Poetry

For the past 20 years, most spent as a professional in education publishing, I have been deeply immersed in writing and editing, both as profession and avocation. During my early career as a teacher and later a curriculum administrator, I also wrote, publishing my first professional journal article at age 24 and my first book at 34. However, my relationship with poetry has been less constant.

During the 1970s I wrote poems fairly often and even had a few published. But over the next couple of decades I largely abandoned poetry in the press of career, family, and other writing. Consequently, I returned to crafting a poem with some regularity only after I “retired” in 2006. I use quotation marks because I haven’t fully retired yet. I still write, edit, consult, and occasionally do graphic design work. Nowadays I write poetry simply for myself, with no thought to publish, though I will share a poem with family and friends.

I like Robert Frost’s definition: “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and thought has found words.” Mary Oliver calls poetry “an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.” For me, writing a poem is both meditative and stimulating. Like so many things that make writing powerfully therapeutic, crafting a poem offers an opportunity to take one’s interior voice and put it on paper to examine it and to work with it.

When I don’t feel motivated to write a longer poem, I often turn to haiku, which originated in Japan. In its English manifestation it is a three-line poem, loosely constructed with 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively in the three lines. (For an example of mine, see the previous post.) Typically a haiku offers an impression, usually involving nature. Haiku that have been translated, of course, often don’t follow the 5-7-5 scheme in the new language. Here’s an example by Basho, a 17th century Japanese master who gave haiku new popularity at that time:

Old pond…

A frog leaps in

Water’s sound

Distilling an impression—considering all the sensations of a moment—and setting it down in a mere 17 syllables provide a surprisingly satisfying but altogether gentle challenge. For me, it is a way to get out of myself, to focus outward on the world before me.