An open letter to some New Hampshire ninth graders

Thank you all for your letters. It is hard to go into a school as a visitor, knowing that everyone is a stranger and that I might never see any of you again. Yet every time I visit a school, I hope to build some kind of personal bond, some kind of connection that will last. I know that you and your reactions continue to matter to me; and now that I've read your letters, I am honored to know that some of what I did in your school last week continues to matter to you.

You asked good questions in your letters, and I decided to answer them here on my blog because it's possible that other students, teachers, and readers might have similar questions. Because some of your questions overlapped, I didn't reprint every single person's comments here, but I hope that I covered all the information that everyone brought up.

I would have liked to know more about how you write your poems and where you get your inspiration and i would also like to know about what you mostly write about. I would also like to know about those words that you used at the beginning of the sentences to make it easier to write the poems but i forget what they were called. 

I don't write poems every day. They seem to arrive suddenly, in batches, so I often end up writing really hard for a few weeks. In between times I read novels, poetry, history, biography, obituaries, police reports, magazines in the dentists' office, cereal boxes, people's weird Facebook statuses, etc., and I get many of my writing ideas from those sources. I also write about things that happen in my daily life. A teacher once told me, "You have to write about your own stuff," and I try to keep that in mind, especially when I start imagining that everyone else in the world has a more interesting life than I do. 

Regarding those words at the beginning of sentences: I think you are referring to Walt Whitman's poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." The words at the beginning of the lines were mostly prepositions: out, from, up, down, and so on. Prepositions are a useful way to break through writer's block because they are always followed by a noun phrase: "out of the Camaro," "from the garbage pail," "up the ridiculous mountain," "down the bear's gullet." My guess is that one of your English textbooks has a list of prepositions, which you could throw into any old order and then challenge yourself to write a poem.

One question I have, and its hard to answer,
Do you write about health like diabetes and cancer?
Because whenever I write, it seems to be,
all hospital scenes and I don’t mean it to be.

This lovely rhymed question goes back to what I mentioned in my previous remark: how you have to "write about your own stuff." I don't tend to write about health issues because, at least to this point in my life, they haven't had a major impact on me personally. No doubt that will change, and then I will probably find myself writing about them. I know that sometimes it feels boring to discover that you keep circling a single topic, but obsession is one of the things that poets do really well. If you read all of Shakespeare's sonnets, you'll realize that he's basically writing over and over again about a messy love affair. Some of the sonnets aren't that good and some are great. But if he hadn't spent all that time on a single topic, he wouldn't have figured out how to write so well about it. 

If you are interested in a book with a health focus, you might check out Jane Kenyon's poetry collection Constance in which she writes about the experience of dealing with a lifetime of clinical depression and also about her husband's cancer diagnosis. (By the way, she lived in New Hampshire.)

I wanted to learn more about famous poets and what they wrote about.  

The Poetry Foundation website is a good place to go if you want basic information about many different poets. It features poets from the past and the present, offers brief biographies, and includes samples of their poems. You can also search the site by topic: say, if you want to read poems about love or childhood or economics or monkeys or whatever.

I wanted to learn a little bit more about the different formats of poetry and if there are any kinds that are just like a story. When did you start writing poetry professionally? Did you go to college for poetry? 

There are so many different poetic forms that I can't even begin to list them all. If you go to the "Verse Forms" section of the Poetry Foundation website, you can sample some common types--sonnets, sestinas, haiku, etc.--that poets have traditionally used. Many poets also invent their own forms and patterns. 

Regarding your question about poems that are just like a story: Yes, there is a very long tradition of what is called narrative poetry, and I'm going to share a link to one of my own poems, "First Game," which tells the story of a really bad elementary school basketball team. As you'll see, I wrote this poem in lines, so that it looks like a traditional poem, but the piece has plot structure, just like a short story does. Some people also write what are called prose poems: they tend to include many images, or word pictures (for instance, like that Whitman poem did), but on the page look like a regular prose paragraph. 

Regarding your question about "writing poetry professionally": I graduated from college with a degree in English. I thought that I might want to be a fiction writer, but I turned out to be fairly bad at writing fiction. So I went through several sad years when I really didn't believe I had any writing talent or ability, and this just about broke my heart because, for my whole life, I had believed that writing a book was the greatest thing anyone could ever do. When I was little, I saw writers in the same way that other kids saw movie stars or homerun hitters or the president: as if they were more like Greek gods than like regular human beings. Anyway, when I was in my late 20s, I started trying to write poems, and all of a sudden I began figuring out that this was the form I needed. And then I met a teacher of poetry, who asked me if I'd like to work with him. So for about five years, I studied with him--not in a school but privately, one on one. And then, about ten years after I began, my first book was accepted for publication. (Along the way I also discovered that writers are nothing like Greek gods.)

I was slightly puzzled during the school-wide session. I did not really see the whole point of rewriting the first poem and making our own after. I understand that it could be a better way of learning what the poem really means, but I did not find it so efficient. I would really like to learn more about how to start a poem and keep it interesting throughout the entire piece. 

First off, I'm going to say that I think 250 kids in an echoing gym is probably not an ideal venue for almost any poetry exercise. In a classroom, with fewer students and a more concentrated atmosphere, maybe the dictation exercise would have made more sense to you. In any case, here's the rationale for the approach: When you copy out a poem word for word, comma for comma, capital letter for capital letter, you are as close as you'll ever be to sitting inside the poet's brain as he or she figures out how to create the poem. That is a very, very important place to be if you're trying to learn how to be a writer--because if you don't spend such intense time with the details of the language, you won't begin to learn exactly what the language is capable of doing. As I said to you during class, the bits and pieces of our language--grammar, word choice, letter sounds, punctuation, etc.--are the tools we poets have to work with. They are our version of a painter's canvas, paints, brushes, color mixtures, etc. The dictation exercise is a way for writers to focus intently on exactly what one poet chose to do with those tools.

Regarding your interest in learning more about how to start a poem and keep it interesting: Ah, that's the 6-million-dollar question! No matter how long a poet has been writing poems, the process never gets easier. That's because each poem is different: sometimes a poet deliberately decides to write about a topic she's researched; sometimes she's overwhelmed with emotion and the words come in a rush and blur; sometimes she's wrestling to fit her thoughts into a form or pattern; and so on and so on. All I can tell you is that you need to read other people's poems, you need to write your own, and you need to start becoming aware, as you go back to revise your work, of what parts of the poem seem most exciting to you--not the parts that you think ought to be most exciting but what words, sounds, shapes, images keep drawing your attention. You have to fall in love with your own words, and then do your best to make all of the poem--every single element--match that high standard you've set for yourself. If this sounds impossible, that's because it is. But, hey, that's the story of art, and that's why being an artist is so demanding and exciting and heartbreaking and absorbing, and why people keep being drawn into the challenge of creation.