Start writing your own poem

Photo Mike Flemming copyright

This article is meant for teachers but it is so good I thought some other people might like to peruse it.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69588/the-start-writing-your-own-poem

Extract:

Practice of an art is more salutary than talk about it.
There is nothing more composing than composition.
—Robert Frost, from his notebooks[Poetry and Prose,
edited by Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson
(Holt, 1972)]

Leaving a Loop

Two thousand miles from home, I open a drawer
and—I’d have sworn it was mine,
the weaving lumpy, my fingers
still all thumbs but they loved the peaceful
push pull, pushpull
so much that one summer
on the boathouse porch with the tree growing
right up through the floor
I made thirty-two
pot holders on the square-jawed metal loom,
stretching colors soft as old rags
soft as this pale buttercup
this faded-eye blue, and the green
fresh as light on maple wings,
seedlight. I wasn’t making gifts,
it was the rhythm of the thing
and the small loom, square and safe,
like the four lines of a child’s house.
I was homesick,
this was spiderwork, nestwork, easy
till you reached the part where
you unhooked your web from the frame.
Here, see the braided corners, on the last one
somehow you pulled the right thing through
to leave a loop for hanging.
I didn’t know I was making gifts
but last winter when my mother died
she still had two, there were stains
and a burn mark, I never thought
of someone’s hand feeling
heat through the weave.

Here is a poem neither your students nor mine have ever seen before. I wrote it last night, so it’s about as contemporary as you can get, short of sitting down right now and writing your own. To me it’s a living, breathing organism—not set in stone; tomorrow I could change it. An organism made of words, that each reader will bring to life in her own way. Emily Dickinson says, “A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.” (1)

Whatever my poem means to me, I couldn’t possibly reduce this meaning to a prose paragraph. I don’t want to say, “It’s about making pot holders when I was young and homesick at summer camp,” or “It’s really about my loss of my mother,” or “Actually, it’s about applied art versus fine art.” Or “It’s about the nature of home and separation.” I didn’t set out, at least consciously, to make a poem about any of this; I wanted to find out why seeing the pot holder when I opened a drawer gave me a sudden, inexplicable urge to write. Now that the poem’s written, and I’ve discovered some answers, I suppose I can say it’s all about these things.

But I’m much more interested in asking, “What does it say to you?”—you who are reading it, remember, as if your life depended on it, letting in your beliefs, your dreamlife, your physical sensations—and, I’d add to Adrienne Rich’s list, your memories and the mood you happen to be in just now . . . ?