The Everything Writing Poetry Book (27 page)

As an exercise, write down the name of the city where you live—or to which you live closest—and then write down the reputations that the city and its people have. Los Angeles, for example, is known as a sprawling, car-congested city, overflowing with movie stars. New York is supposedly the “city that never sleeps” and is identified by overwhelming skyscrapers and historical monuments like the Statue of Liberty. Right or wrong, these impressions will appear on your list and may provide helpful insight for your poem.

As another exercise, go to the library and research the history of the city or the area where you live. Who lived there before you? Did any historical events take place there? Did any famous people live there? What was the landscape like before the buildings (if any) went up? Once you have the answers to these questions, you can then incorporate some of that history into a poem. These tidbits of reality will help you create identities for your characters.

Identity and Home

In a more specific and personal way, your home will establish your identity in the eyes of your friends and guests. For example, if you keep a spotless home and a guest comes over for a visit, that guest will likely leave with a certain opinion of you based upon your house's appearance. If you live in a one-room wooden cabin with a dirt floor and a corrugated tin roof, then your guest is going to gain a vastly different impression of you.

Identities can be established for each person within a home by the way he keeps his private space. Try to recall the details of the private spaces your family members kept when you were growing up. Once you have assembled these details, you can use them to construct realistic characters for your poetry. For example, if your older sister kept a mound of clothes on the floor of her bedroom, a swamp of school papers on the desk, and an assortment of makeup products all over the dresser, you can use these elements of her living space to construct a similar character personality. Even if your sister eventually became an accountant, you can use the details of her life to create an artist or a lawyer character.

Remembering Your Birthplace

Clearly your identity begins at birth, and throughout your life it is undeniably linked to your birthplace. Some spend their early years living in the same house and never leave that neighborhood, city, or state. This sustained familiarity gives a person an acute sense of belonging to an environment—its culture and its landscape. In this situation, you come to know the smell of its seasons, the sounds of its traffic, the tastes of its foods, and the sights of its skyline.

Those Who Stay

If you remain in your birthplace past childhood, writing about it comes naturally. This place has contributed to who you are, so writing about it is just like describing an essential part of your personality. And since you have grown along with your environment, it's not too difficult to look back beyond your own experience and imagine your hometown at the time of your birth—or even before. There are reminders of your growth and the growth of your birthplace everywhere you look. You have photographs, keepsakes, and memorabilia to help you trace this evolution.

If you are still in contact with your birthplace, you may want to try to write a series of poems that re-create the stages of your life set against this landscape. How did you mature with your birthplace? Has the neighborhood grown in strength and stability since your birth, or has it settled into a steady decline?

You may also want to identify what brought your family to this town or city in the first place. Why have your relatives felt such a strong connection to the area throughout the past century? Who has this place allowed you to become? How has it disappointed or helped you? Answering these questions may generate ideas for multiple poems.

Those Who Move Away

While many find themselves deeply connected to their birthplaces, other individuals spend their lives traveling to distant places. If you are one of these wandering souls, returning to your birthplace can be emotional, awkward, or even scary. If there's nothing natural about your return, you will have to exert extra effort to revisit it and study it. In order to write about your birthplace you must investigate it thoroughly.

You may have very few concrete records of your time spent in your childhood home. The photographs, memorabilia, and heirlooms may be few, and the memories even fewer. In these situations, your poetic imagination along with your research will allow you to fill in the gaps. If you can't speak with your parents about your old home, try to imagine how they might respond to your questions. Envision the thoughts of your parents as they chose this place to begin your life as a family.

Perhaps the most important question to ask yourself is “Why did I leave this place?” Were you fleeing from a broken home? Were you bored with your surroundings? Did you travel far away in search of an education, a job, or a partner? By forcing yourself to uncover your feelings about the place you came from, you will find a wealth of poetic inspiration.

Chapter 13
Writing about Environment

T
here are countless different environments in the world from which to draw inspiration. Many writers choose to focus on nature; they might describe a favorite tree or personify a mountain. Some write about the pleasures of travel and the discoveries they make in distant lands. Still others document details of the cities in which they live or the rolling hills that fill the view from their window. And there is also the environment that exists in each person's mind—a place of wonder that one visits in daydreams and hopes to encounter in the future.

Nature as a Subject

In some ancient cultures, people personified the elements of their natural environment as gods and goddesses. At other times throughout history, writers have created literature revering nature, not necessarily as the work of deities, but as the purest part of life. Contrastingly, some have condemned nature for its harsh, wild ways.

In a famous nature poem, William Wordsworth's “The Daffodils,” the speaker imagines himself moving like a cloud and spying a group of daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance
.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils
.

There are many exercises that you can do to help yourself create nature poetry. Beginning with descriptions of features such as hills, streams, and seashores will get you in tune with the physical aspects of nature. Free-writing and journal entries devoted simply to descriptions focusing on your five senses will give you a store of images from which to draw. The best exercise you can do simply involves visiting that hill, stream, or seashore and enjoying the place you wish to write about. However, you should also pay attention to the feelings that such landscapes instill in you. Are you at peace? Do you feel sad? Be careful not to forget the three elements of change, discovery, and decision. An encounter with some aspect of nature can lead to one or more of these three events. In Wordsworth's poem, the speaker is clearly marking a change in his life, being recollected some time afterward. Your visit with nature could bring about something similar. Perhaps spending time at a lake will inspire you to relocate closer to a body of water.

Writing about Weather

Along with specific natural features, poets have also written about the weather. At one time, deities were thought to control these forces, too. Poets would thereby address their works to a deity, or personify the weather, just as Wordsworth personified the flowers and the ocean.

In modern poems, the weather may be the subject matter, or it may be a setting that strongly influences the work. Neide Messers poem “Hold On” works with weather to bring the speaker to the point of discovery:

A mid-November wind blusters up
and suddenly the city crackles
with the sound of leaves
above the rooftops.
They scudder down sidewalks,
quarrel in doorways—
all things thinner, more brittle
in these drought years
.

Suddenly I imagine people in flight
holding their hats, scarves
twirling and coats billowed out
like big umbrellas.
The wind buffets them against
fences and along ditch banks,
sends them dancing in the blue.
Thin and weightless, their faces
bear a startled look, eyes wide,
lips shaped like
O.

How fragile we become
traversing uncertain ground,
the weight of indelible yesterday
in every pocket, and I understand
what strength it takes
to hold ourselves down, to live
each day knowing one true emotion
could blow us away
.

The wind flings the car door wide
when I get out, and it takes
both my hands to close it.
I grab my keys and dash for the porch,
feel the wind's cold breath
creep under my coat
.

Reprinted with the permission of the author
.

The speaker makes her discovery in the third stanza—that we are “fragile” and must “hold ourselves down” against emotions that can batter us about as the wind batters her. To come up with your own weather poem, follow the exercises set out in this section for nature poetry. Start with descriptions, concentrate on the five senses, get in touch with your feelings, and see what changes, discoveries, or decisions you are led to.