You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [1]
10 FROM START TO FINISH: THE FIRST DRAFT
Finding the poem's subject; the beginning, middle and end of the poem; making the poem perfect.
11 REJECTIONS & REWARDS
Preparing poems and submitting them to magazines.
GLOSSARY
1
WHY
WRITE?
Toward the end of autumn, early on a Saturday so sunny and blue that you can see for miles through the crystal air, my wife Joan wakes and puts on her dirt-digging clothes: an old sweatshirt, baggy jeans and sneakers that have seen better days. She dons a pair of sturdy work gloves, grabs a trowel and out the door she goes to plant bulbs on one of the season's last perfect days. Crocus, muscari, tulip, daffodil and hyacinth—she digs, fertilizes, sets them in and covers them up. She plants a hundred bulbs or more, digging earth up and patting it down. A few weeks later, the northern wind blows in with its quick freeze. Snow follows. Throughout the winter, she waits, cultivating patience. The days are short, the nights are long, and the snow piles up.
Then the days lengthen. The weather turns, the snow begins its slow melt, and spring arrives. Joan dons her dirt-digging clothes again and goes out to plant the year's annuals—petunia, moss rose, geranium and salvia. She plants perennials, too—cornflower, red-hot poker, foxglove, delphinium and her favorite lilies, daylily, Asiatic and trumpet. It takes time. Our soil is rugged, rock and clay making for rough digging. And we have eight flower beds on our small lot—eight so far, that is. It takes much of a Saturday and a Sunday, and the following weekend, and the weekend following that. But the rewards are worth the effort. From March through October, Joan's flower beds burst and dazzle. They flare with hues across the spectrum, the vibrant and subtle alike.
I can barely water houseplants, but gardening is one of Joan's talents, and perhaps a gift. She takes her gardening seriously, too, although you'd wonder. She receives so much pleasure from planting and tending her flowers that her efforts don't seem much like labor. Her labor and her pleasure are married in her achievements. I step outside—front door, side or back, it doesn't matter—and see our yard in bloom, and I know that Joan has made an art of gardening.
That's the key: making art of what you do.
Joan's mother gardens, too, and Joan's youngest brother is an organic farmer. My mother practices arts and crafts, and my eldest sister is a professional painter who restores old Victorian homes to their original glory. It amazes me that all of these people are, in their own ways, artists. But it shouldn't amaze me. Creativity finds ways to express itself. It happens every day. My neighbors are artists, too: chefs and mechanics, teachers and preachers, dentists and woodworkers. They all create, fashion and make art of what they do. The urge to create spurs us on. The ways to express it are varied and numerous.
Poetry is the way I've chosen, or perhaps poetry chose me. I suspect the latter. I began writing poetry in my early teens. I didn't know it then, but poetry was helping me think through the conflicting emotions that accompany growing up. It helped me survive my first full-blown, ill-fated romance. Later, poetry even helped me marry Joan. Now I write to think through the conflicting emotions that come from having grown up. Poetry, like life, is an ongoing process.
Against my mother's advice, I studied literature in college—but only after trying economics, business, accounting, journalism and several other "sensible" areas of study. Through all of my educational misadventures, I found myself making time to write poems, an evening here, a morning there. I wrote poems—and read them—because I felt compelled to. Mostly I wrote bad poems, a great many bad poems, but that was very much a part of learning to write better poems. I studied poetry; I read poems every day. I wrote bad poems and then better poems. I studied more. I wrote more.
Since then, I've taught poetry writing to students in elementary, junior high and high schools, and in the university.