One book I return to occasionally is Poem Crazy: Freeing Your Life with Words. If you are prone to poetry writing at all, I highly recommend it. In my opinion much poetry is just dreadful to read -- either too abstract or too much about feelings, rather than evoking some. And other poems are deliberately too dense, leaving you with nothing more than a WHAT? I hate poems like that; they lack respect for the reader's time and attention. But Poem Crazy is good medicine for what ails your poetry, and I'm thinking of reading it again.
I guess I'm thinking of reading it again because I've been thinking about poetry again. I haven't written much poetry in the last five years, but I got the spark when my beloved childhood friend sent me her 12-year-old daughter's poem in the mail. I keep forgetting to ask her permission to post the poem here, but if she allows me to, I'll post it sometime soon. It is nothing short of astounding, and I hope she lets me share it. It brought tears to my eyes when I read it -- because it's such a wonderful poem, but also because this lovely girl has the flame of poetry inside her. I love that I can be inspired by a 12-year-old's work, and I'm grateful too.
On Friday I had Son2 write a list of Spring words. I do this to him occasionally, and he hates it. Oh well. It's a great exercise (one recommended in a few variations in Poem Crazy), and it creates some fertile ground for poetry writing. This morning when I walked the dog, I thought about my own Spring words as I listened to all the different bird songs and observed the tentative signs of life. They started stringing themselves together into phrases and ideas, and I know a poem will be coming soon. If (or when) I'm happy with it, then maybe I'll post it.
In the meantime, I'll leave you with a Spring poem I wrote a few years ago:
The Oriole
Will our orioles return with the daffodils?
Arrest our attention with their treetop song?
Will they weave another basket to dangle
precipitously
from the end of the slimmest of branches?
Will they lose another nestling
whose wings cannot bear it to safety?
Do those treetop dwellers remember?
With what dreams do they greet the spring?
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4 comments:
I totally agree with the last four sentences of your first paragraph. Those are the reasons I don't read poetry. Maybe I lack depth, but I need a reason to commit the time and energy needed to wade through most poetry, and if I have to read the first sentence three times just to get a sense of what the subject matter is, well, I have other entertainments.
Peaj, I hardly think you lack depth. I just think most poets overestimate the depth of our interest in them and their poetry. I'm a pretty simple person. I like poetry to be accessible but also to help me look at something in a new way.
You'd be surprised at how very shallow I can be.
Ecclesiastes 1:2 - Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
I've always loved your simple style Nina, and it is inspiring. Peaj, what I think I heard you say is that if a poem does not grip you with its first words, then it is too strenuous. I agree. It should be as easy as hearing a new song and loving it from the first notes. I am working on whittling words when I write. I want them few, but not sparse. Frankly, I don't care if anyone understands what I write. I write for me. And if I like the words and their timbre, and they release my inner thoughts, then I am more free -- even if no one gets it. If you write for others, then Nina, you're right, the poet must be respectful of the reader to not be ambiguous or obtuse.
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