You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [7]
If you feel inspired, you needn't worry about where poems come from. On the other hand, you must often take your cue from Thomas Edison: "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Most of the time, poets must work to get on with the daily business, searching for ideas and the words to express them. So what do you do, then, to come up with ideas for poems?
One way—I think the best—is to keep a journal. Any notebook will do. Select one that fits your personality, one that you like to hold, one that invites you to fill it with words. Write what you see and hear, your dreams and daydreams, anything that crosses your mind, anything that strikes you as you read, anything that interests you. Actually, write everything that interests you, because these are the seeds of your poems. Your concerns become your poems. Take notes on poems you read. Comment on them. Argue with them if you disagree. Write lines or entire poems that take your breath away. Write interesting words, words you've recently learned, words that just sound good. Write anything that catches your eye, a tattered sheet of newsprint blown down the street or a couple of girls playing basketball in the park. Write a vivid dream in all its irrational detail. Write an errant thought, one that presents itself unexpectedly. Write down your involvement with the world.
Keep a journal so you can return to it later to spark ideas and invent poems. That's what many writers do. Because I have a spotty memory, I write down as much as I can: ideas, sights, lines of poems, possible titles, strange words, words of advice, words of wisdom. Here are a few of the numerous notes in my journals:
• "A Short History of a Long Night" (a possible title)
• "The poet does not use poetry, but is at the service of poetry." (advice from an essay, "The Poet in the World," by Denise Levertov)
• "If you want to get a sure crop with a big yield, sow wild oats." (from a fortune cookie, honest)
• "North is pure delusion, snowblind and rapturous" (a line from a poem, "Diorama Notebook," by Kathleen Halme)
• "Kiss, kisser, kissing bug, kissing cousin, kissy, kissy-face" (dictionary entries)
• "Poem about a man who empties his pockets in a bar and tells tales of all the objects" (a stray thought)
• "Queen Mab: English folklore, a fairy queen who controls people's dreams" (another dictionary entry)
• "Boys from up the street with their snowshovels, one green shovel and one red" (the morning after a heavy snowfall)
• "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." (a line from a poem, "Mowing," by Robert Frost)
My journals are idea logs, diaries of the imagination. I note whatever interests me and return to them later to gather ideas for poems.
One evening in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I read this piece of graffiti, scrawled in green ink on the wall of a restroom in a blues pub: "I feel more like I did when I came in here than I do now." I loved it because it didn't make sense; it's a paradox, a contradiction that contains a grain of truth. It made my mind race, trying to figure it out. I wrote it down on a cocktail napkin and stuffed it into my pocket. That night when I returned home, I added it to my journal. A month or two later, I returned to it and began mulling it over. It started a poem brewing. Then it became the title of the poem, one of the earliest of mine to be published in a literary magazine:
I FEEL MORE LIKE I DID WHEN I CAME IN HERE THAN I DO NOW
Sure, all roads lead round again to the heart,
But I'm lost in some far province—a toe
Or finger, peninsula—alone, hurt,
Sincere, and inconsequential. Each moment
I wake to strange sunrises, jollity
In a foreign tongue, air that smells of fish
And oil, grinding of sphinxian machinery
Down by the shore. There are no