Chapter 3 of Writing the Mind Alive talks about PW as a path to better writing. I've been thinking that this site would be a natural for folks to talk about the writing they are doing, the joys it brings them, the downs it generates. What about poetry, for openers? When do you love it? When do you hate it? Is it even necessary anymore? Here's a little gem by James Schuyler:

A White City

My thoughts turn south
a white city
we will wake in each other's arms.
I wake
and hear the steam pipe knock
like a metal heart
and find it has snowed.

Poems

If you sit down to write a poem
it won't come
out.
At the end of an hour
what do you have?
Clumsy, cloddy
words
which refuse to render
a tune.

No, poems would rather strike
when you roll over in bed
at 4:21AM
or when your hands are wet
in the kitchen.
Then they pirouette
all over your brain

until you give up
go get a scratch pad
and deliver them
onto paper.
Now, knock it off, won't you?
I want to get back
to sleep.

Donna

Like most American poets of the last 100 years, I tend to write in free verse, and not traditional rhymes and meters. But when a master writes in this way, magic can happen. The following poem , "The Woods," is by Hayden Carruth, from his Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey.

Finally the woods
are stripped down
and the great trees are gone,

leaving a tangle
of saplings and vines,
used up and ugly,
confused signs

of the simplicities
that once were here,
the high crown for tanagers,
glades for the deer.

The following poem," English not spoken here," is by Eileen Hennessy. I think it is a marvelous example of what can happen one when writes from feelings. Eileen and I are working on a book, "From PW to Poetry."

English not spoken here,


only the grumble of walls
being hacked to dust and rubble
by squat silent men with round
bronze faces and narrow dark eyes,
clothes, embedded with plaster dust
and cockroach fossils.

Two by two the men push
man-tall bins of rubble
to the elevator, the street,
the garbage truck grinding its jaws.
No need for language

in this labor of rubbishing,
a building big enough to hold
the home villages of these men
and their families, long since
broken to silence.

If you are thinking about poetry in particular and culture in general, I want to recommend a review of four books by John Palattella in the October 4 issue of The Nation.

One question it raises for me is this, is poetry necessary today? All kinds? What kind of poetry turns me on, off? Can poetry be written solely for the page or does it have to be performed today? and etcetera.