Unlocking the Poem

[Here is a sample of what you will find in Unlocking the Poem:]

Like all the arts, true poetry is a milieu in which to immerse oneself. A commitment that is partial or occasional won’t do. One learns to think, live, breathe, sleep poetry. Anything less than total commitment, total involvement, is going to make the work of the poet more difficult, if not impossible.

The intention of Unlocking the Poem is to provide stimuli—prods, if you will—to engender in the reader not only the challenge to produce good poetry but the earnest desire to do so. The many assignments will show some of the ways poems can happen and be realized—including ways that do not coincide exactly with the criteria provided in the assignment text. We consider this fortunate. Rebellion in the practitioners of poetry is an asset. We don’t want writers to be reluctant to take risks. Who wants an automaton for a poet?

But our intention is to be of help. New poets are looking for direction. Seasoned poets will benefit from the refreshments this book offers. Poetry is a vast area. We can all use some assistance at times.

Poets are artists of the word. And like all artists, poets are magicians. The poet will take on the challenge to attempt to express what cannot be expressed in language—a gross irony, since language is the poet’s primary weapon. When a poet enables the poem residing in her or his subconscious to surface, and helps it shape itself and take on public existence, the poet knows this truth: what has been expressed is not the core of the poem. The core of the poem remains inaccessible; its roots go on living in the poet’s subconscious so that each time the poem is read to an audience or appears on the printed page, it will regenerate itself from those residual roots.

What is it that is expressed, if not the core of the poem? The poem retains its core for its own nurturing. What is expressed is an approximation of what in the poem demands expression. And this always happens in an oblique way. When we speak directly, we’re saying something. When we present a poem, we’re showing a happening, and without our saying anything we communicate across the poem’s possibilities in a way that leaves the listener/reader knowing the poem and not aware of how that knowing takes place. The language we use in poetry is not discursive. That is the province of prose. Poetry language is radiational—each image; each metaphor; each simile; each line, phrase, and word, operates in an outpouring of sensed reality, in all directions at once.

Poetry is all the other arts combined. Its language, rhythms, rhymes, and images all have about them the auras of painting, dance, music, structural architecture. As magicians we organize (not strictly true; our subconscious does the real organizing) the elements the poem offers us for its manifestation and bring to the poem a viable existence. We unlock the poem’s life.

[Unlocking the Poem consists primarily of assignments—writing stimuli—many of them with “illustrations” in the form of poems written from the assignments. We give a few sample assignments here, without their illustrations; but you are welcome to view (and download) a wider sample at www.unlockingthepoem.com.]

Assignment Number 9

You are connected with others, standing, and hearing a distant music. You have to strain to hear it. It comes closer, but slowly, and you are impatient, willing it closer, and closer, until finally—after centuries—it penetrates you, you penetrate it, you are the music, the music is you. Any form, any length.

Assignment Number 81

Write a sonnet—Shakespearean, of course!—on the subject, “Hamlet, The Musical.” You might also want to try a sonnet on a comic version of another of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Assignment Number 246

Write a poem, any form, any length, about invisible words.

Assignment Number 368

Write a poem of twenty-six words, each word starting with a different letter of the alphabet—in order! (You may “cheat” by using a word, for “x,” that starts with the x-sound rather than the letter itself.) You may arrange the words in any number of lines.

Assignment Number 417

Using the following as your title or first line, write a poem in any form, up to one page in length: “Do not give me things unbroken.” Alternatively, you may use that as the subject of your poem without using the actual words.

So, there it is. What you have probably discerned, by now, is that the poems are there, just waiting to be discovered, waiting to be unlocked . . . waiting for you to breathe life into them in your own particular way. We have offered 450 possible keys. The poems you unlock with them will be your own, different from the poems anyone else may unlock with the very same keys.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. Find more keys of your own. You might begin by “mixing and matching” the elements of the assignments found in this book. Take a subject from one place and a form from another. Or, you might use the structure of assignments found here to create entirely new assignments of your own. Put together a random list of words and see what you can make of them. Challenge yourself to write a poem within a limited amount of time on the incongruity of something you find that seems out of place.

Set yourself free. There are poems waiting in tomorrow’s newspaper, too, or in what you overhear in the check-out line at the supermarket, or . . . well, you get the idea. Don’t be afraid. Above all else, don’t be afraid. If you give yourself room, you’ll find ideas calling to you from a painting you visit in a museum, or in the arc of a baseball over the left-field wall. The point is, be open to all those ideas, all those sources of ideas. Don’t be afraid to play—with words, with poetic forms, with the pliancy and music of language itself.