Braided Creek:  A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press) offers wisdom, sensitive observation and love of essence.  On the book’s back cover, the editors have written that one of the poets said, “This book is an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials.”

According to my Webster’s, a credential is testimony to the fact that someone is entitled to a credit or to exercise official power.  Poetry is a “concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound and rhythm.”

When we write from our personal experience, in poetry or in prose, we are choosing to concentrate our “imaginative awareness of experience” to create emotional response and don’t need a formal okay.  What we do often need are models that can help us articulate this imaginative awareness when we come to the page; these models sometimes allow us, to view a particular imaginative awareness for the first time.

Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser offer many such models in the unsigned two, three, and four line poems they wrote to each other once Kooser was diagnosed with cancer and the two old friends felt what they needed to say to each other was best accomplished in brief poems.

Here is the exchange of two poems that opens the book. Notice how the first poet shares an observation that animates the inanimate and the other responds with a lesson:

How one old tire leans up against
another, the breath gone out of both.

Old friend,
perhaps we work too hard
at being remembered.

And in the following exchange imagery and philosophy again merge seamlessly:

Faucet dripping into a pan,
dog lapping water,
the same sweet music.

The nuthatch is in business
on the tree trunk,
fortunes up and down.

In some lines, drastic action leads to happiness:

 Throw out the anchor,
unattached to a rope.
Heart lifts as it sinks,
Out of my mind at last.

Sometimes, deft sentences record a human stance toward the passage of time:

As a boy when desperate I’d pray with bare knees
on the cold floor.  I still do,
but from the window I look like an old man.

With no barriers between the inanimate and animate, the world comes alive and is reciprocal:

Old white soup bowl
chipped like a tooth,
one of us in always empty.

Personifying time brings the rule of nature into focus:

When Time picks apples,
it eats them with the yellow teeth
of bees.

Making a metaphor for houseflies reminds us how precious a season is, how finite:

A dozen dead houseflies,
bits of green glass from the bottle
of summer, smashed on the sill.

Minimalist images tell the story of death and the way the dead infiltrate the many, so spirit proliferates:

Today a pink rose in a vase
on the table.
Tomorrow, petals.

****

This week, try your hand at conjuring imaginative awareness from your experience by borrowing from the syntax of these two poets.  What you capture might become a poem or an epigraph that introduces an essay.  It might show up in the middle of an essay or in the mouth of a character.  Or, like Kooser and Harrison, you might conduct a conversation with another writer, relying on your ability to say much in a few words and allow the conversation to braid and to build.

Here are a few ideas on how to approach such writing:

• Find an object that inspires affection (the white soup bowl), mention a characteristic using a metaphor that personifies it (chipped like a tooth) and make a statement that compares it to you.
• Write about something that has one shape today (a rose) but will be a different shape tomorrow.
• Write a command to throw something away, small or large (the anchor), and tell how it feels inside having (or imagining having) done that.
• Think of something you did as a child that you still do (pray on bare knees).  What might you look like doing it now?

If you’d like to buddy up with a Writing It Real subscriber to work on a braided conversation, email us and we’ll match you up.  As always, if you’d like to share your writing, I would be pleased to see your exercise results.

You can read more of the poems in Braided Creek by “looking inside” the book at the Amazon.com site.