Poems about (writing poems about) writing poems

National Poetry Month goes meta, woo hoo!

Photo by yeongkyeong lee on Unsplash

I’ve had a wonderful time this month hanging out with other poets on Substack as we’ve stretched our creative muscles and delighted in one another’s turns of phrase and twists of heart … so I’m sharing the celebration by offering a matched (or not) pair of poems in this post. The first is brand-new, written in response to a prompt from the NaPoWriMo “poem a day” challenge that several of us have taken up, and addressing a favorite topic of many poets. The second, written almost exactly ten years ago in April 2014, ups the level of poetic meta by addressing … well, you’ll see. I won’t do a meta pile-on by adding further commentary at the end. These two prefer to have the last word themselves, and they deserve it.

[You can listen to an audio version of the the poems using the little widget above the photograph.]

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TO WRITE A POEM

With a deep bow to Alicia Ostriker’s “The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog.”


To write a poem,
says the teenager,
is to stare at a mountain,
a rose, or a bowl of apples,
and paint a picture of yourself.

To write a poem,
says the knitting needle,
is to work as three: yourself,
the other half of you,
and something soft.

To write a poem,
says the rosemary shrub,
is to root yourself in the earth,
turn your face to the sun,
and sing your song to the air.

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WRITING POEMS ABOUT WRITING POEMS


When we do it (all of us do), it is for the same reasons
that Vincent painted views of his rented room,
portraits of his shoes, maps of his bandaged face:

because it is what we know best,
because it is what is nearest,
because the gorgeous colors of the world can be so fierce
some days that we feel safer staying home,
even when laces tangle
and walls lean in
and parts of us bleed away.

I know. I do it too. Some days, though, I wish we would all wake up
to a command scrawled in bold new cursive across our canvases,
the pages of our notebooks: Get out now.
Pocket your last handful of change and leave the house.
Go sit in a park, a soup-kitchen, a café, sip absinthe or fizzy water.
Look at faces that are not your own, shapes beyond the reach of your arm.
When you realize (you will) that you are watching yourself look,
stop and laugh, and look again.

Stay out until your drink is gone,
or your cash, or your fortitude;
then come home to safe walls,
the familiar bed and chair,
mirror and shoes,
brush and pen.

Maybe you will have a new picture in mind; at least, may be,
the next sketch of your room will have new colors in it.

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