81 things about poetry
a new and old list
I think a lot about writing, nearly as much as I actually write. The practice of writing has grown in importance to me over time, beginning as something I did reflexively but hardly thought about, shifting to something that feels essentially tied to my identity and work in the world. I think beginning to write poetry was part of this essential shift. Poetry begs you to think about it, to notice yourself writing it. It forces you to philosophize, at least a little bit. I’ve been working at that for years now, and I’m not sure that I’ve gotten any closer to any sort of cohesive poetics. But I’m trying to figure it out. What am I doing when I am writing a poem? What is is all for or about? Why am I thinking about this?
I began writing this list four years ago, and discovered it in a google doc recently. It was really interesting to read the old list, I agreed with almost everything I said. Four years and many many more poems written, I agree. I’m editing and adding to it now, not distinguishing between new and old. Poetry confounds and exhausts me, yet I remain devoted to it as a practice. Sometimes writing poems feels like the only way to exhale what is shut inside of me. I think it’s an important (if not successful) thing I do. I have a published poetry book, and another one soon to be published, so I suppose I’m a successful poet. But I begin to feel self-conscious anytime I start to think about Poetry or Literature. As a very dedicated writer who has never quite felt like I’ve gotten my footing in any sort of community, I often feel like an outsider in regard to those official capital letter words. I feel like I don’t quite understand the ecosystem, or can’t tell whether I’m a part of it at all. Becoming a mother has further blurred this understanding of myself while also making it all feel much more personally urgent— what is my work, is it worth the time and effort and energy, who cares to hear my thoughts, is this art or just shouting into the void?! Better to just write the poems, write the essays, write the fiction than think about it so much. Better to just keep practicing. Better not to worry whether what you write is real literature, real poetry. But isn’t that what poetry and literature are? The things that writers write? Don’t we need to worry about this stuff, at least a little bit?
So here are my collected thoughts as of four years ago and right this second, intertwined. I will continue nurturing my little body of work, tending to my little garden that means so much to me. When I began writing poetry, I felt like I had found a new river inside myself. That running water is vital, and I can’t ignore it even when I try.
Not an exhaustive list! But, oh, is anything ever?
I learn poetry by doing it. I try to define it in the shower sometimes. Come up with sprawling definitions. Poetry is this, poetry isn’t that. I never settle on any one definition. I always forget what I was thinking of by the time I step out of the shower.
It’s nearly impossible to write a poem when you’re fearful. Fear unjoints you, to write a poem you have to be upright at least. You can’t have buckling knees.
It’s a spiritual practice more than anything else, a duet with unknowing. There are no facts in poems — at least none that can be cited. A poem asks, “what is a fact?”.
Poems are guttural. The reflex is hardly literary. Until it becomes literary, but by then it’s a little spoiled maybe.
I could be wrong about all of this.
I’m interested in the concept of heresy after growing up so afraid of it. Is poetry a heretical practice more than it’s a doctrinal one? / I’m not saying it’s TRUE I’m saying it could be true. / I’m asking, what if this were true? / I’m saying, parts of this may be true.
Poetry has nothing to do with capitalism. But wouldn’t it be cool if poetry made money?
You can’t write a poem about something you understand completely.
I'm terribly inefficient. I need to get hit with the stick of efficiency or else I spin around and around in circles watching my skirt flare out and doing nothing.
Denise Levertov writes often of rivers. A way to describe herself, maybe. The poem starts with “‘Your river is in full flood,’ she said.” I read rivers also the other day in another poem, but how could I find it in the thousand-page-book of her collected poems? I love that huge book because poems absolutely disappear into it.
I want my work to be like that, each poem a mystery, a memory, perhaps never to be found again. Poems swallowed up inside a thick body of work.
I need a writing group.
My dog Bobo is beside me on the couch, and I bought new sandalwood incense. Facts like these feel relevant to me, part of the useful information.
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Like I’ve said before, it’s hard to write when you’re afraid. It’s impossible to write a poem when you’re fearful. There has to be a sort of breathless courage, and sometimes I’m not strong enough for that. Sometimes I feel small and curled up, like a child. Small and sad and worried. That’s when I don’t feel like writing at all.
I don’t know if anything I write is any good at all.
Why does it need to be?But poems make me feel so excited!
Poetry, writing and reading it, (but more writing it), is a spiritual practice for me. A way to pray. It’s possibly the first way I’ve ever really prayed. I don’t know what I believe anymore, but I do believe that writing poems lifts my soul up out of the ground.
It was Kathleen Norris’ work that really got me started thinking about poetry as a spiritual practice, as a mode of being, a way through. She practices it, works at it, thinks on it, legitimizes it, humbly and with hope. She makes such an excellent case. But I like her prose so much more than I like her poetry — though she would introduce herself as a poet, I think.
There are actually a couple of poets whose prose I connect with much more. I’m thinking of May Sarton, and also Rachel Zucker. I love the poet’s mind.
My favorite things to read are journals and letters. I love informal writing the best. Writing not meant for publishing. Working writing, functional writing, life writing.
I also like blogs and newsletters, which I also think are informal writing. I don’t love to read polished essays, and I rarely find poets who I can really follow.
The poets I love write domestic confessional poems. Poems from life. Poems that feel like a little window into both a house and a mind. Into a life being actively lived. Jane Kenyon, Denise Levertov, Linda Gregg, Marie Howe, Mary Oliver. There are others, but that’s the vibe.
Poem as window to peer through. Poem as Joseph Cornell box of curiosities. Poem as shelf with things placed on it. Poem as little room, swept and made beautiful. Poem as messy table.
Yes, the poem is just evidence of life being lived, thoughts being thought, words scribbled in a journal somewhere that will likely never be published. The poem is just the little thing to hold up to the light. Maybe the poem hardly matters. Maybe the poem is just a figurehead.
Poem as window into a feeling. Poem as hand to hold.
I re-subscribed to The New Yorker as if that will help, as if I will actually read it.
My poetry was rejected from Image. Not surprising, but I was still sad, still disappointed. I read the email at a bad time, I guess. I didn’t send good poems. But I need someone, somewhere, to encourage me, and I don’t know who it will be.
The way all the poetry I love sounds somewhat alike, but so distinct from person to person, like a group of friends who all speak the same language. I know I’m in the right place. I find them in the crowd.
Is the universe a poem? Is that why it’s so logical and illogical, both?
Poem logic is so shifty. It only has to hold the poem together, doesn’t need to connect to anything anywhere else. It doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone.
I love writing poems about motherhood. It makes me feel powerful. Like a way to say what is happening in a form that might make someone listen. Essays don’t feel so powerful. Why is that?
I love the poems that feel up-close, but even they don’t say it quite the way I would. It urges me to write.
Poems that are clearly inhabited. Someone just left this room. Tea still steaming in the mug.
You can’t be sure of a poem. So much not enough, but distinct. A poem is what it is.
I always feel like I’m writing the same poem over and over again — and in some ways I am. But then I read it back and it’s brand new, and different than the others. There is only so much a mind can hold, but still new things float up and out.
In an interview I listened to, Greta Gerwig said something like, "Virginia Woolf was better than everyone else." It made me laugh. What did she mean by that?
If you tell it slant, I’ll hear it better. Give me the curvy, the queer, the akimbo. I want to find what’s true.
Jane Kenyon leaves many of her poems unresolved. She never circles back around, never refers back to anything. Poems full of facts, even more full of mystery, but it’s almost a secret. Her metaphors have a very light touch. Her heavy-handedness is only in writing the poem at all. They’re exquisite and delicate. She brings herself into them every time. As the observer. As the speaker. As a human needing to know.
Jane Kenyon writes about childhood like Annie Dillard does, like she remembers it perfectly.
I can’t remember anything, except the very few things that stick to me as if with a pushpin. I suppose those are my poems.
I fell asleep early last night, and this morning it’s so foggy that I can’t see the hill at all. A great white wall.
I love so much the term “body of work.” That’s a poem. To think that each time I write a poem or an essay or anything that feels like part of the collection, I’m growing a little taller in statue, that body of work.
I want to be prolific.
I think I am prolific.
And even if nobody ever cares, it will have mattered to me, to have made all the art I wished to, to have grown taller and taller and taller and stronger and stronger and stronger, a body that is sturdy and full.
Why does this feel so much like pioneering? Why do I feel like I’m late? I should have been a writing major in college, should have gotten a dang MFA, maybe I’d have gotten to sit in these conversations earlier.
I wish I had a mentor or teacher. I just pretend that my favorite writers are my teachers, I guess. I pretend they love me. I pretend they’re watching me grow.
Maybe for me it’s essential to traverse it alone. It feels like a door into the next place in myself. It feels like an encounter with my true self. I don’t want to share that space with anyone else yet.
My poetry manuscript was rejected from the emerging poet prize at Autumn House Press which felt very bad. I was surprised by the badness I felt. I read the email in the car with Jessie and Hannah and I could have told them but it felt too bad. I kept the news guarded, like a wound I wasn’t ready to bandage.
I am so worried that my poems are not good. Who gets to decide whether they are good or not? Everything I know about making art means you just have to keep being persistent, but I already feel discouraged. Why am I so easily discouraged?
I write much more informal writing than I do formal writing. More morning pages and journals and newsletter essays than poems or pages of my novel or polished essays. What if that’s really my work? The working writing? I don’t know.
What do I love writing? Why do I keep doing it?
It’s been a long road to here, many years of sharing writing so freely with so little feedback, and once I do look for feedback from the gatekeepers the first answer is rejection. That hurts. I’m not alone in that, though, I know.
I’m thinking about Madeleine L’Engle writing quiet journals through her many A Wrinkle in Time rejections. How funny to read it knowing what happened. But how true her feelings were. I don’t think anything I write will be like A Wrinkle in Time, but maybe I will look back at this season someday and feel the same.
My business is circumference. Reading Emily Dickinson’s letters aloud to Hannah as she fixed my hair, I remembered anew that something here makes wild sense to me, something here rings true. Does it matter if anyone else agrees?
What is the work? Circumference. Circling around the great mystery at the center. Saying what I see.
The rilke poem, “I live my life in widening circles.” The primordial tower image, I think about that all the time. The hawk.
I want to know if my poems are good. I want to know that I’m good. It’s so existential, so spiritual, so legalistic. I can feel myself shifting into a terrible dualism. IS THIS GOOD: CHECK THE BOX YES OR NO. Oh my, there isn’t any box!
Wondering if you’re a good writer only slows you down – that’s certain. I drown in lack of feedback though. I get so little feedback. Sometimes I’m so sure that writing is my true work, and sometimes it feels like a strange fantasy I put on like a cloak.
My true work is just being alive. My true work is the circle.
My true work is also taking care of my family, and living inside of my life.
The writing is just another form of embodiment. Giving flesh to what is already real.
God, I hate money. I hate needing to make money, it ruins every good thing.
As soon as I start to worry about making money with my writing I start to feel panicky and it all feels ruined. Zines feel good to make though. That’s a big positive shift for me. Book deals don’t feel good, ironically. But zines feel good.
Writing it’s like smoke that takes so much energy to create and then vanishes. I keep lighting the match though. I light the match and feel myself burn.
This morning I read the Denise Levertov poem, “Salvation,” the one about daylighting a river. I was thinking about it, and then I turned to it easily and read it. I remember reading it for the first time in Chicago years ago, before I was really thinking about poetry. The first line stuck with me so ardently. “They are going to daylight a river here.”
Poem as personal archive. Poem as scrapbook of important feelings. Poem as memory.
At first the poem can be absolutely anything. It can contain the whole universe. The poem begins as a black hole. Then, slowly, it narrows, boundary-ing itself. It becomes littler and littler, contains less and less. It ends quite small, and quite restrained. A poem is a little thing, after all. But that immensity before any word has been written — that’s an incredible thing.
Using poems to try to herd your life together, gather your life up in your arms, whatever parts of it you can manage to catch and contain for a moment.
You can build your own forms. You can write what feels and sounds good to you. You can study Poetry and try to get it “right,” — but I do not do that because I know that would ruin it for me. You have permission to create your own poetics.
The poem as un-essay. The poem as un-story.
I love when the title of a poem gets stuck in my head all on its own. I’m thinking about “We Manage Most When We Manage Small” by Linda Gregg. I think about that title all the time. The poem too, but mostly the title. I’m in my Linda Gregg era, have been loving reading her work. That title alone drew me to read her more widely.
I feel so angsty sometimes. Writing my little poems, letting them pile one on top of another. A poem is so vulnerable, so easily lost. Just a little collection of words — many sort of loosely scattered in my notes app or a stray google doc. What will become of the poems? Who is there to tend to my body of work? Only me, I suppose.
I didn’t write poems at all until my mid-twenties. Now it feels like an essential part of my creative practice, and, in some ways, one of the things I have been most successful at. But not very successful. And I want a lifelong practice. A slow burn. I want my elder poems to be my best yet. I want people to read those poems. So I have to keep writing now. Unfortunately, I think people will only read your poems when you’re old if you’ve gained popularity when you’re young. It’s a pity that things are that way.
Oh yuck, starting to think about publishing, commercialism, capitalism again. Put it away, put it all away! The poems die in that place!
We manage most when we manage small. Just write today’s poem. Just gather the day in your arms, the year. Just take one breath, notice one feeling that rises like smoke, and try to evoke it in the way only you can. Try to save it for later.
If it has mattered to me, it is enough. If it has mattered to anyone else, that is more than enough. (This for all art.)
I told my friend recently that blue jays will be appearing in all of my poems simply because there are a lot of blue jays around my house and when I see them I want to write poems.
Let it be so simple. Let birds. (Linda Gregg again.) Oh, I so trust that impulse, that reflex to write when I see a blue bird. There, that beauty again, flying across my sightline. Quick, write it down! The same every time, but different.
They say the best poets write from the '“source.” I don’t know what that source is, but I hope it loves me. I hope it whispers to me. I hope it keeps filling me with feelings that feel like they’ll spill over unless I catch them in a poem, forever.
After all those thoughts on poetry and writing and literature and money, here is some writing you might like to buy in the form of ZINES! I love making zines, I love sending them in the mail, or sending the files to be printed. I think they are beautiful physical objects, and, in some ways, small installments of my best work. Publishing books is much too fraught and too slow. The whole publishing industrial complex really doesn’t work for writers/artists at all. And a newsletter or blog, while delightful, is too intangible. What a joy to make a zine! And what a joy to read one! Emily Dickinson made little paper pamphlets of her poetry and sent them to her friends. I like to think that’s what Imaginary Lake’s zines are too.
NEW: I’m really excited to introduce Imaginary Lake’s first writing pattern, Birth Story. It’s a workbook zine, to guide you through the process of writing your own birth story in a way that feels complete using gentle prompts and a timeline structure.
It follows the publication of my second birth story in the zine, Second Birth. Both zines are still in print and available now!
Also available from Imaginary Lake:
I’m Learning Waiting Like It’s a Skill: Observations from a First Pregnancy (Digital Download)
Little Birth Book Magic Zine (Digital Download)
Second Birth: A Birth Story (Digital Download)
Birth Story: A Pattern for Writing (Digital Download)
ALSO FOLLOW IMAGINARY LAKE ON INSTAGRAM PLEASE! (@imaginary_lake) Xoxoxo!
Yes, yes, yes! I relate so strongly to these. Thank you for sharing your process thoughts with us.
If you haven’t read it, you might enjoy George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - his orientation is around short stories, but his process rang so true for me with regard to poetry writing - it was very encouraging and validating to read. You will emerge trusting your own gut more.
Thank you again! 💖
This list is so beautiful. I recognize a lot of my own processing about making and wanting to be in conversation with others who are doing it. Thank you for writing, for yourself and for the rest of us.