Poetic Mind Tip # 4 : Keep a Notebook

Thanks to elephant for publishing my poem "On the Island of Recollection." While culling old journals in December (an annual ritual) I found the poem scribbled on a final page. It needed some reworking. Since I had started the poem years ago, I've written about rubber boots and read Krishnamurti's writings on memory and Lewis Hyde's on gifts. All that ended up in the poem, this time around. 

This leads me to...

Poetic Mind Tip #4: Keep a notebook. 

It doesn't have to be a journal or diary, meaning you don't need to write in it daily. But keep a pad handy, jot down ideas, let them sit, and reread them occasionally. You may find an idea you want to pursue. There are lots of great books on journaling. Kay Adams's Journal to the Self is one. And I recommend Terry Tempest Williams's When Women Were Birds for an unusual perspective on journal keeping and the creative self. 

Poetic Mind Tip #3: Make a Card

When you hand-craft a card for someone you love, you hold the person in your mind as you cut, paste and stitch and prepare a surprise. 

Below are two Valentine beauties for inspiration.

Made by Sacramento artist and photographer Lynn Marlowe

Poetic Mind Tip #2: Read the Funnies

The funnies, as my spunky grandmother called newspaper comics, are to your poetic mind what a daily dose of vitamin D is for your body. 

Giggling/chuckling/guffawing/ laughing over Baby Blues or Zits stimulates belly, heart and imagination. Tracking the drama of Mark Trail's adventures sharpens concentration. Like poetry, humor relies on insight, juxtaposition, originality, timing, nuance and irony. See Dilbert, Pickles, Luann, Drabble, Foxtrot, Doonesbury and Frazz. Other strips (Wee Pals, Mutts, Non Sequitur) get you thinking about humanity.  Frank and Ernest utilizes the poet's key tool: word play. And check out Beakman Jax. While ostensibly answering children's science questions, Jax shines a light on life's paradoxes and absurdities. 

Two online sources for comics are The Washington Post and The Sacramento Bee. I read 'em in print with the Bee before tackling any other news.

Poetic Mind Tip #1: Correspond with a Pen Pal

This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me. - Emily Dickinson

Poems allow us to slow down, notice, reflect. Lyric poems, especially, hold a moment still--long enough to view it--the way a photograph or a painting can. A difference with the poem from visual art, however, is the degree of internalization. A word, and its sound, functions as thin gauze of meaning. Picture a beaded curtain hanging in a doorway, each bead a letter, each strand a series of words that make lines. You can slip through those dangling strings of beads and get somewhere else, to the other side of a question or into a deeper awareness.

Why bother? What's so great about being aware, present, sensitive even? You have to answer that for yourself.

I can tell you that this quality of attention necessary for writing poems, what I call "the poetic mind," can be cultivated in other ways. One of the most satisfying? A pen pal. 

Write a detailed letter, by hand preferably, calling on powers of observation, description, and a sense of interiority. There's an element of gift-giving, which poems also have, the notion of making something for someone else as a way of sharing the world. Among poets are great letter writers, Rilke, Neruda, Bishop and more. But you don't have to be a great poet to write a great letter. Find someone in another city, state or country and take the time to write. Within a few months, your relationship to time will change and you'll be thinking more like a poet, which is to say, like someone who believes in truth and beauty, in being present and noticing.

Need inspiration? Check out The Letter Project.