Workshop Packet

Open Poetry: A Workshop and Retreat

Thassos, Greece    June 2012

Carolyn Forché

“In actual fact objects are faint mirror images of time.  Objects don’t exist...Let the mouse run across the stone.  Now count every one of its footsteps.  Now forget the word “every,” forget the word “footstep.”  Then every footstep will appear as a new movement.  After that, since, for good reason, you have experienced the disappearance of your perception of a series of movements which you were erroneously calling footsteps (you were confusing movement with space), movement will begin to fragment, it will be reduced to nil.  A flickering begins.  The mouse begins to flicker.  Look around: the world is flickering.”

—from “Oberiuty,” by Leonid Aleksandrove, in Chekhoslovenska rusistika, XIII, 68 no.5

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         “the one who

hits the target misses everything else...”

                                    —Danilo Kis

..verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (we have those soon enough); they are experiences.  In order to write a single poem, one must see many cities, and people, and things; one must get to know animals and the flight of birds, and the gestures that flowers make when they open to the morning.  One must be able to return to roads in unknown regions; to unexpected encounters, to partings long foreseen; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, and to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that begin so strangely with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days spent in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to oceans, to nights of travel that rushed along loftily and flew with all the stars--and still it is not enough to be able to think of all this.  There must be memories of many nights of love, each one unlike the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of women in childbed, light and blanched and sleeping, shutting themselves in.  But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in a room with open windows and with fitful noises.  And still it is not yet enough, to have memories.  One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the immense patience to wait till they are come again.  For the memories themselves are still nothing.  Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves--not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

                                                                        --Rainer Maria Rilke

The Reading Practice: Choose a poet whose work was completed prior to 1945 (Sappho, Homer, Blake, Dante, Dickinson, Whitman, Pound, etc.).  At the beginning of one of the four seasons of the year, decide to concentrate on the works of that poet: his/her collected poems, a critical biography, criticism, journals, letters, prose writings.  Keep this work on the bedside table.  Change this poet each season.

Choose a poet whose work was published after 1945 (Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, etc.).  Place one book by such a poet in the bathroom.  Change this book weekly.

Xerox or copy by hand the poems from these readings, both seasonal and weekly, and keep them together in your own personal anthology.  This is the anthology you will take with you to the desert island.

The Writing Practice: Choose a place for your writing (desk, fruit crate in cellar, kitchen table, box in attic).  During your writing time, clear this of everything that hasn't to do with your writing.  Keep dictionaries, thesaurus, field guides, photographs, etc.  Choose a time of day during which it is usually possible for you to free yourself from other responsibilities/activities (midnight, dawn, lunch hour).  Go to your place and write or sit for thirty minutes. 

The Writing Process:  Make three boxes: one for good lines, one for good sections/stanzas/paragraphs, and one for loved words.  These boxes can be of wood, paper, tin, whatever material you like, and whatever size.  Keep these boxes in the vicinity of your writing place.  During the first fifteen minutes of your Writing Practice, empty your hands of the language that has coursed into them since your last Writing Practice.  Write freely, quickly and without regard to form.  Turn these pages over and save them for two weeks.  After two weeks, you will have about thirty pages if you have written daily.  Read through these pages, and re-copy by hand or into your computer whatever still pleases you or seems interesting (these two are not always the same).  Put the pages in an envelope, date it and seal it.  Put it away.  Keep the re-copied pages.  After two months, do the same thing with the re-copied pages.  Put these final "gleanings" into your Poet's Notebook (springboard, ring binder, whatever).  Along with these pages you will keep your drafts of poems, newsclippings, photographs, epigraphs, lists of loved words, lists of treasures of mind, lists of visual snapshots, lists of lists.  Work on your poems using this notebook.

The "Loved Words" List:  Keep lists of the words you most love—for their mnemonic power, their sound, whatever quality.  Read through these lists before you write.  Here are some of Odysseas Elytis' "loved words" (from The Little Mariner, by Odysseas Elytis, translated by Olga Bourmas, Copper Canyon Press, out of print): agape, Alexandra, All Soul's Day, anchor, anemone, Anna, ant, arch, arm in arm, armoir, aspen, astringent, August, bait, barbette, barrel, basil, basket, bay leaf, beach, beam-reach, beeswax, bell, bergamot, birdsong, bitter sea, blanket, blueing, bluefish, bluefly, boat, bolt, bougainvillea, boulder, braided rug, bride, brine, butterfly.

The "Visual Photographs":  Make lists of visual snapshots: quick verbal photographs of places/times/people.  A shorthand memory.  Here are some of Elytis':  (he names them after the islands where he saw them—some might enter poems, some become poems in themselves)

KERKYRA

Spring night in a distant quarry graveyard.  That luminous cloud of fireflies that lightly shifts from grave to grave.

SKIATHOS

Just as the small boat meets the sea-cave, and suddenly, from the awesome light, you are enclosed in frozen blue-green mint.

AEGINA

Eleven o’clock, wind on the uphill to Old Chora.  Not a soul.

BILLIO

Who lets her nightgown drop, picks it up, discards it finally and sits facing the balcony, her bra unfastened in the back.

The "Treasures": keep a list in your notebook of the works of art, passages of music, the paintings, lines  of poetry, etc. which have been made by others, and which you have taken into yourself for safe keeping.  Here are some of Elytis':

HOMER

dusky water

brightly burnished interiors

then an ineffable ether was cleft from the sky

SAPPHO

many-eyed night

FRA ANGELICO

Left view of the “Coronation of the Virgin”  (Louvre Museum)

BEETHOVEN

Sonata for violin and pinao no. 2 in A major, opus 12.

Sontata for violoncello and piano no.5 in D major,

            opus 102, 1.

"If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here.  It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement."  Compose a box of fastidiously labelled materials which re-create your life as an individual (excreta excluded).  This is not an exercise in narcissism nor a romantic gesture, and though it is far from a writing request, it is important to attempt this.  (Modified from a syllabus by C.D. Wright).

Forty-word meditations

1.    sea                        light                 wind                breath

2.    after          among              during              within

3.  lavender      smoke              ruins                breath

4.  shawl          cloud               linens               rain

5.   voices        fog                   grief                 ruins

6.  earliest        latest                farthest                        nearest

7.  holy                        wild                 dying                burnt

8.  end             photograph      coffin               cloud

9.   attic           cellar                wall                 window

10.  snow         memory           March              stillness           

1.  orchard        story               voice               field

2.  blue             broken            still                  ruined

3.  clouds         stars                 house             river

4.  silence         light                wind               road

5.  friend          stranger           ghost             lover

6.  after           during              until              between

7.  remember    sing                know            break

8.  coffin         window           distance        memory

9.  desire         grief                history          fire

10.  sometimes    whenever    often    never

First exercise:

Récit éclaté:  A broken story.

1.  Imagine or remember first a place.  Make notes composed of words, lines, images about the place.  The place might be familiar, haunting, remote, terrible, the site of a wound, the scene of a difficulty, a place revered in memory.  The place.

2.  Some "other" is there, or was there, or should have been there, and this "other" does nor does not remember, should or shouldn't remember, does or doesn't acknowledge what happened and it matters or does not matter.

3.  Something happened.  Between them or within each of them.  A long or a short time ago.  Something might have happened to them both there at that time.  Something one remembers and the other doesn't?  Hint at this event.

4.  The voice of the poem has gone elsewhere since.  Where?  Or what?

5.  The voice of the poem says a last something about that place and time, or that other, or says something to the other.

First lines:

It wasn’t in me.  It went out and in.

I wanted to hold it. . .

I have my dead, and I have let them go. . .

Once, somewhere, somehow, you had. . .

You who never arrived in my arms,

Beloved. . .

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is

most intimate. . .

Who, if I cried out, would hear me. . .

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight. . .

Be ahead of all parting, as though it were already

behind you. . .

Long afternoons of childhood, not yet really

life. . .

The Lalapalouza Exercise

1) Write down a dream, or a waking dream, if you can remember one

2) Describe a tool or a kitchen implement.

3) Write an early childhood memory

4) Make a list of ten things you did today, in order of doing them

5) Write a forbidden thought, as if to someone who would understand.

6) Write a forbidden thought, as if to someone who would not understand.

7) Write down three colors.

8) Write down four evocative or favorite words

9) Make a list of five things you’ve seen today, then choose two and describe them in some detail.  They can be things in this room.

10) Physically describe briefly a person who comes to mind.

11) Write down three direct rhymes.  Moon/June is a direct rhyme.

12) Write down three slant rhymes: moon/mine; long/thing are slant rhymes.

13) Write three things people have said to you in the last 48 hours. They can be short. Quote them as closely as you can, and describe one physical gesture each person made.

14) Remember a time of day.  How visually do you know what time of day that was? Describe.

15) Write the last extreme pain you had, emotional or physical.

16) If the pain was an animal, what animal would it be?  Describe the animal.

17) On a separate sheet of paper, make up and write down the first line of a poem.  Fold the paper and give to me.

 LalaPaloozah Exercise: Writing the Poem

What you have just done is to generate a lot of material and feeling for a poem or poems.

Using any or all of the line you have just been given as the first line or any line of the poem, and any part of or all of the material you have just generated in or out of context, in any way you want, write a poem of between twenty and thirty lines or more with lines of 7, 9. 13, or 19 syllables in any combination, and a few rhymes, either slant or direct.

Allow the material to determine the poem. Allow the material to teach you something new about how you might write a poem.  Do not force an idea, plot or particular sort of language on the material.  Allow its music and sense to speak to you.

Place exercise:

Think of a place with a known story ascribed to it. That place is your title. Now write a poem about that place—even of how you don’t know it—that mentions not one of these shared associations we have.  Example titles: “Sand Creek,” “Dresden,” “Little Big Horn,” “Paul Revere’s House,” “Babel,” “Assisi,” “Birmingham,” “Appomattox.”

Other exercises:

Write four companion poems about/to parts of your body, each one equal in length with corresponding titles. Example: “Stomach,” “Heart,” “Lung,” “Liver.”

Write a poem about a place which, traditionally, is “good clean fun” or “safe” but in which you once felt threatened. Examples: a church, a county fair, summer camp.

Write a poem about a wild animal in a restricted environment, applying a loose, metrical form that is equivalent to the way that animal moves.

Write a poem that is a transcription of a dream, without explaining the dream. Allow the images to leap as the dream leapt, and end on an image.

Write a poem that’s a “walk”: See Carolyn Forche’s “Photograph of my Room.”

Write a poem about a photograph of a writer. The photograph should depict them at just your age. The writer should not be your gender.

Write a poem describing a photograph of the 1930s, then take all reference to photography out of the poem.

Tell a story you have never told about someone who is dead.

A poem about a brief meeting with someone who died shortly thereafter.

A  poem about a secret shared with one parent and not the other.

Write on the top margin of the page a secret you have never told anyone. Keep it out of the poem you will write. Make the poem about an object from that period in your life (from which the secret comes) which you know so well you could recognize it, just by feeling it in the dark.

Write a poem that is an elegy to a time of day (or month or year) in childhood.

Write a poem to yourself as a lost child. Give the child instructions she or he would understand to navigate through woods or a city block or a department store.

Write a poem about two photographs of the same person.

A 30 line poem, in which, in the first 15 lines, you detail your first memory and in the 2nd 15 lines, you detail the first memory of your partner: indicating somewhere in the poem how these make you different or the same.

Choose an (actual) place you never visited. It must be somewhere on the globe! Research this place and describe one adventure there, as though it actually happened.

Describe a private (it can be fabricated) moment in the life of a long dead, public person.

A letter: Entitle the poem “Dear ---,” and write a letter about an encounter you had with the person to whom you are writing.

Entitle the poem an abstraction (for example: “Hurt”) and write a poem which contains no abstractions, and no references to the kind of feeling mentioned in your title. Only describe an object or a cluster of objects in a given place.

Poems about betrayal are so hard to write. We remember all the details exactly; but we can’t forget the anger and bitterness that accompany them. We’re good rememberers, bad forgetters.  What would you have to forget to see clearly someone who betrayed you? Undertake that project in a poem.

Stanley Kunitz has a poem I love called “Haley’s Comet,” in which he remembers the sooth saying of teachers on the eve of the comet’s arrival. “If the world ended,” they told him, “there would be no school tomorrow.” Recall in a poem bad prophesies made by a teacher. Anything from the metric system to communist world domination will do.

Write a poem about an ill-referenced and oft-ignored biblical figure and tell of one moment of her story, without the use of notes or an epigraph.

Zora Neal Hurston, the author of the great Their Eyes Are Watching God spent her last years as a cleaning woman in Florida.  Research the life of a person of great intellectual gifts who was robbed by the culture in which she tried to proliferate them. Observe one moment in that life, towards the end.

Write a poem about your child as an adult. Write it in the present tense, as though you see the scene unfolding in real time. If your child is already an adult, write a poem about her or him as an elderly person. If you don’t have a child, imagine one in either of these situations.

Take three leaps in your direction of thought in a one stanza poem about an everyday object.

Tell the story of a breakup backwards in a poem, ending on the moment you met this person.

Try writing poems using these exercises:

1.  Write an “epistolary” poem,  (the word is the same as the “epistles” or letters from the apostles in the new testament).  This is a poem in the form of a letter to another person, often ommitting the salutation (“dear....”) but in other respects, resembling a letter.  The poet Richard Hugo wrote a number of these.

2.  Write a poem in answer to a letter you receive from someone (or, if you read some interesting published letters, try answering one of them in the form of a poem).

3.  Write a “persona” poem, in which you become someone else and speak in the poem as that person (Amelia Earhart?  a Civil War nurse?  a trapeze artist in the circus?  Sir Walter

Raleigh?)

4.  Choose eight or ten words at random from your “loved words” list and try writing a poem, quickly, in ten or twelve lines, using these words.  Then check your list to see if there are any interesting substitutions you can make.

5.  Take two poems you have written which are related in some way, cut the lines apart, and splice together a new version, then re-write the poem according to the new version, so that you produce one long poem.

6.    Try writing a poem which provides instructions on how to get somewhere or do something (recipe, directions, assembly, or how to recover from a death, a lover, an addiction, etc.)

7.  Write a poem which re-tells, or “transforms” a story or myth.  (Try biblical stories, classical myths, fairy tales, etc.).  Anne Sexton’s book “Transformations” might be a model for this.

8.  Write poems “in the style of” poets from your anthology.  (There should be a little italicized line, indented between the title and the text of the poem, saying “after so and so”.

9.  Write a poem in which you tell what happens in a dream (without telling the reader it is a dream).

10.  Write a series of short, linked poems, illuminating (without commentary) episodes from your memory of childhood.

11.  Keep a travel diary on a trip (jotting down words, phrases, place names, events), and when you return write a sequence of poems which are dated in the form of a diary, and which illuminate your journey in some way. 

12.  Choose a work of prose which you especially admire, and, pulling phrases from that work, compose a poem from the phrases.  Between the title and the text of the poem, insert an indented, italicized “credit line”--from “     “ by so and so”

13.  Write a poem in which you begin by situating yourself in a particular place (on the roof of your house, in your room, etc.), describe that place, and then, by association, “travel” imaginatively somewhere else, and end the poem by returning to the place you are.  The poem should be long enough that the reader is surprized to come back.  John

Ashbery’s poem “Guadelajara” is a good model for this.

14.  Write poems based on interesting black and white photographs from the past.  Look

at photography books by Atget, Lange, Weston, Bourke-White, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, etc.

15.  Research the history of your current home or hometown, and write a poem based on an interesting historic event you learn about.  I once wrote about a fire which burned my town completely in 1872. 

Revision suggestions:

1.  Read each line of the poem separately, to be sure that it is interesting by itself.  Cut words from the end of the line or add words from the beginning of the next line if you think it would improve the inherent meaning of the line.

2.  Look at each word in the poem, and see if you can substitute a more interesting, specific word. Tree  might become sycamore.   River might become the Shenandoah.  Bird might become gull, cardinal, finch, vulture. 

3.  Eliminate unnecessary commentary and description.  If you have the word “snow,” then you already imply (and can eliminate sometimes) “winter,” “cold,” “icy” etc.

4.  Be careful not to eliminate important articles (a, the, an) or conjunctions (and, but).

Or you your poem will read like a newspaper headline.

5.  Check to see if the opening lines and closing lines are necessary.  Sometimes the true poem begins most interestingly with the third line, and ends with the third from the last.

6.  Check to see if all the stanzas or strophes are necessary.  Sometimes you can cut the whole stanza, and strengthen the poem.

7.  If the poem is in stanzas, sections, or parts, cut them into individual pieces and play with their arrangement.  Sometimes the poem is better if arranged a different way (while keeping all the sections).  Sometimes this is how you discover whether any can be cut.

8.  Subject all adverbs to intense scrutiny (as to whether they are necessary) “ran quickly” might be better expressed as “hurried.” 

9.  Subject all adjectives to strong scrutiny (as to whether they are necessary) “white snow” is redundant.  “Snow” would suffice all by itself.  (“Black wind” , however, is interesting, because unusual, unexpected...)

10.  Read the poem aloud several times, and mark with a highligher pen those places which were more difficult to read (tongue-twisters).  Examine them and see if you can improve them.

11.  If you are not certain whether your poem is in proper syntax and is grammatical, type the poem out as prose and check the sentences for completion and proper usage, then re-line.

12.  Check to see that the sentences within the poem (which might go on for several lines), are, in fact, complete sentences (or have a good reason why not).

13.  Try writing the poem in a different “person”—  switch from “he” to “I” or vice versa.

14.  Check the verb tenses to see whether they are consistent and/or correct. 

15.  See if compound verbs can become simple verbs (for compression) “I would run” might be able to become “I ran”, etc.

16.  Check for spelling errors.

17.  Check for consistency in spacing between lines.

18.  Check to see whether the poem is well placed on the page.

19.  In sending poems out to be published, always send clean, correct versions.

20.  Break any of the above rules except #19 if you think it is necessary to the poem.

Some of the many questions to consider when talking about manuscripts:   

1. What are the (thematic) concerns of this manuscript?  (What might be called its “subject matter.”)  What does the title tell us?  The epigraphic material (if any)?

2. What is the arc of disclosure from poem to poem?  (How does the collection progress, in terms of its concerns and themes?)

3. How does the arrangement of the poems work?  (Is it a book-length poem?  Is the ms. broken into sections?  How do the sections work?)

4.  What are the poet’s resources?  [Formal: meters, syllabics, line governance, rhyme, alliteration/assonance, stanza/verse paragraph, appearance on the page.]  [Tropes: use of metaphor, simile, metonymy; imagery, diction, “voice” (first, second, third, close-third, etc.)]

5. Is use made of repetition?  Repeated utterance?  Rhetoric?

6.  Consider the syntax: is it varied? simple or complex?  How does it work with or against the lineation?

7.  Diction (word choice): is it precise? archaic? unusual? simple?

8. Are there flaws or weaknesses in the use of poetic resources?  (Poeticisms, archaisms, personification, pathetic fallacy, infelicitous use of first, second or third person voice?

9. Imagery: is the imagery fresh (unusual, unexpected), precise, complex, suggestive? 

10.  Which senses are dominant and are any senses absent?  Are the poems primarily visual?  Do we hear sounds?  Are there smells?  Is anything touched?  Tasted?

11. Are there syntactic or rhythmic devices here?  Anaphora?  Paralleling?

12.  How does this work achieve its tension?  Is there enough variation (of form? of voice? of diction? of syntax? etc.

13.  Is there mystery?

14.   What (if anything) distracts us from our reading?  What clouds the book? 

15.   What is surprising here?  Unexpected? 

The Art of Finding     

by Linda Gregg

I believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written. Traditionally, and for many people even today, poems have been admired chiefly for their craftsmanship and musicality, the handsomeness of language and the abundance of similes, along with the patterning and rhymes. I respect and enjoy all that, but I would not have worked so hard and so long at my poetry if it were primarily the production of well-made objects, just as I would not have sacrificed so much for love if love were mostly about pleasure. What matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech. I respond most to what is found out about the heart and spirit, what we can hear through the language. Best of all, of course, is when the language and other means of poetry combine with the meaning to make us experience what we understand. We are most likely to find this union by starting with the insides of the poem rather than with its surface, with the content rather than with the packaging. Too often in workshops and classrooms there is a concentration on the poem's garments instead of its life's blood.

My early life was changed drastically by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but not primarily because of the poems' gorgeous words and rhythms. Rather it was because poems like "Pied Beauty" and "The Windhover" gave me a special way of knowing the earth and experiencing God. In the same way, Lorca was important to me when I was very young because of the mystery within the singing. There is a luminosity in those poems of Lorca and Hopkins, and for me ever since when I see such luminosity beginning in a poem, it is a sign that something significant has been found.

It may be that the major art in poetry is the art of finding this shining—this luminosity. It is the difference between a publishable poem and one that matters. Certainly one can make good poems without feeling much or discovering anything new. You can produce fine poems without believing anything, but it corrodes the spirit and eventually rots the seed-corn of the heart. Writing becomes manufacturing instead of giving birth.

I do not have a road map or a neat system to give you to help you find the luminosity in your poems—your art, but I would like to share how it has been for me. At the start, let us agree that the poet must master the elements of his craft: the rhythm, the strategies, the importance of compression, when to use rhyme and when not to use it—all of that. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that the craft must not become the content of the poem. It must not become an end in itself. The craft must serve primarily to deliver what the poet is trying to say to the reader, and to deliver the feelings or discoveries to him with as little loss as possible. Ezra Pound defined craft as "the means for delivering the content of the poem and to deliver it alive." However, there is always a danger in making the craft the thing to be delivered. The poet must have craft, but he/she must also locate the substance, the art within the poem, which is at the center of the best poetry, and is upon what the craft works. Akira Kurasawa, the great Japanese filmmaker, said that the script was the crucial thing in making a movie. "If you have a good script and a mediocre director," he said, "you can still end up with a pretty good movie. But if you have a bad script it is hard for a director with even the finest craft to get a good result."

There are two elements in "finding" a poem: discovering the subject matter and locating the concrete details and images out of which the poems are built. In this instance, I do not mean the subject matter to be the ideas or subjects for poems. Instead, I am referring to finding the resonant sources deep inside you that empower those subjects and ideas when they are put in poems. For example, I am made of the landscape in northern California where I grew up, made of my father's uninhabited mountain where my twin sister and I spent most of our time as small children with the live oak trees, the stillness, the tall grass, the dry smell of the hot summer air where the red-tailed hawks turned slowly up high, where the two of us alone at ten did the spring roundup of my father's twenty-six winter-shaggy horses. Down below there were salmon in the

stream that ran by our house, the life of that stream and the sound of it as we lay in our bunks at night, our goat and the deer standing silently outside in the mist so many mornings when we awoke. The elements of that bright world are in my poetry now when I write about love or Nicaragua or the old gods in the rocky earth of Greece, just as the Greek islands where I lived for almost five years resonate in the poems I write now about the shelter for abused women in Manhattan or how a marriage failed in New England—but not directly. They are present as essences. They operate invisibly as energy, equivalents, touchstones, amulets, buried seed, repositories, and catalysts. They function at the generating level of the poems to impregnate and pollinate the present—provoking, instigating, germinating, irradiating—in the way the lake high up in the Sierra mountains waters the roses in far away San Francisco.

Your resonant sources will be different from mine and will differ from those around you. They may be your long family life, your political rage, your love and sexuality, your fears and secrets, your ethnic identity—anything. The point is not what they are but that they are yours. Whatever these sources are, you must hunt out them out and feed your poems with them, not necessarily as topics, subjects or themes, but as the vital force that fuels your poems.

Once you discover this source, you must find the images and concrete details to make your poems visible and effective. These images and details fuel the poem from the outside and also are what help distinguish poetry from prose. It is the way we give a body to the ideas and feelings of the poem, whether the concrete images are literal or only seemingly concrete, as with metaphors and similes. Part of the art of "finding" a poem is choosing those concrete details that have a special energy and vibrancy. The best poets seem to have a gift for finding such details—a genius for choosing the two or three particulars that create a whole landscape, which manifest a city street with its early morning rain, or simply construct a room. These poets can make us see a person better with two details than prose can do with pages of description.

I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically "see" things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become "old men with snow on their shoulders," or the lake looks like a "giant eye." The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, "the mirror with nothing reflected in it." This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.