Two-Way Street

Poetry has a way of
making the world

interesting.
Start by imposing

your own meaning on it,
but then sit back

and let it show you
what it’s really made of.

Poetry Jukebox

Put in a dollar, and after a few minutes, you will receive a glorious sonnet extolling the virtues of your one true love, full of subtle metaphors and exquisite imagery, guaranteed to melt the coldest heart.

For a quarter, you may have your choice of a complex but mediocre sestina, or a simple yet pleasing villanelle, on a subject selected at random.

For a dime, a tragic ballad in which the family member of your choosing is lost at sea.

A nickel will get you a limerick, dirty or not, as you please.

Today, all I have are pennies.

The Best Worst Poem

A green cow went Moo—
and Trampled me.
-M.A., 7th grade

Do you really think this poem
—all two lines of it—
is in the style of Emily Dickinson,
per the assignment?

Let’s compare it to our notes.

Emily is fascinated
by the mysteries of nature
—why is that cow green?—
not to mention Death. Check.

Dashes and Capitals—yes and Yes.

A surprisingly elegant
slant rhyme of Moo
and Me, leaning into
absent consonants.

Short and untitled—those are gimmes.

And to top it all off—
the drama! Action!
Mystery (again with the green?)!
Even dialogue!

Could this be, perhaps… a masterpiece?

April’s Apogee

With each act of creation
we draw ourselves closer
to that one great moment
when Creation first ItSelf-ed.

Word by word, line by line,
we, too, become ourSelves,
as each poem pulls us into
the Apotheosis of April.

How to Grow a Poem

I planted a period.

Torn up paper in the recycling bin
made a nice mulch of used words.

It was only a day or two
before a tiny eroteme
poked its querulous head up.

The light of a desk lamp,
a few dribbles of tea,
and it exclaimed itself upright,
punctuating the air.

I spread out a trellis of handwriting paper,
one-inch rule, dotted midline,
plenty of space for ascenders and descenders,
and watched as tiny serifs sprouted,
hooking and grasping.

Loops pulled into letters, drawing
themselves into words, blossoming
into phrases fed by roots that delve now
all the way into the bookcase,
drinking from the nectar that arises
when words are immersed in each other.

Come harvest time, the sharp point
of my pen will snip the ripe pods,
slice and spread and slather them
into a feast of lines and stanzas,
an abundance of language that all began
with only the simple dot of an ending,
just like this one.

If I Could Express

If I could express myself on a vision board, then the magazines we’re cutting up would be less Better Homes and Gardens and more Better Souls Enheartened.

If I could express myself in watercolor, then Winsor & Newton would have paints with names like B-flat major and Diminished Fifth.

If I could express myself in music, then each note would crystallize into a gem of pure experience for you to hold and treasure.

If I could express myself in sculpture, then solid stone would leap and dance in great, jagged, mazurkas, chiseling their rhythms into the earth.

If I could express myself in dance, then every movement I make would rhyme with the world.

If I could express myself in poetry, then… I’d probably have written something else!

Downhill

As April inclines towards May
my poems, too, begin to slip
and I wonder which meaning
of “it’s all downhill from here”
I should expect.

April Spills

March was parched, but April spills,
and floods its banks until it fills
up poetry’s valley to the hills.

And may you, out of winter’s chills,
be spun in circles and quadrilles.

The poem leads us where it wills.

Whitespace

The margins of a math book
crawl with a sequence
of dragons, flaming,
flying, hoarding, filling
every gap with their pencil-lead gems.

Printed poetry picks out
mere specks of ink
from an infinitely possible array of white,
letting the mind fit itself in
around what was said
to assume everything else.

Empty lines on a calendar,
like white black holes,
fill their minutes, then hours, then days
with menological gravity.

Even as I type,
space, tab, carriage return,
are honored
with the largest keys.

But where,
in my mind now,
is the space
for another poem
to germinate?

My Refrigerator

There’s half a sonnet, right behind a bit
of villanelle that actually hadn’t tasted
terribly good to start with. Rhymes that fit
with words that I’m fresh out of—probably wasted
on limericks or something trivial
like that. A metaphor that could have loomed,
humming and white against the kitchen wall,
but inside of which, only mold has bloomed.
What’s this? A couplet in the veggie bin,
forgotten about but somewhat fresh, the skin
off an old simile, a tupperware
of frozen quatrains—I think we could prepare
something perhaps not quite uneatable,
or irredeemably unreadable.

Second Wind

When you’ve wrung out your brain for the umpteenth time,
and can no longer stand the glare of the screen—
When nothing remotely resembles a rhyme,
and your imagination is stuck in the Pleistocene—

When you’re up way to late and you just need to sleep,
and your eyelids drag on the floor,
but the deadlines continue, like pumas, to creep
up upon you (there’s always one more!)—

When you realize you just can’t do this yourself
and yet you decide to carry on through—
then you’ll find that you’re carried by Something Else,
and the poems start writing you.

Take a Breath

I spend March 31st inhaling.

The morning sunlight
thundering down on the windowsill,
the skipping mandolin
notes sparkling gold,
the taste of a cloud’s slow
pirouette through the sky,
it all becomes breath,
it all becomes me

until I become breath,
and breath becomes words,
and words flow out in a great exhalation of poetry
the length of April.

First and Last

Each poem is always the first and
the last ever to be written.
No matter what great deeds your hand
has done, you must needs be smitten

anew with the thought that each poem
is always the first. And the last,
even, shall be fresh, bright as foam
that sprays on rocks a fleeting blast

of joy beyond what you had planned.
Let your love for them tell you what
each poem is. Always the first and
the last thing to do—no shortcut

to that feeling of coming home,
of a complete and unsurpassed
finality, in which each poem
is always the first and the last.

April

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Spring”

For one purpose, April, do you return again.
Prose is not enough.
It can no longer quiet me with the flatness
Of countless pages turning steadily.
I write what I write.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The rhythms emerging.
The sound of the wind is rhymed.
It is apparent that all is life.
But what does that signify?
Not only in the heavens are the minds of men
Inspired by muses.
Desire in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a sheet of unmarked paper.
It is enough that yearly, down this hill,
I
Come like an idiot, babbling and strewing poems.

Poetry Season

For a fast month, we harvest poems,
April-ripe and urgently bursting,
our baskets stretched with letters,
with words, with finely worked lines.
We gather our treasures together,
share them, mix them, lick our fingers
as we linger on the long notes,
rejoicing in the juice of songs.
Around us, the ground catches
the leaves, the snatches of sound, the seeds
that fall, almost unnoticed, from our pens,
and then — and then! — they sprout,
the sharp green words come shooting out,
and verse begins again.

Filling Space

The void left when a poem is finished
is only a human emptiness,
as big as our egos.

If we think we have to fill it,
it is impossible.

But if we know that every atom
is infinite,
is eternal,

then we simply listen.
Each one will whisper to us
its epic poem.

The Earworm Triolet

It’s hard to write a poem
with an earworm in my head.
I think “Yeah, still, I’ll show ’em,”
But it’s hard to write a poem
That sounds better than a modem
That’s connecting to the web.
It’s hard to write a poem
with an earworm in my head.

Villanelle. Really, Just a Villanelle.

All month I’ve tried to write a villanelle.
The thought has pestered me now every night.
No matter what, it doesn’t turn out well.

My mind will visit every day this cell,
wherein it frets upon its self-made plight:
a month now looking for a villanelle.

It seems a pleasant verse in which to dwell,
where thoughts can bed down cozy overnight,
but somehow still, it never turns out well.

I try to conjure up the proper spell,
the one that makes the words align just right.
Once more I try to write a villanelle,

but lines with funny colors, awkward smells,
and itchy skin descend on it like blight.
No matter what, it doesn’t turn out well.

I swear this strange desire I will quell!
I’ll squeeze the poem out in black and white!
All month I tried to write a villanelle,
and now I have… though really not that well.

On Elation

What can be said about elation
that the elated, seeking consolation
from their joy, will go to books for?
-Adrienne Su, “On Writing”

What can be said about elation
is less of joy than of vacillation

between itself and its opposite.
A strange fact of life is that

it’s a rollercoaster: if you seek
its pleasures, you’ll have also to take

its pains, the downs with the ups.
The need for consolation erupts

later, lower, past the laughter.
So why does so much “Art” try to plaster

the dark side of life on its billboards?
That is not the truth any more

than a false picture of everlasting
elation. The art we must master

is to find the joy within the sorrow,
that ever-present thread we can follow

that guides us to a state of oneness,
where opposites merge into fathomless

peace. Any state can be uplifted,
thus—and Art can be the catalyst

that carries us, reminds us in our fears:
this life is more than it appears.

The Apologist Sestina

A poet sometimes has a fear of form,
of glaring rules and too long hours of practice —
all for what? Success just means a chance
to wear the chains and let yourself be bound
by someone else’s thoughts, by what they feel
is proper and poetical and right.

And who are they to tell me what to write?
My soul will never wear a uniform,
my art can only come from what I feel.
And what I feel does not include a practice
of subservience to poets bound
to shun delights that come from letting chance

impose its fancy on one’s art. By “chance”
I mean those whims that strike from left and right.
We know not where they come from or are bound
but think this mystery may yet inform
in some vague way what we may call our practice,
both of poetry and life. But feel

more deeply how emotions come to fill
you — crowds, desires, advertising, chance
encounters, music blaring. So, in practice
you will find that you’re not always right
to trust your gut, for who knows what may form
your fancies from these inputs that abound.

It’s when we do not know that we are bound
that we’re most caught. So, though perhaps you feel
at first you absolutely can’t perform
with such restrictions, try. Just take a chance
on sonnets or sestinas, on a rite
enacted over centuries of practice.

Though you’re stiff at first and out of practice,
You’ll improve yourself by leaps and bounds.
You’ll see that, far from giving up your rights
and freedoms, now in poetry you feel
a solid leverage, a boost, a chance
to bring ideas to new and higher forms.

So practice constantly until you feel
no longer bounded by the whims of chance,
but free within the rightness of your form.