Writing the Life Poetic

'Tis the Season to Write Poetry

As the holidays approach in a down economy, many people are seeking alternatives the typical holiday spending frenzy. The good news about hard times is that they challenge us to find creative new ways to give, share and create meaning. Poetry can be a powerful instrument for conjuring such alchemies.  

Poetry can’t change our bank statements, but it can change the way we think about wealth and prosperity. It’s important that we understand that income is one thing, and prosperity is frequently something else.  

For example, a few years ago, I heard Mary Oliver speak. She reported that a critic of her poetry complained that she must be independently wealthy to have so much time to lie around in the grass and ponder nature. This made the poet laugh, because the critic was reporting in an underhanded and confused way about a truth that Oliver tapped into long ago: the act of lying in the grass and listening to the world IS wealth.  

The truth is, we don’t need to go anywhere special to tune in to poetry. Our lives are already inundated with sensory information that is the raw material of poems. All we need to do is slow down, pay attention and write down what moves us, intrigues us or stirs our curiosity. This does not require an inheritance or a 401K. It simply requires a willingness to welcome the abundance that is already ours, and to follow the golden thread of language wherever it leads us.  

What poetry can give us is something far more valuable than money could ever buy – it gives us ourselves. Poem by poem, we write our souls into existence. Weighted in words, the spirit that animates us becomes palpable. By the same token, each poem we read offers a small window into the human condition, in which we may better recognize some glimmer of our own being.  

Egg nog, move over. Rudolph, there’s another light guiding our sleigh tonight! I’ve never experienced any holiday cheer that rivals the state of grace that poetry invites into our lives. In fact, I often give poems as holiday gifts. I print them on pretty paper, place them in an attractive frame and presto – the most treasured holiday gifts I’ve ever given only cost me the time I spent creating them.  

Try it! You just might get hooked.

* * * * *

This is the first column in the December Writing the Life Poetic zine. View the entire issue and past issues in the  WTLP zine archive.

Going Home

My nails are red today.
I did them for the wedding.
When I meet my neighbor Ryan
in the elevator with his blue dog Chachie,
I think      This is strange. 
Me in my pink outfit.  Pink suitcases.
His dog dyed blue. 
He moved in yesterday.
I'm leaving for the summer.
We shake our left hands.  Lefties
he says, nodding his head gravely.
My mother is a lefty too. 
She's carrying two suitcases
and a plastic bag.  Her neck hurts. 
Three lefties and a blue dog
in an elevator going down.
Generally I don't trust large men
with small dogs
but this guy's got an ok handshake
so I don't know.

 

Dear Sam,

When I squint my eyes
I can make your hair a single star  

points breaking around your head. 
Winter breaking inside of me.  

A cape of discarded color at my feet.
I talk the dirt out of my mouth.  

I am no expert. I shine my dim light  
and you're out there breaking glass.

I filled a whole notebook with you once  
but still you were missing. There are pink stars

on the red formica table. The mattress  
a pulse of argument. Next year

New York will be different  
but tonight the moon is a white spine  

and a small candle burns
our shadows into the wall.

the closer you look

Between the tides, the wise table.
The shining. There have been weeks
when I thought nothing. There have
been months when I prayed.
Bottomless days.
The gloves lie fingerless
between us, I write
time out of my bones.
Sax so symptomatic. Sad and sinking.
Collage my horses and forks.
Tea drifts, shifts its shallow
flowers into a steep of temptation.
Not for you and yet for you.
As everything is both itself
and reflection
diminishing into dividends
the closer you look.

More Like Music

By Sage Cohen

 

We all need a line against which

to measure our wildness.

 

The park is cut back along the path.

I align my spine with the heavy bench,

 

send my legs out around your waist

as the sun heats a halo through your long black hair.

 

Today I can understand how the scientists misjudged

the universe’s color for turquoise when really it is beige.

 

The sun must have been streaming through the trees

such that the calculation of space divided by matter

 

became more like music. And when the rhythm lifted

like a woman’s skirt in summer wind, someone sang,

 

as you do now, of the sky being cleared by a good hard rain.

Then the universe compressed like two bodies dancing,

 

perfected with the pressure of exchange, until

the planetary percussion became a salsa.

 

Leaning into the beat, those men reached further

than who they were. Surrendered fact to abstraction.

 

They got loose in their laboratories, pressed to the truth

of the blue of turquoise until it was the only answer.

free write

The past dangles its distractions like chandeliers. I want to be known. Come to me slowly, unfolding in the way a story fills a page. Perforate me with permanence. Fill my glass with glitter and bone. Good girls make it all look good. We were cage fed. Led like lightning to the divining rods. Wanting to be more than we were, no time for triage, adrift in red flowers and lift. We lost the magic to the diagnosis. Not everything needs to be explained. Turning my face toward tonight, my only lover this sky which is all over me and nowhere. My face heated with wine and time. There is no one I'd rather be than a river of time turning away from the light.

Get your Writer's Digest Guide to Creativity

Some of my favorite prompts from Writing the Life Poetic have been excerpted in the Writer's Digest Guide to Creativity magazine, available in bookstores and on newsstands now!

This magazine features four, chock-full writing-boosting sections: Creative Habits, Creative Craft, Creative Business and Creativity Workbook -- all designed to get ideas flowing, words on the page and published work into the world!

You'll hear from leading thinkers, writers and teachers about the craft and business of writing -- including my mentor, platform guru Christina Katz, author of Get Known Before the Book Deal.

For just $5.99, you can give your creative practice a back-to-school shot of adrenaline by tapping into a wealth of wisdom from a range of genres.

Happy writing, poets! May the muse (and the moose) be with you.

I make you a river

By Sage Cohen

Philip Levine claims that there was at least one day when Lorca and Crane were in the same place at the same time. His poem is the imagined moment of flint on flint, as the poets’ minds converged in a small brush fire of tongue and ash before each fell forward into his own, inevitable future.

Stranded in my own moment in time, the electric pulse of poetry charging my clinging sweater, back lined up with the hard bench of listening, I enter the eternity of Spring, where Lorca stands stooped, his pockets weighted with unspent poems.

Each hard knuckle of bud containing a great courage of reckless beauty unfurls itself into words under the spell of my recording pen.

Levine says: “horse cock and mattress stuffing,” a name for a sandwich composed of Wonder bread and bologna. We can take any experience and make it matter: put it in a barn or on a train, make it back-lit or blast it with headlights. I make you a river, so my love has somewhere to go.

I take the word “sacred” into me, and assign it to your mouth, which is echoing my inner ear as the conch holds the ocean. We are blind as a field. I am a maple tree wide as century, your kiss the sun pouring through my green. Time rings me in radiance. There is only this moment of enough. Stable as seed, your hands hold all futures. My pollens drift to dust.

The little note cards on my knee are preserved petals. Levine claims he hasn’t met a poet who rivals Dickenson. We silence our beauty inside the heavy book of Past. These cascading evasions we call time and truth, around which we organize our disappearances, return me to the cross-hatched convergence of afternoon and future. The earth’s thirst for metaphor rains you over my listening skin. I breathe you in, then cry you out again. I write you down so when the river returns, it will know to flow right through me.

 

If I've reached for your lines

If I've reached for your lines (I have) and cupped in each hollow a tender word (I will), the fullness of night that turns in blades through this darkness will give me something I can follow, some net of stars that will hold me closer than I know how to be held. And into that great sentence unfurling to paragraph into the dream that our bodies weave together, too heavy to contain what we know, too impossible to line our shelves with the sturdy preservatives of time and tomorrow, will be the moment unadorned, light as a nightgown, empty as a name.

The Irony of the Small Horn

By Sage Cohen

Paul says the Great American Music Hall
should be called The Great European Music Hall.

Its gold flourishes and imperial balcony feel more
like something you’d yearn for from across an ocean.

Nothing is named right in this world.
I don’t know what to call Paul’s body against mine.

Dancing, maybe, but that’s not enough.
It’s more like a question before it is born

gathering force among the margins
of what is already known or believed.

Paul has his hand on my stomach where my shirt rides up
and I press into the beat coming through his chest.

My hips rotate with the room. Singular surrenders to plural.
Sweat and smoke and beer and bodies pulse in the darkness.

The music is a fire. Dancing is the flame.
We all depend on each other to burn.

Paul points out the enormous man playing the tiny trumpet.
All the big guys have small horns, we agree.

This poem was supposed to be about that. About the trumpet,
because that was how Paul and I planned it.
 
But nothing ever turns out the way you think it will.
The music ends, and then it’s time to go home.