National Poetry Month started yesterday. This week’s article is an oldie but goodie, originally published in 2007 and updated for 2014.

In Port Townsend, the daffodils have been up several weeks. As usual out here, it looks like we’ll get rain this next week and certainly lots during the month of April, but I remind myself that it will benefit the coming spring and summer flowers, my many favorites, blue forget-me-nots, orange calendula, red poppies, orange poppies, lavender poppies and pink peonies in my yard and those of my neighbors. As I await these splashes of color and the warmth and sun, I’ll enjoy another kind of garden–in the US, April is National Poetry Month and poems and discussions about poetry will be sprouting in the media. At Writing It Real, we’ll be posting articles filled with poems by today’s poets with their words on the poem they chose to share with us. Whether you already write poetry or haven’t yet written any poems, these articles will supply you with ways to think about this art and its practitioners and ways to use it to flex your observational muscles and encourage depth in all your writing. When you do write some poems, you’ll be in bloom, too. I hope to inspire you to begin and shape poems of your own. To celebrate National Poetry Month together, I am offering to do some interactive work with the poetry starts you make based on these ideas. I hope you’ll take me up on the offer. Read on!

Why Write Poetry?
Psychologist Rollo May wrote in his book The Courage to Create that:

…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.

Although we may be willing to give “listening to our own beings” a try in writing essays and memoir, something keeps many of us from engaging in that same level of honesty and commitment and writing poetry. Maybe we don’t feel up to the demands of the art. We may feel, therefore, that if we devote ourselves to writing poems, we are only being dilettantes. We may worry that once we find and articulate our deepest feelings and insights as poetry has us do, those feelings and perceptions will demand we change our lives. We need to figure out how to address this situation by coming to believe in the power of poetry to not only indicate what our beings demand, but help us do it. If we learn to honor our need and ability to write poetry, all of our writing will benefit.

Acknowledge and Celebrate Your Poetic Intelligence:
In 1983, Harvard educator Howard Gardner published his book Frames of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, a groundbreaking 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. The first intelligence Gardner discusses is the linguistic intelligence. This is the competency of the poet. Gardner trusts that a poet will best describe this intelligence, and he quotes poet Stephen Spender:

The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again and again as though with all their original freshness.

Gardner writes that the poet uses particular 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, often the most important part. A poet works on the sounds and words in a poem until they communicate the form of a newly discovered insight, glimpse a mystery or understanding. The words then capture the emotions that brought to life the desire to write the poem.

This intelligence is a hard one to value in a sound-bite culture that packages its messages to make target markets into one-size-fits all cultures, eager to purchase and consume, and fills the air around us with noise to keep us from locating our own specific yearnings, especially if they have nothing to do with buying. It is an intelligence hard to value in a culture that embraces, as poet Stephen Dunn writes in his book walking light, “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 a correction to this problem is emerging. Thomas Moore’s Soul Making, Julia Cameron’s The Artists’ Way, David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused and Deena Metzger’s Writing For Your Life are books I’ve enjoyed on the topic of valuing contemplation as an extraordinary competency. We often must search for support in making this intelligence and our practice of it important to us, because our society as a whole has not supported us in valuing this way of being and knowing the world. We are constantly asked to do, to buy, to go, to behave, to agree, to imitate, and to envy. What product can be sold by asking us “to treasure our own insights?”

In order to empower ourselves to write poetry, we must refuse to see poetry as merely verse or ornament. We must refuse to see our linguistic intelligence as inferior or unworthy; we must refuse to let ourselves believe our feelings are inconsequential, or worse, that they are wrong. In an essay called, “The Social Function of Poetry,” T. S. Eliot (who, by the way, is the poet who named April the cruelest month in “The Waste Land”) 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.

Through its practice, we come to understand “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)

Reading poems (there are links later on in this article to many poems you might enjoy) is essential for 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.

Lists: A Simple Way to Begin and Surprise Yourself Later With Poems
When I think of poetry writing practice, I think of the way people practice the skills of athletics without taking on the complexities of the game or sport. I think of REI’s flagship building in Seattle, which has an indoor mountain in the store for people to learn and practice climbing. I think of driving ranges for golfers and batting cages. Here are opportunities to practice parts of the real thing without the need to worry about other parts that the learner might not feel up to sustaining. I think that conjuring images for poems from exercises is a practice that offers writers opportunities to build foundations for future poems without worrying, almost without knowing, that poem-building is going on. Concentrate on the exercise and read the results after a day or so and you will see the connections between the images that you couldn’t have cultivated if you were trying to draw those connections. Showing your beginnings from exercises to a trusted reader can often help you see the connections more quickly.

In his well-known poem, “Things to Do Around a Lookout,” poet and naturalist Gary Snyder, lists things he could do while working for the Forest Service as a lookout for forest fires. He spent a lot of time alone in the small, isolated quarters, and his poem details life there by way of listing actions he could take and objects he could use: airing out musty forest service sleeping bags, bathing in snow melt, the star book and the rock book, oolong souchong tea, and putting salt out for the ptarmigan are among my favorites from the list.

Many poems are lists. Many lists survive inside poems. See Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno,”  Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Wallace Steven’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Check out page nine here to read William Stafford’s “Things I Learned Last Week.” The very poetic Declaration of Independence is a combination of lists.

As an exercise, listing gives the poet practice using exact names and characteristics. It gives the poet an opportunity to dredge up subjects by coming at them slant. Here are some list ideas to get you started:

7 or more things you see outside a window right now that someone else looking might not notice.
7 or more jobs you enjoy imagining yourself having and details of what you would wear to each of them.
7 or more things that are in your refrigerator and why they are there.
7 or more gifts you have been given, when and by whom.
7 or more occasions upon which you wished you could disappear–name names, places, and actions by you or others.
7 or more lies you have told, to whom and when.
7 or more compliments you have given to whom and when.
7 or more ways you would curse someone who has angered you.
7 or more ways you have been complimented and by whom.
7 people you think of right now and why you are thinking of them.
7 or more songs you know and what they make you think of in your life–people, places, events.
7 titles of more lists you could make.

Post a list you’ve made (make sure they are detailed!) as a reply to this article, and I will be back to you with ideas for a poem from what I find in the images. Then, draft a poem and post that one, too, for response from Writing It Real members. We’ll celebrate the way coming to our poetic material without worrying about what we might be writing about can help us exercise our poetic intelligence.

And here’s another idea to get started without worrying about other steps involved in what you are creating:

When I Saw You: Thinking About Small Actions Helps Poems Happen
How many times have you suddenly been overcome with strong feelings just watching someone do something? In writing poetry, we take time to note these feelings. Remember someone you watched do something and a deep feeling you had while you watched. You might want to stay away from anger, which usually covers up a more basic feeling such as sorrow or fear. And think small. Instead of choosing something large like the time your husband surprised you with a new car, try the time your son came home from the pet shop with his first goldfish. What did his clothes look like? The bag in his hand? His hair and his eyes? Did he know the fish needed to stay in the bag in the sink for awhile while the water in the fish bowl became room temperature?

The following list might help you remember observing someone and having deep feelings:

When I saw you put your hands in the soapy water
When I saw your peanut butter cheek
When I saw the ring that pierces your brown eyebrow
When I saw you assembling the gas grill
When I saw you raking leaves
When I saw the unmatched socks you were wearing
When I saw the elevator doors close in front of you
When I saw you lie down at the edge of the bed

Use one of these or a situation one of these makes you think of. Visualize people you know and care about in the places they usually are doing what they usually do. After the title “When I Saw You” (fill in the action–i.e. “When I Saw You Raking Leaves” )write lines that detail what you saw. Then go on to write what you heard, smelled, touched or tasted and thought. If you can’t remember precisely what images appealed to your senses, write ones that you know could have been in the scene. Post your favorite and I’ll have a look to see what I think is developing poetically and post back to you.

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Putting images on the page and trusting them to go somewhere, even if you don’t know where they are headed, you will begin to create strong poems. When April is over and the May flowers are up, you might just have some new writing that draws your attention.