and sky

and wind and rain,

of how the miracle

of each breath

is filled

with poetry.

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