reading

Contents

Introduction

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part Two

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part Three

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part Four

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

About The Author

Bibliography

Introduction

When I first started to consider putting together a book about writing poetry, I thought about how frightened people often are by the idea of poetry – writing it, reading t, feeling that they have anything to write about that anyone else would be interested in reading. I realized that my whole life as a poet and teacher was dedicated to giving people a feeling that their lives, that what they have to say, is important.

I believe we all have stories to tell, and that those stories are the basis for writing poems that reach across the barriers of age, ethnicity, gender, social class to connect with all that is human inside us. I think of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he said: “Writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

In order to overcome our own fear about writing, our own lack of self-confidence in facing the blank page, we need to learn to let go. When we’re writing, we need to get to that place where the pen moves almost by itself.

What I hope to accomplish in this book is to give writing prompts that will help you to get past all the outside influences that keep you from believing in yourself and in your ability to write. In order to write, you need to get rid of notions about language, poetic form, and esoteric subject matter – all the things that the poetry police have told you are essential if you are to write. I wanted to start from a different place, a place controlled by instinct rather than by intelligence. Revision, the shaping and honing of the poem, should come later,and, in revising, be careful to retain the vitality and electricity of the poem. Anyone can learn to craft a capable poem, but it is the poems that retain that initial vitality that we remember; these are the poems that teach us how to be human.

When I first started to write, I read an enormous amount of poetry and was influenced by that poetry to imitate these famous poets. Those years of imitation taught me about the beauty of language, the music of it, the way that words shaped into a poem can sing as the poems of Dylan Thomas sing. Gradually, I discovered a very American music in the poems of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. “The universal is in the particular,” William Carlos Williams said, and he influenced American poets from Ginsberg to Galway Kinnell to Lucille Clifton to Sharon Olds to Jimmy Santiago Baca to Mark Doty to Anne Sexton to Adrienne Rich to Stanley Kunitz to Robert Creeley. Under the influence of Whitman and Williams and Ginsberg, American poets have generated an impressive body of electric, exciting, original, and moving American writing.

Since I started out imitating Keats and Shelley, I was 40 before I learned to believe that people might be interested in reading poetry by a working-class Italian American mother, wife, and grandmother from Paterson, New Jersey. It was a professor in graduate school who gave me the courage to believe in my own story. It is this courage I try to impart to my students – whether they are the graduate and undergraduate students at Binghamton University, State University of New York; the writers attending the many intensive workshops that I have conducted with poet Laura Boss; or the students and teachers at other universities and arts centers throughout the country where I have taught poetry.

Through this book, I hope to give you the confidence that comes with increased writing and reading and believing in yourself. This book is intended to help you to overcome writer’s block; it is intended to open you up to your own experience. It can be used in classrooms or to provide impetus for a group of writers or for the individual writer sitting alone in a kitchen or in an armchair or at a desk. It is a way of jumpstarting your creativity; it is a way to get permission to tell your secrets, to write your stories. It is a book about process, rather than craft.

In the pages that follow, I provide examples of my poetry and a list of suggested poetry books with the hope that in them you will find writing that speaks to you. You will find different poets to whom you respond; those poets, in turn, can help you open more doors inside yourself. You need to write every day and read every day. You need to read poetry from other centuries. You need to memorize poems. You need to fall in love with poetry, because I don’t believe you can write poetry unless you do.

If there is one theme in this book, it is courage; the courage to plunge into these prompts. Use them at random; use them more than once. Hopefully, they will lead you to places held in memory, to the past, and the textures and smells and tastes of that past. Believe in yourself. Share your poems with other people, especially those who are also using this book.

Chapter 1

Finding the Poet Inside You

Poems hide in a place deep inside of you that I call the cave. The cave is guarded by a crow that whispers in your ear in the voice of every authority figure you’ve ever encountered. The crow tells you all the reasons why you can’t write, shouldn’t write. He tells you everything that’s wrong with you: “You’re stupid, lazy, awkward.” Every negative comment ever made to you, every withering look is part of the crow’s ammunition against you and your creative spirit.

In order to write, you have to get rid of the crow; you have to push him out of your way. Only then can you enter the cave where poems abide. In the cave are all your memories, good and bad, the past, every person you’ve ever known and loved or hated, everything you are afraid of in the world and in yourself. In the cave is your rage and your fury and your passion. You have to enter the cave to find all the stories you have to tell and all the poems you have to write. Obviously, this kind of writing takes courage, but it also will imbue your writing with a renewed energy and passion.

Throughout this book, I address the reader as you, because it helps me to imagine the person who is reading this book, a person who is looking for the magic words that will release him or her from the ropes of self-doubt and worry. I want you to feel my encouragement and enthusiasm for everything I know you can do, both in your writing and in your life. One of my students put this line on her screen saver:

MARIA BELIEVES IN YOU!!!

Every time she turned on her computer, the line would be there, reassuring her and knocking that crow off her shoulder.

I believe in the poems that hide inside you. To help you reach them, I have provided hundreds of writing prompts designed to help you to get to the cave, to find the stories you need to tell and the voice in which to tell them. Writing Poetry to Save Your Life will get you started. What you need is paper, a pen, and the willingness to take risks. Plan to write once a day for twenty minutes or if that seems too difficult, then plan to write three times a week. Block out twenty minutes, and allow for as much silence as possible. When my own children were young, I would get up in the middle of the night to write. For some people getting up very early in the morning works better, or writing just before going to bed. The main thing is make a schedule to write.

Once you’ve established a time for writing, then you have to be willing to tell the truth in your writing. Choose a prompt from the back of this book, and write whatever comes into your mind about the topic. Do not censor yourself. Do not try to revise as you go along. Let your mind go and let your pen move as it wishes. As you descend into the cave inside yourself, your subconscious mind will take over and you won’t be in control. You have to be willing to let that happen. All revision should be saved for a later time.

For the many years that I’ve taught poetry workshops, I have used the following prompt as the first one that I give my students. Of all the prompts I’ve used, this one seems to be magic, to have the ability to open people up, to make them go to places in their poems that they’ve never gone to before.

Begin by writing about a person who is very important to you. The person has to be someone with whom you have a very long history – a mother, father, sister, brother, grandfather, grandmother, cousin, aunt, uncle. Imagine that person. Think about where you see the person when you think of him or her: in a kitchen stirring soup, wearing an apron, hands dusted with flour; in an office sitting at a desk with lamplight on his or her hair; in a barcalounger holding a drink. What cologne or perfume do you associate with the person? What other smells – flour, sugar, cinnamon, ink, dust, cigarette smoke? Pretend you are speaking directly to the person and tell that person something you would be afraid to say because you fear the person will be angry or will laugh or because you would be embarrassed. Start by describing the person. Example: Ma, I remember you in your basement kitchen, you always cooking and baking, you in your homemade flour sack apron, you smelling of flour and sugar and cinnamon ...

The purpose of these writing prompts is to help you to write the first draft of the poem. Use details and be as specific as possible. Sometimes, it helps to visualize the place or person about which or whom you are going to write. Where would the person be? What would the person be doing? What kind of clothes would the person wear? What expressions does the person have? What is the first thing you notice about this place or person or time? If you do this enough, it will become second nature to you.

Chapter 2

Learning to Let Go

Because of the way you have been trained in school, you are often dealing with the critic in your head, that voice that tells you what is wrong with everything you do, that voice that makes you doubt yourself.

To combat that voice, it’s important to open up that notebook, look at the first clean page, and start to write. This process is hindered or destroyed by allowing yourself to worry about whether what you are writing is good or bad, polished or rough, acceptable to others or not. You have to believe that nothing matters at this stage of the process except the words that flow from your pen onto the page. Resist the temptation to revise as you go along. Instead, allow your subconscious mind to take over and write what happens when you do.

I’ve always believed that the wise old woman who lives in your belly, that one who operates on instinct, knows what you need to write, what stories you need to tell. When you let your mind control what you write, you lose the electricity and vitality of the initial impulse, the basic truth that the old woman knows, that truth that makes our writing powerful.

The Greeks believed that poets could hear the voices of the gods and had the ability to interpret their wishes. The Greeks understood that poets are born with one less layer of skin, and are open to what is true about being human, as well as courageous about stating those truths. Modern life is full of noise and busyness, which can distract you from discerning these truths. That’s why it is an important part of the process to find stillness and quiet each day, so you can tap into that part of yourself where truth abides.

When confronting that blank page, you must allow yourself the freedom to loosen up. If you catch yourself changing lines, crossing out, going back to revise, you are not letting go. You cannot get to a deeper place inside yourself or in your writing, unless you’re willing to trust your instincts. You cannot control this process with your mind.

I realized the importance of this when Diane di Prima and I were on a reading tour, and she suggested that I bring painting supplies. After we arrived at the hotel, she left me alone in my room to paint. I started to get very nervous when confronted by the blank drawing pad. My hands felt stiff and unnatural. I became increasingly upset that I couldn’t draw a perfect rose even though I was staring at one in front of the window. I kept tearing off sheets and trying again, and finally I had a pile of muddied, blurred paintings.

Suddenly, I realized this is the very thing I cautioned my writing students against. I took a deep breath, and tried to let go, the way I had learned years ago with my writing. The painting did not have to be perfect; it did not have to be anyone else’s idea of the perfect rose. I had to look at the world through my own eyes and paint it, the same way I did when writing a poem.

Once I realized that, I was able to paint, and my hand and wrist loosened; I was happy with my creation. I stopped worrying about whether it was good or bad. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was painting and I was pleased because the colors and shapes were translations of what I saw in my mind.

The time alone in that room, I see now, was a gift. In writing, you must give yourself the same gift. Twenty minutes are enough to write a draft of a poem. Believe that, and your hand, too, will loosen up and you will be surprised and delighted by your own creation.

Chapter 3

Translating Our Lives

My mother spoke an Italian dialect mixed with her own version of English; she could not read English. In Italy, she went to school through the third grade; after that, she worked in the fields and cooked for her entire family. When she came to America she was already 24 years old and pregnant with my sister. It was the middle of the Depression, and they settled into the life of many new immigrants, my father working in a factory when he could get a job. He even worked with the WPA on street repair for a while. My mother worked hand-sewing the sleeves in coats. The factory would drop the coats off at the house in the morning and pick them up again the next morning, leaving behind other coats for her to sew. Even later, when we were in school, and she was able to work in Ferraro’s coat factory, she worked with other Italian immigrants from her area of Italy and they chattered in their dialect while they sewed.

My mother had an intense desire to learn everything; she was quick and practical and efficient. She wanted to learn English and in order to do that she knew she had to go to night school. My father refused to allow it. Though she ranted and cried, he would not give in. “Women don’t need to go to school,” he insisted. Now, when I see how immigrants make a beeline for Passaic County Community College where they can get ESL classes and master Basic English, I think of how my mother would have given anything for such an opportunity. Although the opportunity was denied, she was well aware that language was power.

My mother had a padded rocker in which she would sit at night. We’d sit in her lap or the arm of the chair, and she would tell us Italian fairy tales or stories of her life in Italy before she came to America. I loved her rich laugh, her ability to spin a scary story or a hope-filled one, the music of that Italian dialect she spoke, and the English words she created when she didn’t really know the English word for something.

But my mother was always ashamed of her illiteracy. There were so many things she could not do when confronted with Americans, who did not understand what she was saying, and she, my super- competent mother, became helpless as a child when faced with their rudeness and sense of superiority.

I remember once going to a department store with my mother when I was 14 or 15, and the sales clerk was rude to her, because she asked a question about some nylons. I saw that my mother was ready to slink away from that woman, to duck her head in shame, and I yelled at that clerk so everyone in the store turned to look at me. “Don’t ever, ever talk to a customer that way again. I want to speak to your manager right now,” I said. She got that manager for me and, in my perfect English, I told him what had happened. Because I was articulate and furious and suddenly more powerful than I had ever been in my shy, 15-year-old self, I realized the power of language to present my side of an argument and to make people listen. I realized, too, though my mother was very intelligent and quick-witted in Italian and in the realm of her domestic life, outside of the confines of that Italian neighborhood and house, she was dismissed as stupid and unimportant.

My mother could tell me her stories in Italian, but she could not tell them to America, and maybe that was part of the reason why I decided that I had to be a writer. I remember the Sunday I announced my ambition and my cousin, the accountant, said: That’s the most impractical ambition I’ve ever heard. While part of me knew it was impractical for a working class girl, whose first language was Italian, another stubborn part of me knew I’d have to write in order to save the stories of my mother’s and father’s lives, to tell those stories to an America that would have to listen, whether it wanted to or not. Language gave me power, and I wasn’t giving it up for anything.

Whenever my students whisper, I shout: Speak up. Claim your voice. Seize your power. I force them to raise their voices so everyone can hear. In a way, that’s what happens when you write; you are seizing your power. Your words need to crackle. Sometimes, I get frightened that people will criticize me for what I’m writing. Then, I think of my mother in that department store who could not find the words to defend herself and I stiffen my spine and forge ahead.

In the same way Italian can be translated into English, we need to translate our inner lives, the place that we never talk to anyone about, into poems and stories and memoir in order to make the past come alive. Here is an example of such a poem about my grandmother, called “Donna Laura,” which appears in my book, What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009.

Donna Laura

Donna Laura, they called my grandmother

when they saw her sitting in the doorway, sewing

delicate tablecloths and linens, hours of sewing

bent over the cloth, an occupation for a lady.

Donna Laura, with her big house falling

to ruins around her head,

Donna Laura, whose husband

left for Argentina when she was twenty-four,

left her with seven children and no money

and her life in that southern Italian village

where the old ladies watched her

from their windows. She could not have

taken a breath without everyone knowing

Donna Laura who each day sucked

on the bitter seed

of her husband’s failure

to send money and to remember

her long auburn hair,

Donna Laura who relied on the kindness

of the priest’s “housekeeper”

to provide food for her family.

Everyone in the village knew

my grandmother’s fine needlework

could not support seven children,

but everyone pretended not to see.

When she was ninety, Donna Laura

still lived in that mountain house.

Was her heart a bitter raisin,

her anger so deep it could have cut

a road through the mountain?

I touch the tablecloth she made,

the delicate scrollwork,

try to reach back to Donna Laura,

feel her life shaping itself into laced patterns

and scalloped edges from all those years between

her young womanhood and old age.

Only this cloth remains,

old and perfect still, turning her bitterness into art

to teach her granddaughters and great granddaughters

to spin sorrow into gold.