While poetry is a product, being a poet is, to me, a worthwhile and lifelong pursuit. In my latest column for Read Write Poem, I dig beneath the question of writing daily, to answer how one can, in fact, engage life as a poet every day.
Some of the tactics may surprise you. Would you believe that actually limiting your writing time to shorter bursts can make you more prolific? Or that getting organized might make you more creative?
Check out this month’s Poetry Advice Column for more unusual approaches that just might help you live a bit more like a poet every day.
“The half-time announcer at the 1969 Superbowl football game gave us this to consider: ‘The band will now execute the traditional designs and symbols of our national heritage.’ As a one-man band, I try to accomplish the same thing in my poems.”
-Sandford Lyne
Loch Raven Review has put together a wonderful online retrospective of the life and work of Sandford Lyne, bringing together scores of poems from several different books, and a few of his letters.
He was a tremendous man.
We became friends over a love of poetry, and a similar spiritual outlook. When James came into our lives, and left so quickly, Sandy was able to offer the inexplicable kinship of one who had also lost a child.
Sandy dedicated his life to working with children, teaching poetry workshops to over 50,000 students in his lifetime. Re-reading so many wonderful poems online, and discovering a few I had not read before, brings a little of Sandy’s purposeful kindness, gentle curiosity, and soft spoken wisdom back to me.
Enjoy.
This is an open note of thanks to Paul Fericano. I had a great time reading at the Broken Word series at Farmer and the Cook last night, and listening to Danielle Camacho, P.Lyn Middleton, Quin Mallory, Paul Fericano, Crystal Salas, Steve Sprinkel, and Johnny Fonteyn weave words into the warm summer night. Afterward, I got to talking with Paul, and he showed me one of the gorgeous, limited-edition offset-print broadsides he creates. On remarking how much I liked it, he gave it to me. And then another. In fact, a whole set.
Strangely enough, this is not the first time I have gone to a poetry reading and come home with a gift. It seems to me that the best kinds of writing communities have, at their heart, a spirit of generosity. This was certainly my experience in the MFA program, where my advisers gave so much more than what was asked of them by the university. And so, with so much talk about “greatness” in poetry, I would like to propose a new definition–that poets not be measured so much by what the Paris Review says about their twelfth collection–but by how poetry inspires them to keep giving back. The product of great poets is great poems. But, so often in my experience, the by-product is generosity.
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