Finding A Poem

As poets we are custodians of a "dreaming" which we are obliged to attend to and work with and birth, in order to share the dream in all of its portency with others.

Poems can and should speak not only for the writer but for those who cannot speak... for those who have no voice. Justice comes into it.

Acquaint yourself with different kinds of poetry from all sorts of oral and written traditions.

Research, research, research - not for the sake of gathering information but as a way of freeing yourself from it, as a way of building confidence, so necessary in the quest to find the poem that wants to be told.

Knowledge is useless.

Finding the poem requires ridding yourself of everything you know.

What we know stands in the way of what we might discover. Good poets care about what they are making, enough to seek out the meaning behind the meaning... the heart behind the intellect... Every person, place, memory, image, dream, song, smell, and shadow, is potentially a poem, or the beginning, middle or end of one.

A poet makes the same poem... over and over again.

What is your poem? What is your obstacle? What is it you can't get over?

Know what it is you do not know.

The expression of "modernism" in poetry is the materialisation of the idea that the power of art resides in what is not stated, not shown, but implied. (Pound's ideogrammatic method, for example, or Eisenstein's concept of montage)... the same applies to poetry... it is what is not said that has potency.

Poets are the most succinct storytellers; their poems, the most succinct form of the story: the brief-but-vivid image, the relationship of one image to another, the implied comparisons, the particularity of voice, the exactness of phrase, the thumbnails of dramatic structure - it's no accident the world's greatest dramatist was a poet.

Effective writing and reading involves more than seeing; it is also about HEARING.

The voice is an essential tool in the writing process. Become familiar with the nuances of your own voice, and you will begin to discover the other voices that live within you.

The art of poetry doesn't begin and end with a written poem... it is a way being in the world; a way

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