During National Poetry Month I am continuing to celebrate poets I know whose work I have been following both in their books and by attending readings. This week, three more poets offer one of their poems along with words about its creation. I hope you’ll find the writing ideas I include based on each of the poems useful, whether you are writing poetry or writing prose. But first, a toast to poetry: May she continue to allow us to live our lives fully!

Gayle Kaune is a Port Townsend, WA poet whose career has included teaching and psychotherapy as well as writing. You can hear her speak about her career in poetry as well as read from her work in a podcast here.

I’m reading a poem and there it is again, that word, capacious
by Gayle Kaune

as if the poem were roomy
enough and wouldn’t mind
if the poet put that big word inside
its granite bones. When my friend the biology
teacher calls, she tells me about the skeleton
her students named Napoleon Bonaparte.
On her desk is a purple dachshund
which occasionally disappears, ends up in the case
with “Nappy,” propped against his pelvis in an obscene
yet funny way. She is advisor to the Anime Club
and the G-L-B-T “Tolerance” club—two groups of high
school kids that hang out in her room during lunchtime.

We laugh for an hour and when I hang up
I have to face the day, waiting for me like a Faberge´ egg,
all decorated with appointments and “shoulds,”
though thank goodness I don’t have to chop
twenty onions like yesterday when we served
chili to the men without homes.

The homeless surprised me. I expected
to see the rough, maybe mentally ill,
I see on the streets in the city, but last night,
in my small mill town, they were clean-cut
and young, nothing like the guy last week
whose picture was in the big city paper for stabbing
a woman on my daughter’s street.

I exaggerate. It was eight blocks away
from her street, a good thing I ended up
in a church basement serving spinach
salad with cranberries or I’d be stuck
in a stereotype of fear. And when we went to the church
it was snowing, unusual for here—the coldest
day of the year, and why should I worry
about putting the word capacious in my poem,
or my life, as in years past when paradigm
kept showing up or heuristic, or that other one,
luminous, which could describe my earlier thoughts
as I tried to look each man in the eye,
hand him a cup filled with milk,
or last night’s moon on the snow
as we walked to our cars,
carrying the scorched pots.

— from All the Birds Awake

Gayle Kaune writes of this poem:

I enjoy this poem because it typifies some of what I’m trying to do with my writing. It is accessible and one might say even “breezy.” It pokes fun at the pretentiousness of some poems (my own, included) and gets its subject matter from real life, the writer’s life. Although that life is informed by a wider awareness that there is great suffering and tragedy in the world, the speaker seems to try her best to focus on moments of beauty: the laughter with friends, the luminous snow. Still, she’s carrying those scorched pots.

You can order All the Birds Awake as well as Gayle’s other collections of poetry here. Three more of Gayle’s poems are available to read online here.

Writing Idea from Sheila
Inspired by the Poem “I’m reading a poem and there it is again, that word, capacious” by Gayle Kaune

Can you think of a phone or in-person conversation that made you laugh (or cry), an email you wrote or received (or, of course, was tweeted or posted on Facebook)? Try starting off a poem with your memory of this. Where were you as you listened or read or typed? What made you laugh or cry? After you describe that, write about what came next — what your daily life brought to your attention. Can you enter a particular scene, as Gayle does serving the homeless and associate to what is most important to you about that scene (for Gayle it is that she doesn’t get stuck in stereotypes and fear)? Can you think of a word to float through your poem, one you might normally edit out but don’t this time? Can you think of a reason the poem might want you to allow the word to stay?

If you feel that your poem tightly resembles Gayle’s, attribute your inspiration to her this way: under your poem’s title write “With Thanks to Gayle Kaune” or “After Gayle Kaune.”

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Holly J. Hughes divides her time between Indianola and Chimacum, WA. In her newest work, she employs the wisdom gained from 30 seasons working off Alaska’s shores as well as research into the history and science of navigation.

Sailing by Ravens
by Holly J. Hughes

They have no chart, no sailing directions.
Instead three ravens to find Iceland.

— Islendingabok

Planks creak, sails shudder in unseen wind. At the tiller,
Floki faces astern, watches the Faroes diminish

to flat line of horizon. They ride a barrel stave of latitude,
sight each night with the husonatra the Guiding Star.

On the first day out of sight of the Faroes, Floki released a raven.
Lifts dark wings into an empty sky, an exclamation point,

wings off, shadows another ship’s wake home.
On the second day another raven is released. Circles, a question,

lights upon the ship’s mast, an answer. On the third day,
another raven climbed to a great height, flew off purposefully to the west.

A raven can see land ninety miles away.
Floki could see the raven to a height of 5,000 feet.

What next? Black V of wings diminishing
to a period, winging toward certainty

in bone, feather. Floki leans against the tiller,
traces faint calligraphy across the blank slate of sky.

                    — from Sailing by Ravens

Holly J. Hughes writes of her poem:

“Sailing by Ravens,” the title poem from my recent collection Sailing by Ravens, was triggered by serendipity, as are many of my poems. I was in residency at Centrum in Port Townsend and happened to have lunch with Barbara Sjoholm, a friend, author and editor who’s written extensively about Scandinavia. When she heard that I was working on a collection of poems with navigation as its unifying theme, she loaned me her copy of Westviking: The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America by Farley Mowat because she’d just read about a sailor, Raven Floki, who earned his name because he sailed with a cage containing three ravens. I’d been researching the history of navigation and was especially interested in exploring alternatives to the grid of latitude/longitude; this was an intriguing example. The epigraph says it all: “They have no chart, no sailing directions. Instead, three ravens to find Iceland.”

In my poem I want to put the reader out on the boat with Floki. Because I’ve spent so many seasons working on boats myself, I was able to use concrete sensory details to create a scene that I hope rings true. I chose to use a few terms that I hope are clear in context, such as husonatra, partly because I love the music of that word. I wanted to use details from the account itself, so included those lines in italics, then imagined what was described as the first two ravens returned. I stumbled on the punctuation metaphor as I tried to envision that first raven as it “lifts dark wing into an empty sky, an exclamation point,” then decided to see what would happen if I continued the metaphor. So the next raven “circles, a question/ lights on the ship’s mast, an answer.” Of course, the third raven would continue this metaphor, but I wanted to include more information about what Floki could see at this moment—this was in his account—so included those lines in italics. I followed it this with the image: “What next? Black V of wings diminishing/to a period, winging toward certainty / in bone, feather.” With these lines, I was honing in on the message I hoped the poem would convey, that knowledge isn’t limited to our Western ways of knowing; it can take many forms. I chose to return to the punctuation metaphor in the final image: “Floki leans against the tiller, /traces faint calligraphy across the blank slate of sky.” The “blank slate of sky” also echoes another theme of this collection: we often don’t have maps for our journeys.

You can order Sailing by Ravens from the Alaska University Press. And you can see more of Holly J. Hughes’ work here on Amazon.

Writing Idea from Sheila
Inspired by the Poem “Sailing by Ravens” by Holly J. Hughes

What vocational, hobby, or family experience in your life contains an important tool for success and/or survival — freewrite for a few minutes to think about and to conjure this. It might turn out to be a particular kind of crochet needle or cooking implement or recipe for camping food, a motor for a boat or a thermos jug used for family picnics. It doesn’t have to be extraordinary. What is important is that you can remember seeing someone using it, talking about it, leaving an impression on you or using it yourself. Then, with Holly’s poem as inspiration, place yourself or an ancestor somewhere using the object you have remembered and see what poem evolves.

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Kelli Russell Agodon, a Kingston, WA poet, blogs here and has recently co-founded Two Sylvia’s Press.

Self Portrait with Reader
by Kelli Russell Agodon

To create is not enough.

We must live with our hearts
in our hands—like Mary.

We must hold the blood-
red heart and not be disappointed
when others look away.

This is the simplest way
to say yes. To say, I am here

giving you what I’m afraid
will scare you, yet I am
holding it in my palms.

Disappear if you have to.

Disappear into the cracks
of the world and call it
an earthquake. Fear shakes

itself on us and we decide
how much we can take.

Reader, I want to tell you
the hearts we hold will continue
beating even after we leave here.

Be the statue on the dashboard
traveling hopefully,

even if what you hold
drips onto the floorboard, even
if you have no idea where to go.

— From Hourglass Museum

Kelli writes of this poem:

When I reread Hourglass Museum, I think this poem is my favorite right now as it resonates with me as I consider our humanness and the vulnerability it takes to be creative. As writers, poets, and artists in the world, we create, and if we are doing our best work, we are risking something. Maybe we’re writing about something that’s difficult for us. Maybe we’re exploring a topic or genre. We stretch ourselves and hope the world leans in.

We ask a lot of our art and ourselves, and to me, this poem explores all the subjects I can find myself worrying about late at night—acceptance, vulnerability, the future, art—and how to travel (with all this baggage!) hopefully into our lives.

Hourglass Museum is available on Amazon as well as other books by Kelli including more collections of her poems, an instructional book she co-wrote and a poetry anthology she co-edited.

Writing Idea from Sheila
Inspired by the Poem “Self-Portrait with Reader” by Kelli Russell Agodon

If you were to write a poem as a message to the general reader about something important to you, what “ism” or premise, judgment or statement might you passionately blurt out? Think of what you love doing and how much it demands, whether that is raising children, being a political activist, writing, playing a sport or instrument. Write a sentence that states what you believe this activity requires of your deepest self. Like Kelli, use the second person: disappear, you hold, be, you have. Seeing yourself as another who must devote oneself to the work will help you articulate what the demands of the work are.

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A big thank you to Gayle Kaune, Holly J. Hughes and Kelli Russell Agodon for their inspiration and contributions to poetry!