…if you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.

— Rollo May, The Courage to Create

It’s National Poetry Month and time to rededicate ourselves to following Rollo May’s advice when it comes to writing poetry (and personal essays, too).

A good start is to recognize and value our poetic intelligence. In 1983, Harvard educator Howard Gardner published his book Frame of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, a ground-breaking work that argues for the recognition of human competencies that are separate intelligences in addition to the mathematical and verbal ones currently accepted and measured by IQ tests. Gardner writes that the poet possesses a high degree of competency with the core operations of language: sensitivity to the meaning of words, sensitivity to the order among words, sensitivity to the sounds, rhythms, inflections and meters of words, and sensitivity to language’s ability to excite, convince, stimulate, convey information or to please. A poet knows that how something is said is part of the message, part of what is being said. A poet listens to sounds and words in drafting a poem until each communicates the form of a newly discovered insight, a glimpse of a mystery or understanding and capture the emotions that ignited a desire to write the poem.

Poetic intelligence is bashed in a culture that jingle-izes messages to make us purchase and consume, that fills the air with noise to block our knowledge of our own specific yearnings, that uses language to displace meaning that, as poet Stephen Dunn writes in walking light, urges on us “the capitalistic ethic of acquisition rather than contemplation, the celebration of things rather than soul.”

But more and more, among writers, therapists, theologians and scholars such as Thomas Moore (Soul Making), Julia Cameron (The Artists’ Way), David Whyte (The Heart Aroused) and Deena Metzger (Writing For Your Life) promote contemplation. We can empower ourselves to write poetry by using these authors and others for support in valuing our poetic intelligence and using it. They ask us to be, to explore our beings, and to treasure our insights. We understand from them, “that poetry is a form of knowledge and that the poet’s mode of thinking is a valid means of understanding the mortal world…” (Don Cameron Allen, The Moment of Poetry)

 Thinking this way, we realize that our feelings are of consequence. In an essay called, “The Social Function of Poetry,” T. S. Eliot said about the poet:

…he is making people more aware of what they feel already, and therefore teaching them something about themselves. But he is not merely a more conscious person than the others; he is also individually different from other people, and from other poets too, and can make his readers share consciously in new feelings, which they had not experienced before. That is the difference between the writer who is merely eccentric or mad and the genuine poet. The former may have feelings, which are unique, but which cannot be shared, and are therefore useless; the latter discovers new variations of sensibility, which can be appropriated by others.

We help ourselves exercise this intelligence by joining or creating a poetry writing group; by becoming an audience to poets both by attending public readings and by reading their work in books and magazines; and by arranging space in our lives for the contemplation and perception that lead to writing poetry.

Some of us require a whole room, others only a favorite spot by a window. Some of us start our work away from home in a cafe or parked in our cars where no one can interrupt us. Some of us need physical activity to jog our beings into rising clear of the chorus of errands and obligations. Think about yourself and provide yourself a place to write or read or think, a way to make the transitions you may need to “get” to this place (running, biking, swimming, walking, preparing tea, gardening, showering, eating sweets), some regular time in your day, night, or week to do this, and some supplies–books of poetry, paper, pens (I have never started a poem on the computer).

Don’t get hung up on the place and time and supplies being perfect or “poetic.” In fact, start without a huge investment that you must live up to or you may find yourself trapped. It is hard to write “well enough” to appease concern with materials. (i.e. Is my writing good enough for this fine leather-bound notebook?) It is just as hard to appease a preconceived notion about what is a spiritual or meaningful enough spot to be an okay writer’s place. (If you can only write where there are fresh flowers, white walls and total silence you may be getting too out of this world to include much of the world in your writing.)

A spiral notebook or loose-leaf paper or legal pads, a Bic pen or a pen from your insurance agent will work just fine–as long as it is there. You can keep a regular writer’s journal with you at all times or instead just keep paper and pen in your car (those pads suction cupped to the dash work great or Post-its or merely a pad on the seat next to you), near your bed for when you wake from sleep, and in your purse or briefcase (here notebooks with covers are probably more useful because they are sturdier). Once you decide to write poetry, lines and ideas arrive teasingly at the times you are least prepared to set them down. You must learn to accommodate their arrival.

You have probably seen how the things you are intrigued with and the ones that settle you down make their way into your writing spot the more you use it. And, of course, lots of times most of us have to get away from my writer’s place to actually write. I have found that I can write in a Laundromat, but I can’t write in trendy coffeehouses because the tables full of people writing furiously in their journals intimidates me–I think I feel as I did as a kid in school during exams and achievement tests. Poet and doctor William Carlos Williams wrote in the driver’s seat of his car parked outside patients’ houses when he made house calls. Wherever you go to write, though, be sure to have one or two poetry books with you. Reading them is a way of being among and listening to like-minded and like-hearted people. It is a way of filling yourself with the sounds of contemplation and the search for insight and knowing. It is a way of getting yourself to the place where you, too, are ready to speak and think that way.

Whatever time you schedule will work just fine, or if it wants to change, it will make you change it. Poetry works that way. It is the boss. Perhaps you have already found yourself suddenly up at 5 o’clock each morning scribbling or up later at night, or off in a sunny corner during lunch at work, or stopping in a park by a lake between errands or between work and coming home.

You might find yourself organizing your weekends differently and relishing 24 hours without commitments other than to the writing. Art often comes to us after we have been working to dig it out of ourselves and have given up, left our desk and gone to relax. It is good to find some time in your life where you are the one who feels your way into these transitions between trying hard and relaxing, rather than having them imposed by others’ demands and schedules. Insight does come concerning the life questions we are asking, but to get it, you might need to be alone. When you are alone you stand a better chance of attaching to what the late poet Richard Hugo called a “triggering” subject. For Hugo, the triggering subject was often a town he was new to. For others it is an object or an expression on someone’s face, the sound of something, or a taste in the mouth. Whatever it is that causes you to start writing, in describing the triggering subject you find your real subject.

Wanting to write and giving yourself space and permission to do so are not enough in themselves, though, without a certain confidence in yourself that you will follow through with the writing and that you will begin to write poetry no matter how “bad” you think your beginning efforts are. In fact, you must begin with the idea that there is no “bad” writing, that all first efforts and even many revisions create the opportunity for good writing.

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Here are a dozen ways you can help yourself feel solid about beginning to write poetry and sticking to writing poetry:

Remember that you do not have to tell anyone you are doing this.

Remember that you do not have to justify, even to yourself, that you are doing this.

Remember that you must not judge anything that you are writing as worthy or unworthy.

Remember that you must keep writing.

Refrain from whining about not having enough time or energy to write; do not think

that only under altered circumstances would you be able to write. Instead, go and

write and go and write some more; your circumstances will alter themselves.

Refrain from telling yourself you are a bad writer, a dilettante, or lacking wisdom.

Instead, tell yourself you are committed to writing and to letting the words and craft help

you see and understand.

Read what poets have said about writing.

Keep a notebook of your favorite quotes from this reading. Or post the

quotes on the wall where you write or tape them to your desk.

Notice the good press poetry is getting: articles in newspapers about

poets, programs on National Public Radio and Public Television, appointments of state and national Poet Laureates, impressive anthologies at bookstores.

Notice how good you feel after you have spent even a few minutes reading a poem.

Remember this feeling.

This month, take the time to develop at least five changes in your daily or weekly schedule that allow you to make poetry central in your life. Write a list of what you have done to make this so. Keep a journal of your thoughts and feelings about these changes. Be sure there are at least five changes and five entries. Send them to me and I’ll compile a list that fellow writers will appreciate.

If after you’ve prepared the “place” for poetry, material doesn’t spring to mind, here are some exercises to try:

After you have made your list and paid attention to the place you write from, just to shake things up a bit, go out, with the intention of writing a poem later, to a cafe or store or other place where people gather. Write down four sentences that you overhear. Come back to the place where you write and create a poem that uses each of the four sentences. There are several ways to do this:

1. Write a title that tells where you were when you heard these words–i.e. “Standing in the Check Out Line at Safeway.” List the dialogue in the first lines of your poem and go on from there evoking the situation in which they were overheard.

2. Make each line the opening of a new stanza. Write your own response to each line. This can be conversation of your own or never-meant-to-be-spoken, meditative thoughts. When you are done, see if you can title this work in a way that draws the stanzas together — i.e. “Tuesday Afternoon Meditation in Star bucks.”

3. Write a poem that incorporates each of the four lines of dialogue into it as if they were just lines in the poem. You may find it useful to write more than four overheard sentences and then use the ones that are most lyrical, interesting, or suggestive for your poem.

If you’d like to try another exercise, think about the letters and postcards, email and voicemail you send and receive. How many ways can you use these various mails to help generate poems? Following are a few of my ideas.

Voice Mail

1. Write a different greeting message for every day of the week or for every month or for every season.

2. Write messages you might leave for someone on certain days such as the equinox, the full moon, or the new moon.

Postcards

1. Think of someone who would imagine that your daily life takes place in a vacation spot of choice. Send them a series of postcard messages from your home that will help them see things this way.

2. Think of occasions that are not usually handled by postcard–asking someone to marry you, resigning a job, or filing your taxes. Write a postcard message poem to someone upon such an occasion. Think of exactly what is on the other side of this postcard–where you are writing form, why you chose this card.

Book Rate

When you mail printed material book rate, you are not supposed to have included a personal letter or any handwritten information in the envelope. Imagine a message for someone you might sneak into a parcel sent book rate–would you type it and put it between the pages? Would you write it in ink on the inside cover of the book? Would you Xerox it and put the copy in the package? Why would you send someone a message book rate? Would you be hoping for the message to be a surprise, for the recipient to come across it unexpectedly upon opening the book or turning the pages? Write a poem that is the message. Use a title to reveal who you are writing to and where you’ve written this message.

Send me the results of these exercises or post them on the WIR Community page. I believe if you do the exercises, you will find yourself on the way to making your contribution to the whole and feeling all the better for it.