Greetings!

Because today is the day before Halloween, I think it is fitting that we dedicate this week’s spark to our favorite spooky poems. The first piece of poetry that I remember as spooky was from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

It still brings a chill to my spine. Such ominousness! There are so many more, and a great place to begin to read them is on Poets.org’s front page: Poems in the Graveyard. From there it’s only a short click to this next page: The Graves of Poets.

I read the list of poets and their gravesites. Surely the spookiest is that of Hart Crane, “Drowned while returning to New York from Mexico, Body not recovered.” Of course, I clicked his page link and found this gem of a poem, At Melville’s Tomb. How fitting! Here are the first few lines:

Almost prescient, these words. Did Crane know where his death would find him? Perhaps.

This week’s spark: write a spooky poem. Simple enough, yes? Or, if you cannot bear the walk into darkness, post a link to your favorite spooky poem (title and author if there is no link). Good luck! Happy hunting.

Greetings and Salutations!

Every day, once my house has sighed quietly in the wake of two kids gone to school and the tea in my cup begins to paint the air with ephemeral threads of steam, my thoughts turn to poetry. How can I describe this silence? What does it mean to spend time reading poems? What is the Spotlight Poem today on Poets.org?

Inevitably, I put these thoughts away in order to go about my day, but I always hope I can find a few minutes to jot down a phrase or two that might grow into a poem with enough care and attention. This is important to me, but I’m not sure why. What is it that makes me want to collect words? Why do poets love to play with language? The answers are as many and varied as there are poems in the world.

Here is an essay by Amy Lowell that speaks about The Poet’s Trade. In this short piece, she outlines her belief that a poem must be crafted, “As a matter of fact, the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker.” Another poem written by Heather McHugh, begins as a narrative about poets traveling and follows them as they speculate about poetry and its root meaning: What He Thought. It is in the end of the poem where a greater meaning becomes surprisingly apparent to the reader. Poetry seems to spring not out of craft, but from a spontaneous gift on the part of the writer.

Your task this week is to write a poem about writing a poem, or about what it means to be a poet, or about how it feels to be inspired. Write a poet’s poem. Write a poem that only another writer will truly understand, but try to do it in a way that invites the non-writer into the poet’s world.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:

Thomas Lux Render, Render

Harryette Mullen All She Wrote

Charles Bukowski so you want to be a writer?

Richard Wilbur The Writer

Have fun. Be creative. Good luck! I leave you with this quote from this page on the Poets.org website, various quotes from On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke.

Greetings and salutations!

Today, I found myself thinking about line length. There are so many different ways of using the line to enhance your poem: you can decide to use short or long lines or a combination of both to control the pacing, you can focus on which words you’d prefer to end a line to put particular emphasis on the most important, you can consider whether or not to enjamb which also can determine the rhythm of the poem, and/or you can rhyme the end words to give the poem interesting sonics. There are many other considerations I’ve neglected to list.

I believe that focusing on the number of syllables in each line can open up the way you think about your poems: using a set number of syllables can make all your lines long or short, can force you to be creative with end-words, can make you consider enjambment in a new light. Because you are placing a mechanical framework upon your words, you find that you sometimes pay a lot more attention to the words you choose to form an idea than you might if you were writing freely.

Some of the most famous examples of syllabic verse are the Japanese forms of haiku, and tanka. Additionally, there is the Alexandrine, a French syllabic form where each line has twelve syllables and generally one caesura.

Because English does not traditionally have many forms that use syllabics (mostly because English is accentually, rather than syllabically, rhythmic) does not mean that there aren’t great poems written where the poet counted his/her syllables. Here are a few:

Philip Levine What Work Is (averages 9 syllables per line)

Marianne Moore To a Steam Roller (each stanza follows a syllabic form: 5-12-12-15)

Dylan Thomas Fern Hill (you tell me what the syllabics in this poem are!)

This week’s spark: write a syllabic poem. Have fun!

Salutations fellow poets!

Recently, a member of the Poets.org forum suggested I create a poem spark based on one of E. E. Cummings’ paintings. Before reading that suggestion, I didn’t realize that Cummings was also a prolific painter. You can look at some of his work here: The Paintings of E. E. Cummings.

This made me think, “What else don’t I know about Cummings? Or other poets?” I did some more investigation, and uncovered this interesting tidbit: Cummings never wanted his name to appear in lowercase. You can find the article about that interesting fact here: Not “e. e. cummings”

There is even more information about Cummings’ poetic work available at Poets.org here: E. E. Cummings

Fascinating stuff. There must be more that I don’t know about so many poets; information that is readily available on the web if one looks for it. So, I will be using the poem spark to do a “poet focus” every now and again. There is always more to learn about poetry, and poets, and the history of this art.

However, to get back to Cummings, I’m sure everyone knows his work in poetry uses huge leaps of imagination with punctuation, form, words, etc. Sometimes, the exhuberant nature of his poetry almost overwhelms the sense of it, but not always. Underneath his marvelous fascination with the visual and the innovative lies the seed of a great voice.

Here are some of my favorite Cummings’ poems, each with a singular message that threads the pieces of the poems’ language into a coherent whole:

next to of course god america i

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

And here is one of E. E. Cummings’ paintings I particularly like:

lone figure and tree in stormy sunset

This week, write a poem using E. E. Cummings style (innovative punctuation, etc.) OR write a poem inspired by the painting I linked to above, “lone figure and tree in stormy sunset.” Most of all, be creative and have fun!

Greetings and Salutations fellow poets!

Today’s poem spark is about one of the more important elements in a poem: the title. So many times I’ve decided to read a poem because it had an interesting title, or decided not to read a poem because the title seemed, well, boring. It is the very first thing a reader sees, whether in a table of contents, in a list of poems online, or at the start of a book of poems, not to mention when beginning to read a poem. As such, the title is an extremely useful device for opening a conversation with your reader. As Ted Kooser states in his book, “The Poetry Home Repair Manual:”

Thinking about poem titles, I went to Google, typed in “poem titles” and found this page: Writing the River – Poem Titles. Look at how many interesting titles are listed. Titles like this one, “During the Long Wait These Dreams” and this one, “even when the moon don’t shine” make me wonder what those poems are about. They are intriguing and interesting.

Here are some poems with titles that encourage me to continue the conversation and read the poem:

Heather McHugh What He Thought

Lawrence Ferlinghetti [Constantly Risking Absurdity]

James Wright Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium

Sometimes titles begin a poem as its first line:

William Stafford Traveling Through the Dark

Henry Reed Naming of Parts

Sometimes a poem ends with its title:

Michael S. Harper Nightmare Begins Responsibility

Stevie Smith Not Waving But Drowning

This week, write a poem that uses either its first line or last line (or phrase) as its title. Have fun and be creative!