Fletcher - Poetry matters: writing a poem from the inside out

for Georgia Heard,
wise teacher and friend

One year I came home from college to spend Christmas with my family, and I was flat broke. I had gotten used to being a poor college student, but this year I didnt want to be broke for Christmas. I was tired of buying junky gifts for my parents, brothers, and sisters. This year I wanted to have enough money to buy nice presents.

I got a job washing dishes at a local seafood restaurant, stacking trays of dirty dishes and hauling away the clean dishes when they emerged from the dish-washing machine. It was hot, sweaty work, but on Christmas Eve the manager handed me five crisp twenty-dollar bills. I hurried out to do my shopping.

There was a shopping center close to my house. I was walking across the parking lot when I was startled to see my grandfather. He was leaning over a container of trash, picking through it.

Grandpa? I said. When I took a step closer I could see mat even though the man was tall, thin, and bald he wasnt my grandfather. This ragged man had a ripped coat; he looked cold. All I could imagine was my grandfather pawing through trash, looking for something to eat on Christmas Eve. I walked up to him and pressed the five twenty-dollar bills into his cold hand.

Merry Christmas, I mumbled.

Th-thank you, son, the man stammered, looking at the money.

I wanted to tell him to use the money to buy a new coat, but somehow the words wouldnt come out. I turned around and started walking home.

Merry Christmas! the man yelled.

Merry Christmas, I said, waving. When I walked away I felt good. But the good feeling lasted about one minute. My wallet was empty now. I didnt have any money to buy presents for my family.

It seemed pointless to go shopping after that, so I walked home. On the way I got the seed of an idea. I went straight to my room, took out some paper, and started to write. My brainstorm was to write a poem for each member of my family.

I started with one of my little sisters. She liked horses, so I wrote her a poem about a horse galloping on the beach. It took me about a half hour to write the poem, and when it was finished I decided it wasnt bad at all.

One of my brothers wanted to be an astronaut, so I wrote him a poem about outer space. After a while Mom called me down to join everyone in hanging stockings from the mantel. When we were finished I went back upstairs to work.

By ten oclock I had done four poems, but I had eight brothers and sisters. My eyes started getting tired. It was hard worktalk about writing under deadline!but it was fun trying to think of what each person would want his or her poem to be about. I wrote and wrote. By eleven my eyes were blurry but the poems were done.

I went down to the basement Someone had given Dad a box of old paper, and I knew he wouldnt mind if I took some sheets. I copied each poem onto a piece of paper, trying to keep the letters neat and not make any spelling mistakes. When I finished copying a poem, I rolled up the paper and tied a red ribbon around the middle. It was almost 1 A.M. when I went downstairs and tucked each scrolled poem in a stocking hanging from the fireplace. Finally I could drag myself upstairs and go to bed.

Early the next morning I felt someone tugging the collar of my pajamas. When I wrenched open my eyes, I saw my three-year-old sister Carolyn standing by my bed. She was holding her Christmas stocking, all lumpy with presents, and I could see the scrolled poem sticking out the top.

Listen! she said in an excited voice. Gently she scrunched her stocking until I could hear the paper crinkling.

Theres something magic in there, she said, nodding her little head and looking straight at me. Theres poetry in there. Poetry!

Maybe youve heard before that poetry is magic, and it made you roll your eyes, but I believe its true. Poetry matters. At the most important moments, when everyone else is silent, poetry rises to speak.

A beloved teacher retires. Her students write a poem and, later, at the ceremony, read it aloud to honor her.

A big sister gets married. Her little sister writes a poem and reads it at the reception.

At funerals, graduations, fiftieth wedding anniversaries, birthday parties, at the inauguration of a president, people gather to readwhat? Not stories. Not articles or plays. They read poems.

I think the reason is partly because poems are so intimate. Often we write poems for personal reasons. A girl likes a boy, writes him a love poem, and slips it into his backpack where she knows he will find it.

It has been said that writing a poem for someone else is like giving blood because it comes from the heart of the writer and goes to the heart of the receiver. Poems are filled with words from the heart.

The power of poetry comes at least partly from its brevity. Poems are short, and they pack a punchoften they say a lot with a few well-chosen words. Heres a poem I recently wrote:

I left one flower
on Grandmas coffin:
a forget-me-not
as if I could

Of course, not everybody is a fan of poetry. I often run into kids who dont like to write poems. Poems are boring, one girl muttered when I visited her classroom. She complained that her teacher had spent hour after hour dissecting poems and pulling out similes, metaphors, and symbolism.

If I had one wish, she told me, it would be that Id never have to analyze another poem for the rest of my life.

Shes got her wish, at least in this book. This book is about writing poetry, not analyzing it. I wrote this book to help you write poems and to give practical ideas for making your poems sound the way you want them to sound. Were not going to smash poems up into the tiniest pieces. But I do think its helpful to be wide awake when you write a poem. Lots of poetsboth kids and grownupsfall into a trap. They view a poem as a one-hundred-yard sprint. They dash off the poem in one fast draft and make a quick decision whether its good or not. If its good, they keep it. If it stinks, they throw it away. Many poets never think about how theyre writing the poem, where it works, and where it needs more work. Big mistake.

I wrote this book to help you think deeper about how you can make your poem shine. You might be surprised to find that I dont approach poetry the way many teachers do, by looking at poetry forms: haiku, couplets, diamante, acrostics, limericks, etc. Some writers like to start with a preset form, but I think of that as writing the poem from the outside in. I have written a chapter on the uses (and abuses) of form. But in this book I focus on helping you write the poem from the inside out.

Well start with the heart, the guts, the feel of poetry. The three pillars of poetry are emotion, image, and music. Well explore those elements in the first three chapters. Later on well look at ways you can refine the poem by using white spaces, cutting unnecessary words, and sharpening the ending. After that well explore different ways you can have fun by going public with your poetry.

Whenever I visit schools I meet lots of kids who like writing poems as much as I do.

Theyre short and intense, Andy, a seventh grader, told me. When youre writing a poem you can see right away whether or not its going to get off the ground. I like Andys description of a poem getting off the ground. He thinks like a poet!

I will never be able to fly like a hawk or dunk a basketball like Kobe Bryant. But with words and poems I have been able to achieve that sense of perfection. It doesnt happen all the time. Sometimes it happens for only a fleeting momentbut it does happen, and its as exhilarating as flight. I got that feeling when I wrote these lines about the coming of the dawn: