I heard a great variety of poems last evening at the Third Thursday open mic at Ziggi’s in Westminster, CO. We had people read whom we have not heard from in quite a while. Sheryl Luna did a great feature slot, and I heard something that tickled those synapses in my brain that recognize a poem embryo. It’s the last item in the list below. There is no logic to any of this, but here’s a list of poem prompts that I keep in my “carry book,” the notebook that lives in my purse.

• the last lemon cake
• coffee and a lemon square (yeah, I like lemon flavored sweets)
• digital immigrant in a pixilated world
• “large reverberations in small events” (from D. T. Max’s bio of David Foster Wallace)
• things that can shatter
• small things that make me happy
• dinner in dystopia ( a prompt from a Friday 500, Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop)
• “Mean things mean things.” (quoted but I don’t know by whom)
• novocaine of noise
• identical twins/blue shoes/the revolver (don’t ask, no idea where it came from)
• time as a red illusion
• ponies going ’round

If you can use any of these, please do. And I would be happy to see the results. It’s going to be a hot day in CO, a good time to hole up in an air conditioned coffee shop. Cool air and hot poems. Perfect.

Last evening at Cannon Mine Coffee in Lafayette, we talked about the tribal aspects of poetry. Maybe we speak a dialect that only insiders can fully understand? Given the small audience that most poets attract, we might as well speak Latin or some other unknown and esoteric tongue. And then there are those who would make known their feelings and experiences with only a vague, general vocabulary on their lips. They say they write to express themselves. Well and good, I guess, but screaming is also expressive, as is moaning, sobbing, cursing and a certain one-finger salute. None of which is poetry. A diary entry, a sermon, screed, or rant is not automatically poetry. 

Poetry is a craft, which one practices and respects. It’s art, not therapy, not a greeting card or shopping list. Tribal lore for poets includes other poems besides ones own. From those who have written before, we learn the manners of our people. And we learn hospitality, welcoming strangers, gently nudging them to accept the ethos of the tribe. Otherwise, we post guards at the doors of perception and end up writing only for those who know the secret passwords.

Recently I reconnected with the work of a poet whom I have known for many years, Betsy Sholl. She and I went through the same MFA program, lived in the same community, belonged at times to the same writing groups. I have read her poems in great gulps, but not until recently did I study their effect on me. When I read her work deeply, I want more depth and texture in my own work. Hooray for Betsy. She’s doing one of the most important things a poet can do–inspire others to discover what they like about good poems. And she’s inspiring me to work harder at the truth, which is our job description.

Without knowing it, though, she also taught me to question my ability to read a poem for what it is not. A poem is not an extension of the poet, but a stand-alone creation. Knowing her as well as I do, I concluded that her work is autobiographical. It’s believable, given what I know of her life. It may begin with her direct experience, but it can and does go beyond that. The opening lines of her poem “Pink Slip” (in Don’t Explain) did not fit with what I know of her life, so I couldn’t quite “get” the poem. I asked for her help. Oh, that’s a persona poem! Well, duh! Now it works very well.

Then I went through a brief loss of faith. If I cannot believe what I see on the page, cannot tell if she’s speaking directly or not, then what? Can I trust her? It doesn’t matter. All she’s asking is that I trust the poem. That I recognize that the writing on the page has an integrity all its own. Where she was when she wrote it might be interesting, but is not vital to the way the poem moves. Had it been anonymous, would I still value the poem? I would. Lesson learned.

After a week of distractions and a chaotic to-do list, I look forward to this afternoon at Lighthouse   Writers’ Workshop. Twice a month people gather in a grand old Denver mansion and write for an  hour or two. I find  comfort in seeing people bend to their keyboards or notebooks, all quiet, all  intent–or at least looking so. The atmosphere just keeps murmuring, “Write something.” This week I want to write solace, to pen solitude in the midst of all those other breathing beings.

I will take my journal and a folder of poetry drafts, a favorite pen and no expectations of success. Today I will write poetry as refuge, as meditation. Whether or not it helps heal a broken world or a broken heart, today’s workshop is dedicated to calm nerves and deep thought. The TAO says, “Do your work; then step back.” This week my work has been hard. It’s time to step back and reclaim my identity, to search what Yeats called the “lumber room” in my head and see what’s there. When the busy world pinches, poems heal by urging me toward truth, and that’s a kind of beauty, even if a terrible beauty. If all I see is a scaffolding that blocks the sunrise, I will have found something outside that connects to something inside. I will have added two hours of uninterrupted peace to my life.

ABCs of Living Local.

This thoughtful guest blog comes to us from Michael Greene, citizen of New Orleans. He and I have known each other for decades and debated more issues than I can name.

“I spent the morning thinking about a passage in Henry Miller’s short book “The Time of the Assassins” where he writes that the Surrealists poets Lautreamont, Breton, Rimbaud and Nietzsche are screaming at us, in Miller’s view, about the coming century and the cataclysm that will accompany it. In Miller’s opinion, and I’ll be the first one to say he is always writing about himself before any other subject, these poets were terrified by the vision of the life they viewed through their poetic lenses. Of course, Miller states, no one paid any attention to them then and there is no reason to think even with the evidence at hand anyone would pay attention to them now.

Suddenly, I’m reminded of a day when the Gulf of Mexico was on fire as a result of the BP rig explosion and it took me twenty minutes to cross St. Charles Avenue on foot because the seemingly endless stream of automobiles, each with one human in it, would not stop for me. I considered shaking my fist at the cars and their drivers, but in New Orleans no one would notice an old man going crazy on the curb. I think I came to the hard conclusion that day there wasn’t any point in my trying to understand the world I lived in. However, I still fall for the notion that there might be some poet out there speaking about the big picture, so to speak, in a way I can understand it. 

Anyway, I check around the Internet for the “Occupy Poetry” and ran across this one. What am I to make of it? I don’t want to fall in one of her “holes” and there aren’t any “Democratic Vistas” in the poem unless I count some pots and pans being thrown around the room. The business about the poor factory workers jumping from the roofs in China because of the lousy deal they get supplying iPhones to the Empire? Well, I get that all, too. I’m nations sorry about it; things are hard all over from what I can see these days.

http://occupypoetry.org/dis-orient 

I want to know what happened to my Walt Whitman? Do you know where he is? Is Walt now an old man gone crazy on the curb?”

Oh, Michael, don’t despair. Walt is still grandfather to us all. Look at the style of “dis-orient” and you’ll see him peeking out of the wrath. There’s the difference, I guess. She’s pissed and he was in love with this teeming world. I think we need both. If we didn’t love Boston, we wouldn’t be so angry and cry when someone blows up a holiday.