It’s National Poetry Month and I am celebrating poets I know whose work I have been following both in their books and by attending readings in my town and surrounding areas. Each of the next weeks, I will publish a poem by each of three of these poets along with their own words about their poem and its creation. I’ll share my ideas for how you can base a writing strategy for your own work on what they have shared with us. Here’s to writing poetry (and reading it!). But truth be told, you can apply the ideas to prose writing as well (so here’s to writing lyric prose!).

 Gary Anderson is a Poulsbo, WA poet, whose work reflects his interest in his Finnish ancestors.

Eulogy
by Gary Anderson

For Marie, the best damned fisherwoman a dozer operator
could have hoped to know

Those were the last best days.

Diesel smoke and mineral soil,
the good earth smells of logging
on the upper Naselle.

Down stream,
the uneven ground of the riverbank
welcomed the fresh-caught steelhead,
an oki-drifter hanging from its mouth.

One more cast before the cat skinner comes home.

Another

Another

— from My Finnish Soul, Shelter Bay Publishing

Gary writes of this poem:

The last best days were days of innocence – for the environment and for our lives. Marie, my mother’s sister, was one of the most significant women in my life. She once told me I was handsome and I have not heard that but once since. And then there is the romantic notion that you should drive a dozer through a creek while steelhead are returning to spawn.

You can find both of Gary’s books, My Finnish Soul, and Bunch Grass and Buttercups: The Deep River Suite on Amazon, where you can also “look inside.”

Writing Idea from Sheila Inspired by the Poem “Eulogy” by Gary Anderson
I had to use the Internet to learn the lingo Gary employs: a oki-drifter is a fishing lure; a cat skinner is a bulldozer operator. The upper Naselle is a river in Washington State that flows into Willapa Bay in the southwest section of the state and then into the Pacific.
The last best days — a time in the poet’s life, a place in the poet’s life when hard work and the land and a friend who fishes are a mix for perfection. And there is a lingering there, a casting caught in the forever of memory: Another / Another.

And now perhaps Marie, to whom the poem is dedicated, has died; certainly the land now bulldozed is changed and the days of years ago are gone except in memory. It seems to me the eulogy is for all three–maybe even for the plentitude of salmon.With great economy and the reliance on specific names and terms, the poet has done his work, allowing all to resonate against the title.

Try your had at a eulogy for someone you cared for. Place yourself in a location where you shared time. Use terms from the activity you engaged in there. What word might end your poem? “Another” works for imitating the act of casting. And it helps us linger in the poem as the poet lingers in the time of the poem. If you are writing about swimming, the word might be two words: backstroke and breast stroke. If you are writing about cooking, you might come to the word stirring / stirring. You get the idea. To thank Gary for the strategy, you can write “With Thanks to Gary Anderson, “Eulogy” in My Finnish Soul” under your poem’s title as an epigraph.

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Terry Persun is a Port Townsend, WA poet and writer, whose prose and poetry is widely published.

Bottle Cap
by Terry Persun

Shining
in the back
of the crawl space,
under the half-finished
porch still bare except
for floorboards torn
from the old barn up the road,
the one that stood there thirty
years or more before falling in
on its own, was an old bottle cap
from a long-drunk beer my father
probably nursed after working hours
at the tannery down town near the creek.
It’s reflection of what little light
there was under the house reminded
me of how his eyes gleamed one
bright time just before he fell
asleep on the old chair that still,
like a dead leper, sits alone
in the living room of the old
house where he lived almost
his entire life without
saying a word
to me.

 — from And Now This, MoonPath Press

Terry writes of his poem:

“Bottle Cap” references so many things from my childhood that it’s always been one of my favorites. The crawl space under the house (just thinking about it brings back its smell and dampness), the old barn up the road (we used to play in even though we weren’t supposed to), the creek (that flooded every spring), the tannery (where Dad put in long hours to feed his family), it’s all there. My childhood was filled with amazing and wonderful things that I carry with me to this day. Reading this poem reminds me of the mystery, the joy, and, yes, the sadness of growing up where and how I did. Regardless how the poem reads, I did talk with my dad quite a bit (not everything in a poem is true…just enough to be believable), and when I wrote this poem, I was missing him.

You can find Terry’s collection And Now This on Amazon as well as the publisher’s website. Learn about his other poetry collections on his website’s poetry page.

Writing Idea from Sheila Inspired by the Poem “Bottle Cap” by Terry Persun
The shape of a poem tells us something about its subject and its mood. Terry’s poem grows a belly as we read down the page or a shine–is the poem both a shining like a bottle cap with light shed on it? Is it the shape of the profile of a man seated in a chair? Might it be that the poem speaks to both visions?

What childhood memory do you hold that involves a parent and a place? What artifact might be there that you would enjoy discovering again or after all this time? Might you have a favorite ravine behind the house you grew up in, a favorite crack in the ceiling, a spot under the front porch or deck? Do you have fondness for a lake you visited each summer? Or for a field you played in? Was there a patch of garden that was yours to plant? Maybe it was a particular lamp or chair, even a dish drain, china plate, apron or kitchen towel that was memorable to you. Whatever comes to mind now can help you start a poem.

Terry’s poem is composed of two long sentences. Can you try to create long sentences that form a shape on the page that you think helps communicate the feelings the poems uncovers for you? That shape might be something you find at the end–the shape of a rocking chair going back and forth, the shape of a woman standing at the sink, steps down a porch. Don’t worry about this until after you have created the poem and if you’d like, don’t worry about it all–just create the poem with line breaks you like–or even as a paragraph (a prose poem). What is most important is that you allow your senses to report the scene–its smells, tastes, sounds, what you could touch and see and what, if there is a person in the poem, you or the person is doing. You don’t need too many images really to evoke the mood your memory returns to you. As Terry tells you, everything in a poem doesn’t have to be explicitly true, as long as it conjures the feelings you are experiencing as you remember.

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David D. Horowitz is a poet and with his endeavor Rose Alley Press, an active publisher of many poets, both local to the Seattle area and further afield.

Golden Silver
by David D. Horowitz

I might sleep late, jot down the wrong address,
Mistake the sugar for the salt,
Clean room but drop so much I leave a mess,
Or compliment but actually insult.
I might provide too many facts, confuse
When clarifying, stain with phrase,
Misquote or misdirect, or hide then lose,
Or turn a dial far too far and freeze
Instead of thaw. I learn, though–silver lining
That curbs my errors, judgments, whining.

— from Sky Above the Temple, Rose Alley Press

David writes of his poem:

“Golden Silver” is written in strict iambics, which vary between pentameter and tetrameter. Also, the poem maintains an abab cdcd rhyme scheme but ends with a feminine-ending couplet. In “Golden Silver,” then, I try to balance strict and loose form to reflect good-humored acceptance of common errors blent with disciplined striving to overcome them. Yes, the poem implies, I make mistakes and am error-prone, as we all are, but I learn from my mistakes and thus minimize them. I like the gentle humor and slightly tarnished but persistent idealism of “Golden Silver,” as well as its apt details. There’s a touch of “every person” here, yet I do not merely mock myself. “I learn” and this “curbs my errors.” I’m happy to convey that theme.

You can find David’s book on The Rose Alley Press website along with names of independent bookstores that carry it as well. You can read excerpts from all of his poetry collections here.

Writing Idea from Sheila Inspired by the Poem “Golden Silver” by David Horowitz
How sweetly David sings of and accepts in this poem his human failings concerning the daily occurrences that illustrate how vulnerable we are to making mistakes, to constant imperfections. Yes, I agree with him, it is the learning, which also allows us to accept ourselves, that is important. It reminds me that when we read a poem or a personal essay or a story or a novel, we are not interested in people’s perfection. We are interested in their failings and how they belong, like we do, to the human race. To write a poem inspired by David’s poem, think of something you are not proud of having forgotten or lost or ruined. Can you write a poem about that?

Instead of “I might” you might start with “I did” or “I lost” or “I said.” You might be inspired by David’s adherence to iambics–it is, to me, what makes his poem an ever endearing song. Yours might turn out to be an apology or a lament. Try writing about what to you seems like a small or a large failure and see what happens.

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A big thank you to Gary Anderson, Terry Persun, and David D. Horowitz for sharing their poetry and their thoughts on what the poems mean to them.