the best poetry advice

How to Write Good Poetry
a poem sent as an email by my professor, Sesshu Foster.

1. Several people asked whether their poems were ‘good’.
2. Is your life good? What do you do with it, and how do you feel about that?
3. Is your breathing good, is it working for you? (When you do it, it fulfills its functions doesn’t it? I’d suggest that poems serve you, too. Like breathing, even if you forget about paying attention to its regulation and effects.)
4. The question of “good” should perhaps always be answered in the negative, for this reason. What I hear in that question is this other question: am I done?
5. No, your job is not ‘done.’ You must also live as a poet, see as a poet, serve as a poet. If your poems are to serve, serve your poems. Is a cook, a person whose vocation is cooking, or a musician whose vocation is music, done if they do one dish well, play one song well? Is a one-hit-wonder “good”? Getting “good” does not end.
6. That is, a poem is not merely an end product. It’s part of the process of living your poetics, serving your own poetics, seeing and enacting them in the world.
7. Have you defined your poetics so explicitly?
8. The short answer seems to me, is that if you can’t say how the poem serves your poetics, and whether the poem serves you, then you’re not feeling it. If you’re not feeling it, isn’t that your answer? Or a part of it?

Suggestions

1. You must write poems that serve you.
2. You must write poems that don’t. Then you can tell the difference.
3. I’d suggest that, therefore, you must always be writing bad poems. Some must be “bad,” for some to turn out “good.”
4. Some poets would call this “taking risks” with your writing. But what the hell is the risk? What’s going to happen if you write a terrible poem? Is your house going to fall into the hands of a banker? Are you going to get struck by lightning? Are people going to laugh at you on the street outside of bars? They only put people in jail for writing good poems, and mostly in other countries. Bad poets are as safe as the reproductions of paintings in motel rooms.
5. Feelings are real. The clichés of 18th & 19th century Romantics left over hundreds of years later in pop music are not, not on the same level. They have been copyrighted. Are your feelings copyrighted in advance? Are your feelings somebody else’s ideas? Don’t equate one with the other. Even if you believe in the emotional fundamentalism of Romanticism (who doesn’t now and then?) or as Sarah Campbell put it in her review of Poems for the
Millennium: Romantic
and Postromantic Poetry, (2008) edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, “The Romantics are more contemporary than we are. The Postromantics are more alive than we now living,” you still have a different poetics than Kenneth Goldsmith.
6. Read to find what is useful to you about that tradition, and what is not.
7. Define your poetics (and poems) in that way: is the poem useful to you? Is it working for you? Why or why not? Define your poetics by writing poems.
8. You already figure that some techniques, whether personification or appositives, synecdoche or metonymy, allusion or juxtaposition, are perhaps the right tool for the right job at the right time. You would intuitively just do it. (Maybe after a lot of previous work and thought.) You wouldn’t say “catachresis are always better than parataxis.” Instead, you would be engaged and, in a sense, in motion. In which direction?
9. You get to have fun with that. You have to have fun with it. Intellectual or somatic or aesthetic or social or sonic joy is simply required.
10. I repeat, fun is required. Whether you are writing about being in jail, or living in a fucked up world, or, like Paul Guest, surviving as a paraplegic. If you are not having fun with joy and grief, take a break. Start over.

Chugga Chugga

after eating the stranded syntax of prose poetry like spaghetti, i think of a man who left his wife and child to ride trains across the nation. through thick glass he witnesses the crime of kmarts in meadows, wonders how rich eden might have been before its identity was stolen. when his eyelids fall heavy, beautiful french films play themselves on the endless reels of dreams. that same year, i told myself, slow learners see more beauty, trying to fill a deep-seated emptiness with the comforting clang of those jointed words. the rhythm of things passing, hitched together, tugging forward, impartially abandoning both the heavens and hells of this land.

You Are Fabulous Creatures, Each and Everyone of You

If you've heard me read this aloud, I wrote it for you. If you have not, read it aloud to yourself, and know that I wrote it for you too.

only in the high sierra have i seen such beauty.
honest piercing beauty that boomerangs around the room
in smiles and tears and
gazes held.

starbright, sunlight, what can i say to you who know me so well?
I wonder who you've met-
what claire slipped through the gap in my teeth,
stretched its legs, shook hands--
what claire did you glimpse between pauses like a bird flitting among trees
what claire did you laugh at and with

i don't know but it's something in me
, and it's glowing.

i have only met a similar sliver of any of you, just a
fingernail moon
of your
full selves.

and so i truly hope that i will get to dance through the changing tides with you, learn more, open more, laugh more with all of you.

the difference between what will happen and what is likely to happen is yet great-

there are gaps in this world where magic lives.
the cracks let the light through, and you
oh my,
if you were a candle
i would be the daring finger dashing through your flame,
and never getting burnt.

and if you were a grove of trees i would be a squirrel running
up and down your textured bark all day.

and if you were the wind,
sometimes gentle,
I would be a cloud,
blown away forever.

if you were a couch, I'd be a coffee table, and we would talk in throaty British accents whenever the people left the room.

if you were a mountain range, i'd be a pair of hiking boots,
exploring your valleys and ridges my whole life.

and if you were just a bunch of people,
i guess i'd be a person too
so i could love you with
hands and feet and eyes and tears.

the water wheel turns
i receive love
turns
i give love
turns
and all the while love was turning through the air
like dust, like rain, like snow.

close your eyes.
there is light inside you.

part your lips,
your tongues hide rubies.

spread your toes,
earth is beneath your feet.

open your chest,
there are birds inside,
who want to sing.

breathe for love is in the air like orange blossoms, breathe deep, because it reminds us all of home.

this claire wants to curl up inside your ear so she can
whisper sweet things to you all night,

but there are adventures to be had.

even to think of eating straw
berries with you,
on a meadow of green grass:
i would no longer feel that i was dying
in mordor on a melting mountain of doom,
but that i was in the shire, at home, all along.

how i will enter history, not as i imagined, sweet pea

when i look to my future i do not see very far.
but sight has longed failed us in our quest for truth.
here is a future among futures
a single voyage, when the ocean could blow me onto any number of uncharted courses.

i preface, because i am scared to begin,
i introduce, reluctant to dive,
i build up, hesitating:

further up and further in!
what i cry as i march forward into the future, further up and further into this paradise that so often looks like hell this shadowland that is the mirror of all divine.

surely, this future is not about the where, but the how, not the places my feet will take me, but how gracefully they dance along the way. surely this future is also my past and is in every way my present, for this singer believes in the circular nature of time.

but frank, if you have dared me to dream, dream i will- with great courage and unbounded abandon.
this claire graduates from college with a bachelor of arts in literature with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in latin american and latina studies. this claire graduates from college never wanting to stop learning, and enters into the 'real world' as a perpetual student.
this claire has some money saved up from her summer jobs, and uses it to travel. what happens when claire travels? she doesn't know, for that is the nature of adventure.

this claire returns home and appreciates home all the more for having left it. she wants for the one now, and thinks of a poem by Hafiz,
" Where have you taken your sweet song? Come back and play me a tune. I never really cared for the things of this world. It was the glow of your presence that filled it with beauty. "
She sees this glow in the natural beauty she surrounds herself in often, she sees this glow in her lovers eyes, in the caress of the ocean and the embrace of the wind. she reminds herself, it is never to late to have a happy childhood, and won't consider herself an adult until she is fifty.
she likes the word practice and keeps practicing.
she learns and teaches and works and plays and all the time learns how to create self-sustainable wonder in the world.