Everything I Know About Writing Poetry (with Jane Kenyon)

Yes, I’ve had a crush on Jane Kenyon for the past few months—this autumn, this winter, this spring. I love the following lecture notes (from A Hundred White Daffodils)—a precious document, to have something unfinished from a mind you love. I can’t love the line “We have to be like babies waking up” MORE, my word. Like, stop trying to be sophisticated. Try to be more like babies, like fools for the world, like simpletons—as though you are hearing, seeing, paying attention for the first time.

If you are looking for a writing exercise today, try writing your own Everything I Know About Writing Poetry (Notes for a Lecture/A Diary Entry/A Homily for Birds).

Everything I know about writing poetry…

• I am able to write when I have been able to feed myself, rest, read good books, see beautiful things, spend time outside, live my life among others, be gently busy and occupied but not overwhelmingly, distressingly busy.

• Sometimes a line comes singing into my head. What a gift. “The light has always been going down” began this way with the opening line “What. The quiet work of words.” appearing on the way back from dropping my kids off at school. Other time it is an image that triggers a poem, something I saw. Other times, it is the space I make for the writing of the poem that triggers the poem: sitting down on the couch with my dog, sitting down with my student in a sterile, grey study room on a tired, Friday afternoon, and a poem blooms out.

• Revision is play. It can be a joy (the revision of line endings, for me, especially). It can also be what bothers you; listen for what nettles you in a poem—a word that feels too easy, too expected, too rushed.

• Like love, writing poetry can’t be forced. But you can create the conditions for it. You can soften yourself towards writing, take care of yourself, relax, feed yourself, emotionally and physically and spiritually. I do think the best thing you can do for your writing is something else—gardening, sewing, baking. I’m partial to gardening, because change and growth and weather and seasons and planning and color and light are built into it.

• Reading is the most essential aspect of writing.

• The best writing risks something. Writing poetry should continually move you towards your edge, not towards your center, not towards safety and what you know, but towards your not-knowing, your uncertainty, your confession.

• Be specific as hell.

• Be concise as the honeysuckle, to borrow this beautiful phrase from poet Chris Corlew.

• Don’t forget the music—how the language sounds. Please don’t forget this. The vowels. The consonants. The consonance, assonance. The rhythms. Intentionally read musical poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gwendolyn Brooks.

• We are not lonely poetry islands. And, unlike Jane Kenyon, most of us do not have the luxury of a rural farmhouse and hours of quiet time. The good news is that we read best in community, with each other—find others to read with, write with, attend readings with, make presses or start a journal or podcast with; this is the joy-work.

Happy National Poetry Month, all.

Han