Where Do Poems Come From?

I just finished reading Nancy Lynee Woo’s book, Bearing the Juice of it All (Finishing Line Press), and I’m in love. Her language is visceral and gripping, her work honest and probing, her structure both sharp and layered. When she agreed to be on The Poetry Saloncast with me and…

There is a flotilla of actual research that suggests kids already think like poets. They notice imagery, think in metaphors, and act as though everything is alive and has human consciousness, from their real pet frog to their stuffed giraffe. All I had to do was introduce a concept like “personification” or “metaphor” and let them dash away with their pens and paper into the happy land of kid speak. They would come back with Pulitzer Prize winning lines like, “Earth, do you enjoy spinning?” or, “I heard a caterpillar’s heart breaking when it turned into a butterfly.” When writing poems about science, one little girl wrote, “Pluto is not a planet. It is a tear the first astronaut cried when he saw our world spinning alone in space.”

The thing about changing your writing, unlike changing your life, is that it is much easier. You don’t have to max out your credit cards on a trip to Italy, find a guru in India, or go to Bali to fall head over heels. (#EatPrayLove.) All you have to do is change your words. Words are the building blocks of poems, and hence, the building blocks of your ideas; your style; your substance. If you change the words, and the way you use them, you change everything – and that means both inside and out.

Many people think they need to feel “inspired” to write, but seasoned writers know that not only is that untrue, “getting inspired” isn’t even a key ingredient. Sometimes the best work you can do is done not out of inspiration, but out of sheer panic, under perfect duress, when you…

As a poet, and full-time poetry teacher from California, I sometimes take for granted that poetry is everywhere, that it is for everyone, and that it can be used to help us all communicate with one another during difficult times. Interviewing the brave, incisive poet Kai Coggin about her newest…

I was in a poetry workshop where a talented poet wrote, “I had to burn my brother’s body in order to stay alive during the night.”

I responded, “Oh, how sweet; the brother sacrifices himself in order to keep the sister alive.”

My neighbor said, “No, that’s not it. She’s empowered. She killed her brother in order to take care of herself.”

The instructor said, “You can shorten this to ‘I burned my brother and lived off the warmth.’”

The writer said, “I have no brother. Everything in this poem is a lie.”

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Stop this day and night with me and you will know the secret to poetry – Walt Whitman In 2019, months before the Pandemic began, my husband and I moved to Costa Rica to take a little sabbatical. After almost three years here the sabbatical has taught me more than…

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Americans have a funny relationship to money. We think that money will buy happiness, and unhappiness will bring us money.

From a young age, I knew I wanted to spend my life making art (poetry hadn’t yet entered my existence), but I also really, really wanted to have money. I worried that if I did something that made me happy, like futzing with poetry and making a mess with finger paints, I would have no money. So, I compromised and became an English teacher, which sometimes made me happy, sometimes made me very depressed, often made me tired, and absolutely did not make me rich.

We are here to help one another get through ‘this’ whatever ‘this’ is. –     Kurt Vonnegut   One of the things I find so intriguing about living through this pandemic is how I feel both overwhelmed by all the rapid changes of the world, at the same time I…

“Even singing a sad song requires an absolute happiness.” – Galway Kinnel   Can you make poetry fun, even when it is about serious subjects? I’ve been reading Cameron Morse’s sixth book of poetry, Far Other (Woodley Press, November, 2020). It focuses on the questions of mortality, spirituality, and the…

When I tell non-artists that I am a professional poet, this is the gist of the conversation that typically follows: “Really?” “Yes.” “You’re kidding.” “No.” “You can make a living doing that?” “Yes.” (long pause) “Huh.” They mostly can’t think of much to say after that. I suspect they think…

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I never have writer’s block, and my husband hates me for it.

If you ask him, or any of my friends or family really, they will affirm that expressing what I’m thinking is not my issue. There are no end of things to discuss and no end to my valuable opinions about them, and since most of my friends know this and avoid taking my calls as a result, I have nobody to tell about my opinions except the page. The page never talks back. It’s a great listener. When I write a first draft, I don’t care if it is good because I can always delete it before some analog human comes along with opinions that are different than mine (i.e. wrong).