Some of the tactics may surprise you. Would you believe that actually limiting your writing time to shorter bursts can make you more prolific? Or that getting organized might make you more creative?

Check out this month’s Poetry Advice Column for more unusual approaches that just might help you live a bit more like a poet every day.

Again, many good poems in Antaeus, Poetry, and Ironwood, and also some poets with repeat hits for me such as Brigit Pegeen Kelly, William Matthews, Jane Hirshfield, and Stephen Dunn.

This exercise has put a different spin on the concept of reading like a writer. In addition to reading closely within a poem, noticing what I like on a macroscopic level helps me get in touch with new work uniquely nutritious to my writerly self, so that I may nourish my sensibilities in a more conscious way.

I remain unapologetic about my diversity of taste–from alpha to omega, Ashbery to Oliver. Yet such diversity sometimes makes it difficult to actually know what I like.

By keeping track of poet, poem, and press, I not only discover (or reinforce) my interest in certain poets, but begin to see what presses carry them repeatedly. Antaeus, Chicago Review, Ironwood, and Paris Review are all now on my radar as possible next subscriptions. [Correction: Antaeus and Ironwood are no more.]

How do you find the poets and journals that take the top of your head off? Is your process more organic? Or do you use some form of meta-analysis, like what I have done, above? With a limited budget (of money and time), how do you know what to read next?

Predictable Success outlines the life cycle of any organization, and especially businesses, just as surely as a developmental psychologist can tell you, in broad terms, that you are going to be going through certain stages in your individual growth. And as just much as it can help to be told that you are not alone in the tumult of adolescence (or really any stage of life), this book is likewise a balm.

But Les goes further in explaining how businesses at any stage of growth can progress to a state where success becomes predictable. This remarkable set of practices strikes me as equally applicable to the development of an artist. Even as a business learns to create necessary structure, in such a way that it still fosters collaboration and innovation, so, too, does any artist dance between discipline and creative abandon in learning to create and sustain a life steeped in art.

One of the key aspects Les mentioned in our workshop is a critical “fourth element” viewpoint, able to take the viewpoints of visionaries, doers, and procedural types and synthesize them into something greater. This is apparently going to be detailed in his soon-to-be-much-anticipated second book. Les is brimming with good ideas. But the importance of the synthesis he described on Friday has resonated with me deeply since, as both an executive and a poet.

A few weeks prior, a colleague passed around an article in CLO Magazine entitled “The Power of Paradox.” It lays out, rather eloquently, the importance of embracing an “and” mentality, instead of assuming a business must settle for this or that. That is, it points out how healthy businesses eschew polarization, and strive for synthesis. I couldn’t help myself. I had to reply to my work colleagues as a poet, to point out that we poets also strive to embrace paradox in making art–a quality John Keats termed “negative capability” nearly two centuries ago.

Poetry is a medium capable of tackling the complex and contradictory nature of human consciousness. A business–and really any group–is composed of complex beings all striving under a purpose that they (hopefully, and by degrees) all hold in common. Therefore it makes sense that those organizations prone to excel are those most able to embrace the complex nature of achieving sustainable success–marrying intuition with great data; risk-taking with process; a supportive, fun culture with a solid bottom line.

As I am finding my way in art, in business, in life, these moments where the world seems to conspire around me to push through a revelation such as this are precious indeed. Many thanks to Les and my sharp-as-tacks colleagues for helping me to glimpse the bigger game that lies ahead.

The implications of this technology for poetry, however, remain to be seen. I was contacted at the start of this month by Laura Often, Public Relations for Text Flows, the company that partnered with The Academy of American Poets to bring Poem Flow to life. She was interested in having me blog about their project. I’m not sure if she found me as a former technology blogger or a current poetry blogger, but nonetheless I took a look. Unfortunately, at that time, I could only see a brief Flash-based demonstration on their web site.

Holding my iPod Touch in my hands while it runs this application is a different experience. The font is lovely. The transitions between lines (and parts of lines) are thoughtful and well-executed. In fact, the deliberate slow-down of the reading experience seems to be one of the few actual enhancements I’ve seen technology make to literature–perhaps the only enhancement in this regard, since mostly when it comes to reading, technology encourages us to speed up.

So why do I feel hesitant to herald this as the great game-changer for poetry? I suppose some curmudgeonly part of me still remains of the opinion that literature, and poetry specifically, doesn’t need smartening up through gadgetry. And yet, such gadgetry does, indeed, hold our eyeballs hostage–in some cases for most of our waking day. So perhaps I should be happy that poetry has a chance to greet those eyeballs.

Text Flows has certainly done a nice job. Ultimately, as a word-artist, the reading experience is paramount to me. And as much as I love the feel of turning a crisp page, Poem Flow does bring something new to my reading experience. Time will tell if this “new” will become the norm.

For now, you can see for yourself. iPhone and iPod touch users (and soon, no doubt, iPad users too) can download Poem Flow from the iPhone App Store. You can also demo the application in any Flash-enabled web browser on the Poem Flow site.

Photo by Randy Graham

I broke away from work to attend the dedication ceremony for my neighbor Mark Benkert’s new memorial sculpture to the Aliso Street Bear (a.k.a “Elliot”). In introducing me to read the poem I wrote dedicated to the bear, Mark also mentioned something remarkable about the process of sculpting the memorial.

For both Mark and I, the loss of the bear resonated deeply with the loss of our sons. As Mark was inscribing the letters “J” and “B”, the initials of his son, Jonah Benkert, the “B” also read much like a “P”–and he mentioned that “J.P.” reminded him of our own son, James Peake. Needless to say that by the time I took the microphone, I was nearly unable to speak.

Yet I managed to read my poem, honoring the bear, our sons, our community. The rest of the dedication meant a lot to me–from written poems and prose pieces, to impromptu verbal tributes, a song, and drumming. It was also a moment of catharsis for our community, coming together once more to honor all that the bear brought to us.

Yet rejection is a natural and necessary (albeit sometimes painful) part of the writing business. Asking what you can get out of the experience is just plain smart. So, in that spirit, I have done my best to serve up fairly simple, practical advice with a dash of humor and a healthy side of encouragement.

I hope you enjoy it!

I find the time to write poetry by getting up before dawn. I began writing poems with “matins” (morning prayer) in the title after reading Lousie Glück’s The Wild Iris. At first, these were quiet, grief-stricken prayers. Yet, over time, I have opened up to increasing experimentation, playing with forms more wildly, allowing myself to venture into political and ideological irreverence in search of greater truths.

This poem represents one such adventure. The final imagery comes from a brief vacation in Burgundy with Val. The car rental place upgraded us, at no extra cost, from a sensible Fiat to a nippy Alfa Romeo, and we found ourselves whizzing through the Yonne, stuffing pieces of fresh almond croissant into each other’s mouths. When we came upon the church at Saint-Père-Sous-Vèzelay, we were greeted by decapitated statuary. The implied violence struck me. Sometime later, the icons returned to me in this poem.

See also: “Three Poems in Sugar Mule Online“

And looking back on the first, second, and third anniversary, I see a clear trajectory toward healing, and toward integrating this profound experience into my life–not as a tragedy–but as a source of strength. I recently found the courage to hold a baby in my arms again, and felt, in that moment, only joy. I have also discovered more of the blessings, strange as it sounds, of the complicated nature of grief.

This experience reaffirmed a few things for me: that art can make life meaningful, that compassion is always the most appropriate response, and that my wife is still the bravest woman I have ever met. Today, I say, once again: godspeed, my son. And thank you.

I leave you with a poem that is fast becoming one of Paul’s most popular–read in Ojai at an event I was sadly unable to attend. I am grateful to whomever filmed it.

“Once I said, Death is God and change is His prophet. / Now I have calmed down, and I say: / Change is God and death is His prophet.”

“Time is a coffin, while nakedness is the daily news.”

Contemporary political discourse about the Middle East often underscores the divide between Israelis and Palestinians. But in reading and re-reading the poems of Yehuda Amichai, one of Israel’s most celebrated poets, and Ibrahim Nasrallah, one of the foremost Palestinian poets of his generation, what strike me are the similarities.

Obviously, the physical landscape they describe is the same–but beyond this, their inner landscape of grief and hope, forged in the intensity of a war-torn homeland, steeped in ancient traditions, yields poems at once timeless and immediate, universal almost to the point of allegory, yet also deeply and achingly personal.

What interests me most is how each poet finds hope in the midst of the violence and uncertainty of such long-standing conflict. In Nasrallah’s poem “Beginnings,” the speaker describes to his lover a passionate vision of a hopeful future:

…
when I am able to freely place a gentle kiss
on your cheek in public,
when I am able to return with you after midnight
without a police patrol desecrating our bodies
in search of a confession,
when we can run in the streets
without anyone pronouncing us crazy,
when I am able to sing
and share a stranger’s umbrella
and when she in turn may share my loaf of bread,
when you are able to say I love you
without fear of death or imprisonment
and I can open a window in the morning
without being silenced by a bullet
…

Even as Nasrallah holds out this vision, he does so in contrast to great difficulties–some ostensibly real, such as curfews and dangerous, bullet-ridden streets; others more extreme–such as fearing death or imprisonment for saying “I love you,” or being killed simply for opening a window. Yet the juxtaposition of the real difficulties against the more strange, or at least strangely-described ones, only serves to underscore the absurdity of the real oppression, and thereby heighten the deliciousness of freedom.

Amichai, by contrast, seems to find a kind of hope, and an affirmation of his humanity, in his willingness to keep asking the difficult questions, and in a “we shall see” attitude toward life. Consider this excerpt from the third section of “Once I wrote ‘Now and in Other Days’:”

…
… When we sang, “This is the last battle,” I believed,
and when they told me “This is the last supper” I believed. Since then
my life has been filled with last battles and last suppers, like the last wish
of a death-row inmate. …
…
… And the measure of justice and the measure of mercy were like
getting measured for shoes–to this day I buy shoes a size too big,
so they won’t pinch my feet. …
…
They told me “I’ll be back” and I am still
waiting, and they told me “I’ll never come back”
and I am still waiting. And when they told me “Don’t ask,”
I began to ask, and I have not stopped asking since.

Again, like Nasrallah, Amichai intersperses his poem with a poetically described hardship–constant uncertainty–but he does so, not with visions of actual freedom, but with whimsy (the shoes) and chutzpah (“I have not stopped asking since.”) These qualities would seem to be a survival skill for the constantly-disappointed speaker as he endures dangerous times.

Each poet presents an incredible vision of what it means to nurture and reinvent one’s humanity in the midst of a bitter, age-old conflict. And strangely, in this way, they would seem to be more united–in the realm of poetry–than divided. That is, each has found solace in poetic terms where no resolution has, as yet, been reached politically.

Perhaps Plato got it wrong. Rather than banishing poets from a healthy republic, they should be called upon to remind us–in ways that philosophers and even theologians often cannot–of our fundamental humanity, and how, even in the midst of long and seemingly endless conflict, we can and must make meaning–and find hope.

Recommended Reading:

Open Closed Open: Poems

by

Yehuda Amichai