Building A Poem- Explained Via Prose

This is an explanation of how I started writing poems, why I still do and how I do it.

                                                       Building A Poem

        When I am trying to create a poem I try to quiet down my mind as best I can.  I tend to do this at roughly the same time each day but not always.  Usually between midday and 4 pm.  Before that I am reading the news, mostly economic related stuff, drinking coffee and doing physical stuff around the house, chores and errands.  On a day when I am able to have the time, I sit still for a while and look around.  I am often still and quiet for 15 minutes before I begin.
	I put down the first phrase in my small notebook (4-½” by 6-½”).  Sometimes the next lines follow immediately, sometimes I have to wait for a while and try to understand why that phrase showed up.  That has been the tricky part for me, the patience.  Since I began writing poetry at 24 years old, forty years ago, my relationship to it has changed.  I did not value writing poetry, mostly because it woke me at night and disrupted my life as a carpenter. I wrote, on average, one poem per year for 30 years.  At that time, I wanted to put down on paper the thing that was waking me up and preventing me from sleeping.  Once I did that, I could return to bed and sleep.  Now, the dynamics have completely changed.  I am more or less retired so I can create during the day.  I invite poetry into my life instead of being held hostage by it.
	Once the first line has arrived I begin by slowly thinking of all the aspects of the first line.  Is it a literal statement or is it about something else?  What is the meaning of this phrase and what are its intentions?  I try to keep my questions very simple but they demand an answer.  What is it about this phrase that is worth writing a poem about?  I believe a poem should be about something very specific. Oftentimes my poems may have a circular nature.  They end up where they began but now things look different because of what was said in the middle.  I think that is a key element to a poem; it should show us a new way of looking at things.
	On a practical, more specific level I believe a poem should also entertain or be comical, supremely silly or show us how a powerful emotion has moved us.  The language, and this is a very personal belief, should be accessible. Using extremely personal language or phrases that only have meaning for the writer alone may be of use to the writer but is not meaningful to the rest of us.  I dislike references to arcane bits of art or literature that I may never have heard of in order to understand the main thrust of a poem.   I like syntax that supports the purpose of the poem.  If the poem is loopy and bonkers then the syntax should mirror that.  I don’t like to read syntax or vocabulary that showcases the poet’s skill just for the sake of that but does not advance the poem. Returning to the sequence of writing. 
	I have now finished my first draft of the poem.  When I look back at my notebook it usually already has crossed out words or lines with new words hovering above.  Some phrases or words are circled or in parenthesis with lines and arrows running wherever.  This first phase usually takes less than an hour as most of my poems are on the shorter side.  I usually reread it at least 3-4 times right at that moment, one of them aloud, and that always brings about more edits.  I look for words that don’t really belong.  Sometimes during the creation part phrases or words will pop up and say, “Oh, put me in, put me in. I would be great right here!”  They are very persuasive and so I include them.  Later, when the excitement passes, we have a talk and I look closely at what value they add to this select group of words trying to say something special in as few words as possible.  I try to let them down easily.  “It’s not you, it’s me.”  Every single word has to be doing a service to the message in this poem or they get cut, no matter how pretty or charming they once were.  I say to them, as I hit the delete button, “I might use you later”.
	I am now into the second part of writing after the first rush of creativity is over. By this time I have copied the handwritten thing into Google docs so I can better see how it looks in the more tidy environment of print.  Now the creativity is more concerned with, “what exactly is this poem about after all?”  A fairly large percentage of poems don’t make it past this point. Or they might get chopped for use later.  What words need to be here to make that survival happen and are there enough of them?  There are always clever phrases or nifty sounding words that look good out there on the field but all they do is distract from winning the game.  The game, according to my rules, is about saying exactly what you have in mind.  And you do it in a way that the most possible people can understand it without losing the magic that caused the poem to exist.
         I check my grammar first, since I prefer things to be grammatically correct.  If you were to put my poems into sentences they would all be grammatically correct along with paragraphs.  I am not advocating that for anyone else, but for me, I require the confines of grammar in order to allow my creativity to go bonkers.
	Once I have checked capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, I shift on to whether or not my verb tenses agree, singulars and plurals are correct.  Very basic stuff but they cause me to closely inspect the structure below whatever lunacy is going on above and let’s face it, many poems are pretty crazy.  That’s why we write them, to try and make sense of a batshit crazy world and the only way I know how to do that is poetry. (Note singular and plural disagreement) By this time I have read through the poem at least 15-20 times that first day.  If I have the mechanics cleaned up, grammatically speaking, I leave it alone for several days.
	When I come back to it after a week I usually start cutting right away.  I get rid of words that say the same thing several different ways;  fancy pants words that few people will know and all it will do is alienate them. I don’t want that ever. I am after a kind of density that causes the reader to be only slightly taken off guard but still be willing to travel someplace special because I have earned their trust. 
By this time the poem has taken on its character.  It is its own entity.  I need to be aware of any personal things that can detract from the poem saying what it wants to say.  This may sound strange but this is when I attempt to remove any traces of myself that could interfere. If my poems should outlast me, I would expect them to have a timelessness and a stand alone quality where they have a unique relationship with the reader.  I will never know John Donne personally but I feel like I do because of the way I relate to his poems, same with Frost, same with all of them.
         The last edits occur a month or six months later, sometimes even a year or two later.  These are often the hardest.  By now these words have been a part of this small family for some time and have survived many rounds of cuts. This is the time when I make a potential change but I save both versions.  I look at them both, side by side and see which one serves the message best, which one will reach the most people and still keep the magic. I have looked at poems from 30-40 years ago and I can only faintly recall the impetus but I can still feel the magic and that’s what I value most.  Well, the magic and the message, because one without the other is just good prose or some kind of a performance where the reader says, “That was a fun magic show but what was he talking about?”
	I often wonder why I became a poet.  It was certainly nothing I aspired to when I was young.  Both my sets of grandparents loved poetry, as did so many people of that generation born around the turn of the century.  They sat around reading at night, doing poetry recitations from the famous and dramatic writers.  Both my parents loved poetry and they could each recite lots of good poetry.  I read a lot of poetry at my parents' behest but it wasn’t until my second year of college when I read “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot, did I really feel the power of a poem. I was two years out of college, working construction when I began to be pestered by a buzzing pairs of words at night.  Sometimes lines would arrive into my head during the day and linger there like a stupid song melody.
	Throughout our childhood, we five brothers were not encouraged to discuss our feelings.  Our opinions were not sought by any adult, that was the 60’s and 70’s. Our parents didn’t encourage that touchy feely stuff.  We did amazing things in our childhood but we just didn’t talk about it.  I often feel alien in social settings, but never in nature.  Poetry became my way of processing the world around me.  I once wrote a poem about a pair of snow globes.  Once I can put an idea into a poem, encapsulate it, distill it down to its essential meaning, then I can understand it. And so, I pass through the world making snow globes as I go. That’s why I do it and that's how I do it.