Poetry

In response to a poem by David Whyte

What to Remember When Waking

i believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written. traditionally, and for many people even today, poems have been admired chiefly for their craftsmanship and musicality, the handsomeness of language and the abundance of similes, along with the patterning and rhymes. 

i respect and enjoy all that, but i would not have worked so hard and so long at my poetry if it were primarily the production of well-made objects, just as i would not have sacrificed so much for love if love were mostly about pleasure. what matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech. i respond most to what is found out about the heart and spirit, what we can hear through the language. 

best of all, of course, is when the language and other means of poetry combine with the meaning to make us experience what we understand. we are most likely to find this union by starting with the insides of the poem rather than with its surface, with the content rather than with the packaging. 

too often in workshops and classrooms there is a concentration on the poem’s garments instead of its life’s blood. it may be that the major art in poetry is the art of finding this shining—this luminosity. it is the difference between a publishable poem and one that matters.

Linda Gregg