Why I Still Make Poems

Sometimes with One I Love by Walt Whitman : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

The delusions of fame and fortune have long since gone, but the ideas still arrive nearly every day. Reading Whitman the first time wasn't a magic moment because I had already tried making rhymes before, sitting in some corner making a song I'd never be able to sing. But it was the truthful and easy way the lines stretched out on the page that made me keep trying, and unrequited love provided plenty of opportunities. Now, there is enough requital to fill the day and though the poems still don't pay, by the word or otherwise, the songs keep coming, by the bird and otherwise.


Publication – is the Auction (788) by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

I guess I've always been afraid of the fairest price of the words that spill out. If the best of the my poems typed, recited, or scribbled out on yellow legal pages were to be weighed out against an honest merchant's wool, I'm afraid the warp & woof would be left wanting. The seldom & slender publications that have come through the years don't amount to much proof of worth. At least there is the knowledge that what isn't sold remains priceless, though mostly unread.

Enter: The Blogosphere. Though admittedly it doesn't increase the readership of these poems much and certainly doesn't lead to critical acclaim, it does provide a sense of writing for an audience larger than the self, satisfying the need to speak out without needing a third party to certify the parcel as approved poetry.

The Farm on the Great Plains by William E. Stafford : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

My father was not a poet, but he was a lover of words with a keen sense of both things and sentiment. He was an engineer; therefore, he was a maker. Home, the idea, has always been a kind of poem: filled with the familiarities of place, the kitchen smells, the sounds of family, feet and floors, the movement of air, cool & heat, as it lurched or slinked through a decades old house. And this home was a Midwestern home, a Midwestern family removed from its Eastern roots by years of coal dirt, machine oil, and schoolroom chalkdust.

Enter: William Stafford. The simplicity of what this man, a surrogate, though dead himself, for a dying dad whose poems never made it beyond throat or fingertip. Here were pages and pages of stories carefully crafted as early mornings' news. A paradigm to follow, a family of poems to admire, learn from, imitate, and teach to children, other people's children, and someday my own. Kids, these are poems your grandpa might have written and your father tried but never could.


Home for Christmas by Franz Wright : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

As I said, dad didn't write them down. If he had I might have had that to contend with every time I head home or visit a white blank page. Instead, the blinking cursor says: maybe this is the moment the ghost arrives to write the first poem to hold its own dusty weight.

Kindness by Yusef Komunyakaa : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

But words matter to me. The way they conjure intentions, images, inflection, and innuendo. I make my career teaching words to kids many of whom do not privilege them beyond popular use. There is no word that doesn't signify to the importance of poetry. It might just be that poets have tried them all. Few do it as playfully and powerfully as Yusef Komunyakaa does it today. When he writes:

A barometer, temperature
gauge, a ruler in minus fractions
& pedigrees, a thingmajig,
a probe with an all-seeing eye,
what do we need to measure
kindness, every unheld breath,
every unkind leapyear?

is he not testifying to what we do when we string the words along a line, breaking here and there to catch a breath, skip a beat, or wink an eye?

New Intelligence by Rae Armantrout : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Finally, we write, or, rather, I write to keep learning. Whatever can be asked can be answered in a poem without the burden of limited faith or limitless doubt. Where else can words pull things together so tightly or warm exiles with starfire? Isn't every poem a birth and a dying? Doesn't every poem create a world, underworld, and heavenly hope? Or if not heavenly, a world of spirits that only the right words can reach.

*****

I'm not sure this little meandering through poems and personal history gets at why I write, and it doesn't make up for the lack that is my poems' curse, but it does provide a few examples of why I keep doing it, namely, to believe in poems like Whitman, to believe in doubt like Dickinson, to understand the difficulty of simplicity like Stafford and the inevitability of loss like Franz Wright, to chase the wonder in words like Komunyakaa and to create a new way of making meaning like Rae Armantrout.

In the end all the excuses fall away like old beliefs that get outgrown. Given wider world and longer time, I might never strike the vein that leads to fame. Truthfully, I spend my patience in too many other places to make these poems work the way they should, but I've wasted too much time saying: this is the last one only to get the itch again. So until the next one comes along, I'm sorry about the imperfections of the rest.