How To Write A Love Poem

Writing a love poem is both the easiest and also the most difficult thing to do in poetry.  It is easy to write a love poem because writing about something that feels so good simply comes easily.  Certainly easier than writing a poem about something painful or even grievous.  However, writing a love poem is also difficult, especially if you aspire to write something interesting.  Trite love poems are ubiquitous.  A quick search online will immediately pull a wealth of poorly written love poems praising the charms of the beloved using phrases and metaphors which are not unique let alone interesting.  The primary goal of someone writing a love poem should be to write a poem that rises above the banal.

So ,although writing a love poem can be easy because you know what you are feeling, trying to write a poem that expresses your love in a new and exciting way may not come as easily. Even the most masterful poets struggle with writing love poems.  I confess to not only writing but publicly sharing some admittedly horrid love poems.  I say this to encourage you not to get so caught up in the suggestions which follow that  you never write a love poem.  I hope that you will, however, at least try to write something that will reflect the most essential experience of your emotion for your beloved.  And to this end, I offer the following  exercises.

The first exercise I would recommend is to write a love letter instead of a poem.  In the letter, write directly to the person describing how you feel about them and why.  Or you can write a letter to someone else, telling them how you feel and why.  It is not enough to say what you feel because the truth is that we all experience the feeling of love in similar ways–the excitement of seeing the one you love, the "butterflies in the stomach," the breathlessness.  By saying "why" you feel what you feel, you are taking your emotions to something more personal.  Is it the way the person dances?  Not everyone dances.  Does the person you love make you breakfast in bed?  These are the details which make your relationship and what you feel and experience different from everyone else’s. 

Another way to approach a love poem is to make a list of things you love about the person.  Many love poems and songs are simply a list of things the the lover/writer loves about the other person.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning counted the ways she loved her husband Robert Browning in a sonnet.  You can do the same.  I would even challenge you to try to make the list as long and as detailed as possible.  The longer you can make your list, or letter, the more details from which you will be able to draw when it comes down to writing your poem.

As you are writing the letter and/or the list, do not discard anything as being too trivial or unimportant.  Remember that your goal is to celebrate your relationship and the qualities of your love which make it different from anyone and everyone else’s.  For this reason, you want to include the things about your relationship and the person you love that define what the two of you share.   Do not be  afraid to celebrate the trivial aspects of your love because these, ironically, will elevate your poem above the trivial and typical love poem.

After you have written the letter and/or the list, you should have plenty of information from which to draw and write a poem that is emotionally relevant to you and your beloved.  Poetry is an ideal means of communicating familiar emotions because the abbreviated lines and careful choice of words allows the poet to take the mundane and make it profound.  As you read through your writing, look for those things which jump out to you as interesting.  The things that jump out may be physical or personality traits, things the two of you share in common, and experiences that the two of you have had together.  The goal here is not to highlight everything but to choose the highlights of your emotions and experience.  These are the elements you will want to weave into your poem. 

How you choose to write the poem, whether you choose to write a form poem (ie. a sonnet, vilanelle, et al) or free verse is completely up to you.  You might want to write more than one poem, using more than one form.  While I realize that this sounds like an awful lot of writing, look at it as an opportunity to celebrate your relationship, to explore the things about it which make you happiest, to not only relive the best but also immerse yourself in the experience of being in love with this other person.  (You may even want to save what you don’t use this time and share it at some future time.)

I assure you, if you take the time to do these things you will be able to present your beloved and the world with a wonderful gift–a synthesis of your love in your words that only you can offer.  I hope you will share them with me if this article has helped.  I would love to celebrate your love with you and know that this article helped you do the same.

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How To Write A Haiku

The haiku, because of its simplicity, is one of the few form poetry styles with which most poets experiment.  However, simplicity can be deceptive and it is the very implication that a haiku is "easy" to write that invites so many poets to write technically poor haiku.

Haiku has a long history and although most people are not familiar with the tradition behind haiku poetry nor make the correlation between spiritual practice and haiku, even less people are unable to define it.  A haiku is a seventeen syllable poem made up of three lines.  The first and third lines are five syllables each making a 5-7-5 syllable three line poem.  If a haiku were only this, a three line poem composed of seventeen syllables, then any seventeen syllable sentence would suffice and qualify as a poem.  In my article, How Not to Write a Poem, I give an example of a haiku composed of a simple sentence.

I hate you mostly
when I talk to your wife on
the phone as she cries.

This meets the definition most people use to define a haiku but falls so far short of a true haiku that to label this a haiku is an insult.  It fails to meet the other criteria which are often overlooked.

A haiku is not only a three line poem but it also includes an allusion to nature.  This can be seen in the haiku of the masters, such as Bassho and Issa, as well as others.  From a particular species of plant or animal (a cherry blossom, a hawk, a cicada, a chrysanthemum) to a clear season (harvest moon, snow, summer’s sun), there is supposed to be some allusion to the natural. 

However, sometimes this is a subtle allusion.  Your seasons will differ from those of other nations and traditions. In my home, growing up, we had a fake Christmas tree that stayed up year round so referencing a decorated tree had no seasonal meaning.  But had I referred to a particular block party in the streets of Manhattan, anyone who grew up in my home would recognize the time of my haiku.  Be aware of your own seasons, think beyond those obvious four seasons that dominate the thinking of society.  Adopt and adapt your seasons to infuse your poetry with a subtlety that may elude most readers while infusing your writing with something intrinsic, personal, and potentially profound.

Haiku is intimate, a highly personal form of poetry, that is easily recognized for its immediacy in the predominance of the present moment.  Some haiku may be written in the past tense, very few are written in the future tense, but most haiku is undeniably set in the present.  Because of this, haiku have an emotional integrity that is often overlooked by the poet who is assuming that the haiku is an easy poem. 

I learned this lesson when not writing a haiku a long time ago.  I had been experimenting with sumi-e brushwork and was trying to copy the drawing of a hawk standing on a rock looking over its shoulder.  Each drawing I made seemed devoid of something I could not define.  The brush strokes were carefully performed, allowing for control within the freedom of the ink’s flow.  My frustration grew as I tried again and again to recreate the image I had before me. 

Then I stepped away, looked at the original from which I was trying to draw inspiration and wondered to myself what the hawk was thinking and feeling.  In my mind it seemed to be saying it wanted to be left alone, not documented in ink.  I returned to the paper, meditating on this feeling of isolation, of wanting to be alone and undisturbed.  Nothing else changed.  My strokes were the same, the ink I used not watered down in any way, but this time the image that I created had an energy that the previous attempts had lacked.

This should be true of your haiku; you must first feel the moment before you can write about it.  You may write about something only moments passed or decades old.  By drawing on the past moment, placing it into the present tense, you draw yourself and your reader into the haiku’s moment, bridging a distance between yourself and the moment and your reader so that the three become one.  Honor the emotional moment and trust your reader by being subtle in how you expose yourself in the delicate lines.  The very brevity of a haiku, the seventeen syllables, will force you, as a poet, to synthesize a moment into a concentrated form, condensing the emotion so that it has the same weight as it did when experienced.

For instance, I wrote a poem, Poetic Bugaboo, about a moment I experienced while frustrated with myself as a poet.  The same theme could have found its way into a haiku because the insect meets the criteria for having something of nature in the poem.

Squashed gnat between the
lines of a poem written
with no real passion.

It is possible, maybe even likely, that most readers would not understand the frustration I was feeling with myself as a poet but a haiku trusts the reader to sit with the poem, meditate upon its meaning, discover the emotion of the words, and in this way writing a haiku and reading one can become a form of spiritual practice. 

Most writers have learned the five W’s and an H rule:  Who?  What?  Where?  When?  Why? and How?  In writing a haiku there is a similar, often overlooked rule.  Each line of the strictly traditional haiku will ideally fall into the following pattern: 

Line 1:  Where?
Line 2:  What?
Line 3:  When?

Before you balk at the strictness of this, arguing that poetry is about breaking with tradition, I offer this challenge.  Try to conform to the strictest definition of the haiku, rise to the occasion and allow yourself to write a haiku that conforms to these rules, dare yourself to find freedom within the strict rules.  Write seventeen syllables, broken into three lines, include a natural element, and then answer the three questions (Where? What? When?) In precisely those three lines of five-seven-five syllables.  Find the freedom in the form and conformity.  Trust yourself to be in the moment, write from the moment, and dare yourself to write a true haiku.  And if you fall short of the purest form when writing your haiku, welcome to the club.  Trust me; you are in very good company.

alone in my bed
no wishes left or dreams, dark
clouds hiding the stars

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How To Write A Bereavement Poem

Loss is as much a part of life as birth and death.  As painful as loss is to experience, there is a solace to which the poet has access.  In writing, the poet can process their loss in a meaningful way to help facilitate personal healing.  Whether the loss is the end of a relationship or the more final loss of someone’s death, a poet has an outlet in words and verse.  (For the sake of this guide, I am going to focus on death.  However, please understand that any loss is experienced as a kind of death and the process of healing through poetry cannot be underestimated nor is there an intentional implication that death is the only real loss.)

When writing a bereavement poem, it is best to first write something in prose and not attempt to write a poem.  I suggest this because it is easy, given the natural use of metaphor and abstractions in poetry, to write a poem that is so vague as to have nothing concrete for the reader to fully appreciate or understand your piece. The problem is that sometimes we are so close to the pain that it is hard to actually write about it.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, we need to write about how we feel but what we feel is so overwhelming that what we write is likely going to be more safe than honest.

One of the best ways to begin writing about your pain is not in poetry but in prose.  If you keep a journal, this is a natural outlet in which you can write what you are feeling.  However, you may find that even this outlet is too emotionally difficult for you.  Another useful means of writing through your grief is to write an unsent letter This is actually a journaling exercise that many psychiatrists have used and one that is accessible to anyone, even the non-poet.  You write the letter as though you were going to give it to the person to whom the letter is addressed. 

When a friend of mine was raped and murdered, my emotions were extremely raw and it was difficult for me to write about what had happened or how I felt about it let alone form all of this into a meaningful poem.  I was shattered with grief and fueled by anger, going from one extreme to the next.  As I rode through the waves of these emotions, I wanted to write a poem for my friend but knew that my writing would not be worthy of my friend’s memory.  While the emotional energy behind the words would be raw and immediate, I anticipated that what I wrote would be redundant, the same words others had written when someone they knew died, or they would be so abstract as to have any real meaning.

Instead of trying to write a poem, I wrote my friend a letter.  More than one, in fact.  I just returned to the page time and again, writing in conversational prose all of the things I was feeling about her death, about her, about our friendship.  I wanted to get into words the things I never said to her personally and ended up exploring a lot of things I had never fully faced about myself.  I can’t remember how many of these letters I ended up writing but eventually I stopped, knowing intuitively that I had said all I wanted and needed to say.

Only then did I feel ready to sit down and write a poem.  In the past, I have referred back to these prose writings from my journal or within these unsent letters to find elements which I could weave into my poem.  This time I did not refer back to my letters.  I wrote the poem, For Jenny, without rereading what I had already written.  I have no doubt that if I were to compare my unsent letters with the final poem I would find parallel thoughts and ideas.  It may be that sometime in the future I will refer to these prose writings and create another poem, a different poem, written from a different emotional place because more time will have passed and my ability to process the grief will be different.

You may find that you are asked to write a bereavement poem as part of a eulogy or a funeral service.  Because of the expectations and time restraints, it would be easy to make the assumption that you do not have the luxury to spend time on writing a prose piece first.  I would encourage you to please think again.  The time you spend writing a passionate prose piece which you can set aside for at least a day will benefit you tremendously.  You will find, as you write the prose piece, that you will remember details about the person from your shared past that you might not have given thought to in trying to write a poem.  Whether you use every detail in your poem will be your choice but to not take the time to remember as much as you can before writing the poem is to cheat yourself and the poem itself of the richness of your emotional integrity. 

How you choose to write your poem is ultimately up to you.  Whether you decide to write a form poem (an ode or sonnet, using meter and rhyme) or free verse, your experience in writing this poem will be both painful and healing.  You may also find yourself surprised by what you ultimately write.  When I finished my poem for my friend, I was genuinely surprised by the anger that rippled through the lines.  Recently, when a friend of mine asked me to write a poem for her boyfriend’s grandmother who had died a year ago, I was surprised to find that I wrote the poem from the viewpoint of her boyfriend. 

Allow yourself to write the poem as it comes.  Do not try to make it something different or conform it to the expectations of others.  Frankly, it would be better for you to come empty handed, without the poem someone asked you to write, than to write a poem unworthy of your pain and memories.  Above all else, honor the experience of writing your bereavement poem, aware that to do this will stir up a great deal of pain but promises an equal measure of healing.

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How To Read a Poem

The first step in learning how to read a poem is to find a poem you like. An obvious observation, I suppose, but many people leave their high school English classes afraid to even approach a poem for appreciation having had the details of poetry so thoroughly beaten into them by some well meaning teacher that the beauty of the verse is lost. If you do not already have a favorite poet whose work excites you to learn more about poetry then an excellent place to start is with simply reading poetry. 

Go out and purchase an anthology or two. You can spend as much or as little as you like on a collection of poetry. The anthology itself can be as broad as a complete history of poetry including texts from every era and nation to being as narrow as a collection of poems a slam team performed in a national competition. It might be a good idea to find an anthology that includes at least one or two poets with whom you are already familiar as well. I would also suggest that some publishers have begun including cd’s of the poets reading their own works.

Read through the anthology and do not be afraid to skip a poem you do not appreciate. If you want or need capitalization and you find a poem where there in none, don’t read it. Or if you do not like free verse and prefer a poem that has end rhymes by all means read only the poems that have end rhymes. You can always return to the poems you have skipped at a later time. 

Once you have a few poems you like and want to fully appreciate you can begin the real fun of fully reading a poem. Poetry is deeply rooted in oral tradition. Therefore, most poetry is written to be "heard." I say "most poetry" because there are some poets (cummings, for example) who played with the poetry form to such a degree that certain poems are virtually impossible to read aloud. However, when seen on the page, these poems are lovely to look at and this was the poet’s purpose in manipulating the form of the poem so that the reader would have a visual stimulation beyond the words. 

Nonetheless, most poetry was written to be read aloud and to fully appreciate a poem the reader should take a moment to read the poem out loud. Feel the words on your tongue. Notice how the sounds are either soft full of s’s, f’s, and h’s or hard with sharp k’s, b’s and p’s. Listen to where you naturally pause for breath and how this influences the movement of the poem. Pay attention to where you find yourself slowing down or speeding up. Your appreciation for the skill of a poet will grow by leaps and bounds by simply reading the poem through a few times. If you can hear the poet read the poem on a recording, try to do so after you have done this for yourself. See where your reading of the poem is different from how the poet reads the poem. 

If you suffered through those high school English classes, you are aware that there are certain poetic devices a poet uses. Such words as metaphor and iambic probably still haunt you to this day. Let me reassure you that I will not try to exhaust the lexicon of poetry terms. However, there are a few things you will find in most well written poems and looking for these elements will bring you a greater appreciation for what you are reading. 

Of the poems you have chosen from the anthology, choose one of the longer pieces. It is easiest to find one or more of the following in a longer piece. Once you have a poem chosen, read it through slowly, looking for some or all of the following:

• Sensory Words and Imagery: As you are reading, notice what senses the poet tries to stimulate. Does the poet describe a scene, mention a fruit, or even a season? An orange will draw up a visual image as well as a taste and aroma. A season will have a certain feel to it that goes beyond merely physical. (For instance, winter is usually associated with endings.)
• Metaphors and Similes:  Here are two of those dreaded poetry terms you probably hoped you would never see again. Don’t run away just yet. Read through the poem you chose and see if you can’t surprise yourself by recognizing a metaphor. For instance, I alluded to the idea that winter is associated with ending on an emotional level. Winter can often be a metaphor for death but it can also be a metaphor for new renewal, hibernation. Or it can be a metaphor for the emotional coldness someone feels towards another person. Footprints in the snow may be a metaphor for the past. Look for the metaphors and similes and if you find none, don’t worry about it. 
• Rhythm and Rhymes:  If you have already read the poem aloud a few times you will have already discovered these things in the poem. Even in free verse, the lines will have a certain rhythm. There may even be some rhyming words although you won’t always find them at the end of the line. Also look for repetition in sounds, which creates a rhythm in the poem as well. Vowels can be long or short and certain consonants, like c and g, can be hard or soft. In the hands of a masterful poet, these details will not be coincidental.

By no means is this list exhaustive but these few details are recommended as a starting point. Nor am I suggesting that you do this for each and every poem you read. It is not necessary to do these things to enjoy the poems you are reading. 

If you have the time to do so then by all means make the effort. But I am guessing that you do not have the time. Making a commitment to read poetry regularly and to pick out the poems you like most is an excellent beginning. Once you have a few favorite poems, purchase collections of poems by the poets you like best. Perhaps read a biography about the poet and find out who inspired him or her and read that poet’s works as well. Or find a contemporary poet whose works are influenced by your favorites. And, as you become more comfortable with reading poetry and appreciating the craft of the poem, I hope you will make the effort to learn more of those poetry techniques you probably hated in high school. Even if you don’t, doing the above will take you a long way in learning to love poetry.

* Footnote: I have learned that not all poets know how to read their own poetry, surprisingly enough, and their voices do not do justice to their own writing. There are, however, recordings of actors reading poetry and, because of the dramatic training these men and women have gone through, the recordings often elevate the poem to wonderful heights.

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How To Not Write a Poem

The following is a list of the mistakes immature poets often make. The truth is, even practiced poets will make these mistakes. Nobody is immune to lazy writing. But if you want your reader to realize that you are not a talented poet, that you have nothing new or interesting to say, then be sure to include one or more of the following things in your poetry.

1. Use archaic language.

Once upon a time when people spoke, they used such words as "thou" and "methinks." A lot of poetry was written at this time and we are still reading these poems today even though we no longer talk that way. Contemporary poetry should be written in contemporary language. When Shakespeare wrote, "Methinks thou doth protest too much," this is actually how people spoke in his day. When you choose to use archaic language for the sake of sounding poetic, you only make yourself sound like an amateur.

2. Use cliches in your writing.

Cliches are useless unless you are writing about cliches. If you fall back onto cliches you reveal yourself as a lazy writer. If you describe someone’s eyes as being deep as the ocean or your love being like a rose or any of the other typical metaphors, your reader will quickly lose interest.

3. Rhyme for rhyming’s sake.

There are many people who write form poetry which usually means lines of verse that have end rhymes. When done effectively, some of the most brilliant poetry will rhyme and rhyme well. However, too often it is done poorly. If you have to invert sentences to force a line to rhyme, revise the poem until you can do it without compromising your syntax. My son likes to mock certain rappers for making rhymes out of nonsense words or, worse, rhyming the same word with itself. If you can’t rhyme creatively, better to just not rhyme at all.

4. Be vague and abstract.

Henry Miller says that he always set aside his writing for a year. I have done this and been surprised to find a poem I wrote was utterly meaningless to me. It sounded lovely, used typically poetic language with metaphors, allusions to literature. But when I try to get to what the poem means, all I see are pretty phrases with no substance.

5. Stop reading poetry.

If you want to write bad poetry, you either need to expose yourself to only bad poetry. The problem is that if you read any poetry you risk reading good or even great poetry so it is probably best to read no poetry at all. If you simply must read poetry, only read poetry that was written over 500 years ago. You wouldn’t want to read anything contemporary, anything written in your vernacular. Better yet, try to read poetry written by people with whom you have no connection. Most older poetry is written by highly educated, wealthy, white men. If you are none of these, you won’t be able to identify with them as poets and what you write will lack authenticity.

6. Read books about poetry–all of them, all of the time.

Rather than actually write poetry, spend your time reading about writing poetry. Memorize everything you can about meter, be ready to define any and all formal poetry types from haiku to vilanelle, and memorize not only the difference between a Shakespearean sonnet and an Italian sonnet. If you can actually quote from memory examples of all of the above, that is even better. The time you spend learning all of this information could have been spent writing poetry and that is not what we are trying to do here.

7. Throw out all spelling and grammar rules.

Whitman and Dickinson started it and then came cummings, who wouldn’t even capitalize his own name. With modern poetry came a wave of waving goodbye to the conventional rules of spelling and grammar. These genius poets paved the path. No longer were poets confined to conventions. Not only did lines not have to rhyme but now poets didn’t even have to capitalize a proper name or follow the most common grammatical rules. The problem is that these people who most perfectly ignore the rules first mastered them which is why they break them so beautifully. They don’t break the rules for the sake of breaking them, they break them to say something more meaningful than conforming to the rules would have afforded them the opportunity to do.

8. Avoid yourself as a poet.

If you are writing poetry then you are probably comfortable with a certain style of writing. Perhaps you are comfortable with free verse or you may prefer for your poems to have a tight rhythm with carefully chosen end rhymes. Neither choice is better than the other but if you write other styles of poetry then you risk actually growing as a poet. Stretching creatively beyond your personal comfort zone will likely result in your becoming a better poet. I caution you to find your one style and stick to it no matter how boring your poetry writing may seem.

9. Mistake prose for poetry.

This offense occurs most often in haiku where someone writes a seventeen syllable sentence and breaks it into lines of five/seven/five and declares themselves the writer of a haiku.

- I hate you mostly
- when I talk to your wife on
- the phone as she cries.

Technically, this meets the haiku standard for line breaks but offers nothing else. It lacks the emotional subtlety of a true haiku. Any poet who would dare to proclaim this a haiku only shows their ignorance of what a haiku should be.

10. Be afraid to break the rules.

Although you definitely want to break the grammar and spelling rules (as mentioned in rule seven above), you want to be careful to the point of paranoia when doing so. Consider all rules sacred. If you do this then you are more likely to write in a very formal tone, using those archaic words that are no longer a part of your natural vocabulary, and you will do whatever it takes to make that line rhyme the way it should.

If by some chance you are reading this article because you actually want to write a good poem, maybe even aspire to write some great poetry, and wanted to read some rules of things to avoid, then you would do well to follow number ten closely. Even these ten points are not sacrosanct. You can and should have the courage to do whatever you must to make your poem as powerful and potent as you can. If that means using archaic language or a cliche, manipulating a line so that the rhyme works, etc., by all means do it. But only do it if it is truly effective and there is no other way to make your poem relevant.

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How To Keep a Poetry Notebook

In my poetry notebook I have written the following notes:a murder of crows on everyone’s lawn but my own, flashing breasts = 20% off, I met a leprechaun with intense eyes and chiseled face who writes poetry and was named Byron as a child. There are other things to be found.  Long confessions of thoughts I don’t want others to know I have.  Discussions of lusty dreams or frightful nightmares, heavy with metaphor and symbolism.  Quotations from books, poems, songs.  Descriptions of people I see and conversations I have overheard. Nothing is too sacred or mundane to be recorded. 

Why do I collect so many things between the covers of my poetry notebook?  Because I never know what will become the inspiration for a poem and I know, from experience, that too often an inspiration will present itself only to be lost because a pen and paper are not handy.  Or worse, I will snatch up a piece of paper or napkin, borrow a pen from a stranger, only to misplace the hastily scratched idea.  This is worse only because I was so secure in the knowledge that I had written it down and now it is just as lost as if I had never written anything down. 

One time, when I was driving, I got the idea for a poem, the lines fully forming in my mind.  I started reciting two lines to my son who was with me asking him to remember those two lines as I  kept repeating the next three lines to myself until I could pull over.  With my son’s help, I was able to write out the five lines of the poem in the poetry notebook I carried with me for moments like these.  Without that poetry notebook, those five lines would probably have been lost in the time it would have taken me to run my errands and return home.

I never know what will inspire a poem, what story I may overhear on the radio, what quote from a movie will stir something inside.  I have learned to find poetry everywhere I go and for this reason I try to carry my poetry notebook anywhere I go.  In fact, I don’t know anyone who writes poetry regularly who doesn’t carry something in which to record these random thoughts whenever they may occur.  It is a discipline well worth developing if you aspire to be a poet. 

Unlike writing poetry, when keeping a poetry notebook there are no rules.  The poetry notebook has more to do with a personal aesthetic than anything else.  You may prefer to have a poetry notebook with lines while another poet likes the freedom of a completely blank page.  The cover may be plain or decorative, hard or soft, the binding spiral or made so that the pages lie flat, the individual sheets larger than 8.5” by 11” or smaller.  All that matters is you like the way the book feels when you write in it and that it is easy for you to carry around with you.  You may even choose to keep a smaller notepad with you for capturing those random moments to be transferred in a larger poetry notebook later.  (This is especially useful if you work where you cannot carry your poetry notebook with you.)  I only urge you to try to keep something with you at all times so that you won’t resort to writing these snatches of inspiration on slips of paper or napkins which are too easily lost.  If you must grab whatever to write in the heat of the moment, make it a point to transfer what you wrote into a more permanent location as soon as possible.

I’ve already noted that in my poetry notebook I am rather promiscuous about what I include.  I try not to judge anything for its poetic potential.  Rather, I write everything down and trust that later, when I have time to sift through it all, I will find some golden nuggets of ideas to build into a full poem.  I have often surprised myself when reading my journals to discover something beautiful buried in pages of whining and cataloguing.  When grieving over the murder of a friend, I wrote, "Grief has no explanation.  Grief has its own meaning."  I knew as I wrote it that someday I would weave these two sentences into a poem but more often than not it is later, sometimes even years later, that I discover something so raw and honest in my journaling that I am compelled to flesh it out into a poem.

If there is a rule for keeping a poetry notebook then it is this:  Do not rule anything out.  Include everything you can.  If you read an article in a magazine or newspaper that you think you can work into a poem, paste it into your poetry notebook.  If you see a picture that you think is interesting, slap it in there.  But above all else, write your own words constantly and habitually in your poetry notebook.  In fact, I want to offer you a challenge which I first discovered in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.  She says that she takes a poetry notebook and fills it, cover to cover, in one month’s time.  If I remember correctly, she said she used simple spiral poetry notebooks and made it a point to fill the pages with her writing.  At the end of the month, she would finish one poetry notebook and on the first of the following month pull a fresh book off the shelf and begin again. 

I challenge you to do the same, with only one word of caution.  A friend of mine thought this was a great idea and went out to buy herself an inexpensive poetry notebook at the store.  She found a cloth bound book with college ruled lines and bought it for this purpose.  The pages were the usual 8.5” by 11” but there were over 200 pages in the book which means that, in order for her to fill the book, she would have had to write over 6 pages a day.  In addition to this, of the pages had much more narrow margins than a sheet of loose leaf paper and were college ruled.  Needless to say, she was unable to reach the goal.  Choose a book which has enough room for you to stretch yourself but not so much that you feel overwhelmed nor so small that you fill it up in two weeks.  I have tried a variety of styles and some months I have found filling up the book comes easily while other months are harder.  But every month, the challenge of filling that poetry notebook forces me to be more observant than I would be otherwise, seeking out possible ideas or simply whining about my life.

If you take me up on this challenge, I would love to know how it goes so feel free to email me.  And if the challenge simply does not appeal to you, I still strongly encourage you to carry a poetry notebook with you wherever you go.  The world is hungry for new poems and the inspiration is waiting out there to be discovered and remembered in words.  All the world needs is a poet who makes these moments into a poem.

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