This is an essay on one aspect of writing poetry.

                                                    Whiffle Balls and Baseballs

	Impact is a compact word.  It almost sounds like a punch.  If you lengthen it, you weaken it.  Impactful, impacted, impacting.  It means the contact between two things.  As a poet I want impact.  I want to make contact with people because I want to publish my work and have people react.  If I get no reaction, my guess is that my poem had no impact on them.  
         Who has seen a painting or listened to a piece of music and been undone?  I have burst into tears after reading certain poems, not many but it has happened and the same with art and most often with music.  It penetrates into me, slips past my defenses and undoes me, makes me vulnerable, emotional, passionate.  I am moved because I was hit with an impact I wasn’t expecting, it touched me in a place where I was soft that I had not even known about.
         I think about words a lot, pretty much all day long as I bang away with my hammer and tools building things.  I have been building for 40 years so I can do most of it with a smallish portion of my brain.  Words are like hammers.  When I want to drive a small nail, I use a small hammer.  In a poem I want to use the right size hammer, otherwise I lose relativity and might leave an indelible mark in the wrong spot.  I have hit my fingers with my hammer many times and it made an impact on me.  I have been hit in the face with a whiffle ball and, as a catcher, I have been hit with a baseball.  Two different balls with a very different impact.  I barely remember the sting of the whiffle ball but being hit by a baseball was memorable.
	As a poet, word choice is pretty much most of the game for me.  Punctuation is important, so is verb tense, tempo and point of view.  They all play a big role, but when I’m building a poem, word choice = impact.  There are some touches that are so faint and delicate that you are not really sure whether or not you were touched.  Words like ephemeral, gossamer, lace, zephyr, whiff, faint, slim, wisp.  Landscape descriptions might be filled with these lighter words unless something dreadful is going on beneath the surface.  I often read poems with a broad swath of words packed into a small space.  That’s good for claustrophobia and intensity but how long does it go on for?  When I am writing a comic poem the word choice tends towards the light and usually not more than 2-3 syllables.   I tend to think of comic poems as quick reading.  Since the subject is light, it doesn’t take too long to pick up on what’s going on.  I don’t want to slow things down by using long words like inimitable, claustrophobia or reprehensible. That kind of word requires a lot of work to fit into a poem.
	A serious poem is a bigger undertaking than a comic poem or a poem that looks around at the world and describes it.   Trying to say something important requires words that are unambiguous, strong words strung together with a lot of feeling and emotion.  In a serious poem I am trying my utmost to have my reader understand exactly what I’m trying to say.  I want to shape the poem as if I were building a lock.  I want my reader to want to make the key.   At the end, if we have both done our jobs, we will connect in a special way as surely as the tumblers fall into place. 
	After all, what is a poem but a thing that is read?  If I write a dandy poem but show it to nobody what has happened?  Maybe in the act of writing it I solved some personal problem by working it out in poem form.  That has happened to me many times.  Maybe that’s enough but not for those of us who crave contact by way of making an impact.  We want desperately to know if what we are seeing and thinking and feeling is commonly felt by others and that we are not crazy and not alone.   A good poem makes us feel connected, heard and understood.   A really good poem pierces our armor, eases our loneliness and makes us certain we are all brothers and sisters.