What a generous post, Melanie -- so much shared about where your poetic attention goes and how your poems grow. Good reading for anyone who wonders how poetry happens!
I like this idea of poems like seeds and farming. Really interesting and fitting description of the poetry process.
In your poem, "Which way is the wind blowing today?" I like that description of:
"Tonight the wind hers
clouds to cover
the moon and stars."
To answer your questions, I do have some ideas and images I'm haunted by. Oddly, they're a family of local crows that often follow me on my hikes. I leave peanuts and snacks for them along my walks. What is odd though, is I rarely take any photos of them as it doesn't feel right to do. Hard to explain.
I love your crows and the reticence to take photos of them. It's lovely to have something special just for you that you don't need to share with the rest of the world. I once tried to befriend our neighborhood crows with peanuts, but I botched it and accidentally scared them away and now they won't have anything to do with me. Unfortunately crows have good memories for that sort of thing.
The compost pile is an apt metaphor. I love seeing the progression of the poem in your fertile brain. The completed poem is gorgeous, and the way it gathers power from the many, many moments of attention and wonder is stirring. It makes me feel that the fragments of lines I hoard in journals and word documents are all part of the finished poems after all. I could see a collection of essays like this turning into a book. If I end up teaching a creative writing class again, I want to direct students to this essay as an example of why I encourage them to journal, to pay attention, to listen to the musicality of words, to let ideas link themselves together organically as they figure out what you want to say. It's hard to express that to students when all they see is the finished poem on the printed page, but this essay would take them by the hand and lead them through the process.
The process of writing can seem so mysterious. I love trying to shed light upon it. When I was younger I'd have been mystified by the idea of journaling. I mostly wrote when I had an idea for a full poem, not so much lines and scraps; but the more I push myself to just record the scraps and the observations, the more frequently poems come. And it's not so much even that I'm going back to the journals to mine them for lines-- though that does happen sometimes-- but just that I come back to the same images and words and phrases over and over again and over time they accumulate and conglomerate.
One of the most satisfying English assignments ever was when a high school teacher had us read two drafts of a passage from A Farewell to Arms and asked us to write a short comparison contrast analysis talking about what words and phrases Hemingway had changed and why the final version was better than the rough draft. That lesson sank into my bones and convinced me like nothing else of the value of revising.
That is an excellent assignment. I need to tuck that away for the next time I teach hs English. It is mysterious how the more you write down ideas, the more frequently/easily they come. My first drafts are often heinous. Everyone jokes about the crappy draft, but my first pass is often cliche riddled, swamped in rhymes, and clunky. Every once in a while I write a poem in one go, but it is rare. I enjoyed getting in on the behind the scenes. Thank you, Melanie!
Right? The kids insisted we had to get ice cream. My oldest reminded me that when Pope Francis was elected we went out to dinner at Chilis because it was too late to cook.
What a lovely meditation on your poetic process. Thanks for sharing! I too love the compost idea, and I use seed imagery a lot in my own thinking and writing. I’ve never thought deliberately about the images that haunt my writing, but now I’m going to!
What a generous post, Melanie -- so much shared about where your poetic attention goes and how your poems grow. Good reading for anyone who wonders how poetry happens!
Thank you, Elizabeth. I appreciate your reading and commenting. And thanks for sharing!
I like this idea of poems like seeds and farming. Really interesting and fitting description of the poetry process.
In your poem, "Which way is the wind blowing today?" I like that description of:
"Tonight the wind hers
clouds to cover
the moon and stars."
To answer your questions, I do have some ideas and images I'm haunted by. Oddly, they're a family of local crows that often follow me on my hikes. I leave peanuts and snacks for them along my walks. What is odd though, is I rarely take any photos of them as it doesn't feel right to do. Hard to explain.
Thanks for commenting and sharing, Neil.
I love your crows and the reticence to take photos of them. It's lovely to have something special just for you that you don't need to share with the rest of the world. I once tried to befriend our neighborhood crows with peanuts, but I botched it and accidentally scared them away and now they won't have anything to do with me. Unfortunately crows have good memories for that sort of thing.
The compost pile is an apt metaphor. I love seeing the progression of the poem in your fertile brain. The completed poem is gorgeous, and the way it gathers power from the many, many moments of attention and wonder is stirring. It makes me feel that the fragments of lines I hoard in journals and word documents are all part of the finished poems after all. I could see a collection of essays like this turning into a book. If I end up teaching a creative writing class again, I want to direct students to this essay as an example of why I encourage them to journal, to pay attention, to listen to the musicality of words, to let ideas link themselves together organically as they figure out what you want to say. It's hard to express that to students when all they see is the finished poem on the printed page, but this essay would take them by the hand and lead them through the process.
The process of writing can seem so mysterious. I love trying to shed light upon it. When I was younger I'd have been mystified by the idea of journaling. I mostly wrote when I had an idea for a full poem, not so much lines and scraps; but the more I push myself to just record the scraps and the observations, the more frequently poems come. And it's not so much even that I'm going back to the journals to mine them for lines-- though that does happen sometimes-- but just that I come back to the same images and words and phrases over and over again and over time they accumulate and conglomerate.
One of the most satisfying English assignments ever was when a high school teacher had us read two drafts of a passage from A Farewell to Arms and asked us to write a short comparison contrast analysis talking about what words and phrases Hemingway had changed and why the final version was better than the rough draft. That lesson sank into my bones and convinced me like nothing else of the value of revising.
That is an excellent assignment. I need to tuck that away for the next time I teach hs English. It is mysterious how the more you write down ideas, the more frequently/easily they come. My first drafts are often heinous. Everyone jokes about the crappy draft, but my first pass is often cliche riddled, swamped in rhymes, and clunky. Every once in a while I write a poem in one go, but it is rare. I enjoyed getting in on the behind the scenes. Thank you, Melanie!
It cheers me to no end that we shared the same Thursday…starting school, seeing white smoke, then celebrating!
Right? The kids insisted we had to get ice cream. My oldest reminded me that when Pope Francis was elected we went out to dinner at Chilis because it was too late to cook.
What a lovely meditation on your poetic process. Thanks for sharing! I too love the compost idea, and I use seed imagery a lot in my own thinking and writing. I’ve never thought deliberately about the images that haunt my writing, but now I’m going to!