Poetry: trying to make some sense of it

Waking up after a stormy night, its time, I thought, time to do more to unravel my thinking about making poetry. Not just the writing, also the inspiring, the revising, workshop processes, finding and listening to feedback, sending poems into the world of others’ likes, dislikes, and the ways and means by which a decision is made that a particular poem works, whatever that means.

Wow, that was a long sentence … what am I trying to say is that, probably, as much as needing to write more poems (always) I’m ready and have the time to write myself toward a greater understanding of everything that surrounds and inhabits a poem if it is to reach, in all senses of that word, a reader.

Last evening I started a new poetry notebook (a real treat as its a large Moleskin with paper that invites writing) and I took a new Pilot pen … blue ink, the colour of the deep sea, and I wrote about my workshop experience that day with a newish poem and about my reading about the writing of poetry from the notebooks of Adrienne Rich.

I don’t plan to reproduce that here. What I want is to continue to regularly write with that pen on those pages and to follow that by also sharing a little of the result here in the hope of some comments from you, my reader, please. Whoever you are, reading this, poem writer or poem reader and both of those, I liked to hear your thoughts on making sense of poetry. Let’s not leave it to the professional poets to write about this art and craft … there are many of us and increasingly more of us, writing poetry that often stays out of sight, hardly sees the light of day, is glimpsed by only a few.

So here’s two passages from my pen and paper journal

Poetry pulls me … but is dissatisfying, contested, without a sense of knowing what it is about

and via Adrienne Rich  - the idea of setting down words into a force field and that as we read these are words that someone has known.

Reading that raises for me questions about whether I always know the words I set down, do I need to know them, can I arrive with them in that force field, learn about them through the poem. Is that what happened when I write the poem I work-shopped yesterday? Did that matter? Did it make a difference?

I’m aware I’ve committed myself to doing this again, and again: that feels scary, I need space to consider how and what sort of routine. This entry is long enough, there’s a blue sky day out, a day that’s quiet and in need of a little filling with other matters. I’m off to the gym and later on to my book group’s get together to choose books for 2014.

Have a good day, reader, and please, please, leave me a comment.

PS Reference is: Adrienne Rich What is found there, notebooks on poetry and politics W W Norton and Co.New York.