Eco-poetry

The Ecopoetry Anthology presents not just poems about nature. Ecopoetry is a movement that seeks to change our culture from dominion over all living things to living in harmony with all beings. Humans are not separate from nature. We know that our increasing population and the increasing pressure to exploit natural resources is becoming a challenge for the planet and our own quality of life. Our needs for fuel, energy, manufacturing, and profit contribute to the degradation of the environment and scarcity of resources. Eco-poetry seeks to rebalance the world, to find a new language that can draw us back from the inevitable disasters caused by materialism, excessive consumption, and short-term vision.

This collection of poetry provides a wide range of work. I recommend it. I think it's a very good starting place.  I felt at times that it was almost too wide a range of poems. The definition of ecopoetry is broad and it accomodates a lot.  Ultimately, I think we need more eco-poetry.  So I'm saying, write it.  The poet Linda Hogan once told me that whatever you write about makes it stronger. Write about what is important to you. Write about things that need to be stronger.  And you might ask: how do you do that?

The Relationship with Rhyme

Tracks

Every poet must contemplate his or her relationship with rhyme.  Meter and rhyme are often identified as the elements that make a poem a poem.  I consider poetry to be a pattern language. The images, marks and appearance on the page are not random. The idea of pattern encompasses more than meter and rhyme.  Poems draw patterns with image, metaphor, myth, and music.  Within the term music, I want to recall the phrase "in time," in other words, being able to hold the beat or rhythm. Timing. Secondarily, poems can be both in time and out of time (referring to temporality) but their rhyme and meter are about timing.

Publishing Tips

The bookshelf

Do you want to see your book in the bookstore? It happens, but it takes a long time. Read on for some guidelines about seeing your work into print (or e-publication). 

Present a manuscript that looks professional: 

• Proofread carefully, then have a friend proofread
• One poem per page
• Use standard margins
• Use a standard, 12 point font. Avoid fancy font.
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments - add a page that acknowledges previous publications: what, where, when
• Paginate

A cover letter should include the title of the work that you are submitting and a brief biographical statement. If you are sending a manuscript to a competition contest, or if it's part of a grant application, read the submission guidelines carefully. Some contests request that your name does not appear on the manuscript.

What are the standard sizes of manuscripts?  

• A full poetry manuscript: 60-100 pages
• Chapbook length: about 30 pages
• Novella: 60 pages
• Novel length: about 300 pages

How Do You Assemble a Manuscript?

This is a challenge, and the answer lies within the poems. Let the form rise out of the content. Art and poetry is an emotional investigation of a subject. Most poets discover the nature of this investigation during the project, perhaps at the completion of the project.  An image or concept might arise. This is the key to the overall organization of the manuscript.  Maybe you wouldn't call it a concept, but you would call it a question or an inquiry.  

It's helpful to develop sequences of poems that are related thematically or by form.  It's sensible to use these sequences of closely related poems to build a manuscript.  

Most presses like to see individual poems published in magazines.  I know some publishers would like about fifty percent of the poems previously placed in literary magazines.  Send out your work regularly. Most online and print literary magazines now have an online submission manager (like Submittable or Submishmash), and the editors of the magazines usually request a small batch of poems to review, 3-5 poems usually. 

The online submission managers are easy to use. You are asked to fill out text boxes online that include your name, address, and other contact information. It will guide you through uploading a file that contains the poems you want to be considered (saved in .docx, .doc, .rtf).  After you press the "Submit" button, a page will open confirming your submission and you'll also receive a confirmation e-mail. 

Read the submission guidelines on the literary magazine's website, and look for additional information. Some magazines develop themes and want to consider theme-related work. Others will request a certain number of poems.  All would greatly appreciate it if you become familiar with the publication (by subscribing or buying a copy). Most presses take 2 months or more to reply, and your reply will come via email.  The better you know the market, the more successful will be your efforts to place poems.  

Alternatives to print publicatiion: zines, broadsides, posters, poetry videos, e-publication

DIY Publishing:  (It helps to know people)

• resource: Midwest Independent Publisher's Association
• http://www.mipa.org/
• be wary of "preditors" -- do your research / avoid paying for unnecessary services

Establish an Editorial Process

• Professional quality work: Hire proofreader(s)
• Cover: cover image/ (hire a professional for professional results)
• Text: Consider "standard practices" or consistent "styles" for title formats, margins use inDesign for best results

Turning the Manuscript into a Book 

There are many design decisions that must be made. You can hire somebody to do it for you (and it will be expensive). You can do it yourself if you are skilled.  These are things you will be thinking about:

• The cover -- have a concept for visual images, title placement, font size & style back cover -- blurbs, isbn bar code, price, publisher
• spine -- author, title, publisher
• ISBN numbers / http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/index.asp
• LCN numbers/ Library of Congress / http://www.loc.gov/publish/pcn/ Copyright / http://www.copyright.gov/
• Style Choices (be consistent with font for titles and text)
• Title Page: title/author/publisher/place of publication
• Publisher Information / ISBN & LCN / Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Poems (one poem per page, consistent margins, format, font style & size, titles)
• Information about the author
• Blurbs - ask other writers

Find a Printer and Distribution Network

• offset press / digital and print on demand / e-books
• read the National Writer's Union Print on Demand Report: http://nwu.org/sites/nwu.org/files/print_on_demand_report.pdf
• A popular website for DIY authors: https://www.createspace.com/

Plan to Do a Creative Marketing Campaign

Many writers are publishing their own books these days, and you will need to work hard to find your market and appeal to readers.

• build your network
• send advance copies to reviewers/ send to Publisher's Weekly 6-8 months in advance create a website
• use social media: facebook / twitter / social bookmarking
• plan a book launch / schedule readings / book signings
• do promotion and outreach / book fairs / book award competitions
• find creative marketing strategies/ niches and unique approaches 

Good News for Literary Fiction

"A striking new study found that reading literary fiction – as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction – leads people to perform better on tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence."

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov/?hp&_r=0

A Logic Model for Poetry?

Dream Big!  I want to foster the literature of Minnesota and the North, empower women, decrease the exploitation of the weak, create peace and make the world more beautiful.

Okay, I plan to make a living as a writer. In the Creative Community Leadership Institute, we have been discussing use of "The Logic Model." With it, individuals and organizations can develop projects or programs.  It is a way to strategize. Some people hate Logic Models, and other people find them useful.  As a poet, I was repelled by the concept--it's too linear! it's too insane! it kills creativity!--but now I've decided to try it.

Notice I'm not using it to build poems. For sure, it would not work.  But it might be useful as I build my career.  In the coming weeks, I will be modifying and developing this model.  I'm curious now.  Will it work?

Fringe Festival Comes to a Close

Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish at Intermedia Arts      photo by Pam Colby

The Minneapolis Fringe Festival has completed the 2013 event. Thank you so much for coming to our show!  Night Train / Red Dust presents stories of the Iron Range: women's stories, labor history, mining, and immigrant stories set in deeply resonant sound and image environment.  If you would like us to present this show in your venue, please contact me at sheila@sheilapacka.com

Night Train / Red Dust

About the project:

Night Train/ Red Dust began as a quest for my grandparents' stories. I grew up on the Vermilion Trail, also known as Highway 4, the road that runs through the Lake Superior National Forest, through the community of Island Lake, and to the Iron Range.  I learned this road was the original route to Lake Vermilion, and it was used since 1000 AD (by the Woodland Indian tribes whose burial mounds are found near Lake Esquagama). There is evidence of early mining among the Woodland Indians. In 1856, gold prospectors came to Lake Vermilion. The gold was there, but too difficult to extract from the quartz. Then iron ore was discovered. Around the small town of Biwabik (population 1500), the town where I went to elementary and high school, ten iron ore mines were working by the early 1900s and trains ran the length and breadth of the region.   

Bonfire of Roses

"Bonfire of Roses" is a phrase from Meridel LeSueur's essay in her book, Ripenings.  Meridel LeSueur had a powerful presence and reading voice that made me shiver the one time I heard her read her poems. I consider her my literary grandmother.

Check out this video-poetry that features three of my poems from Night Train Red Dust set into film by Kathy McTavish. She composed the music that was played by the Zeitgeist New Music Quartet in St. Paul.

bonfire of roses from Wildwood River on Vimeo.

To find out dates and times, visit the Fringe Festival web-page
at http://www.fringefestival.org/2013/show/?id=2418

Kathy McTavish and Sheila Packa
photo by Magic Box Photography

Opening the Eyes

Opening the eyes is one of the important benefits of art and poetry. A work is truly great if it can make us see differently.  One of my missions in Night Train Red Dust was to restore lost history of women. Any geographic area has layers of geology, people, and events. Do you know what happened in the place beneath your feet? Who walked on the same ground where you travel?

Women's stories are often forgotten. They are not considered "important" in the way the city builders and bridge builders and presidents, which is a terrible omission.  New biographies of women are changing the telling of history.  These new perspectives are essential.  Our geography has a spectrum of color. Aside from white immigrants, the First People, Native Americans, travelled on these rivers and pathways.  Highway 4 from Duluth to the Iron Range, once called the Rudy Perpich Memorial Highway, once called the Vermilion Trail began as an Indian path. It was used in 1850s for exploration.  In the 1860s, Civil War veterans arrived with the Gold Rush and they travelled on the Vermilion Trail to Lake Vermilion.  The gold wasn't accessible, but iron ore was discovered. Corporate interests paid the Anishinabe people in 'scrip' in exchange for the land. The people did not resist being relocated as the mining companies moved in to drill and excavate.  These stories are essential.

Night Train / Red Dust at the 2013 Fringe Festival in Minneapolis!

I excavate these words from a vein of iron
from stones broken
beneath old growth 

from the open pit – lit by dynamite

Sheila Packa will be at the Fringe Festival with her new work, Night Train / Red Dust, at Intermedia Arts Theater, 2822 Lyndale Ave, Minneapolis (with film and live music by Kathy McTavish):  

Friday, August 2, 8:30 pm 
Saturday, August 3, 1 pm
Tuesday, August 6, 10 pm
Thursday, August 8, 8:30 pm 
Sunday, August 11, 1:00 pm  

These performances start on time, and end within the hour.  

This project is made possible through a fiscal year 2012 Arts Fellowship grant and a Career Opportunity Grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council (www.aracouncil.org) which is funded in part with money from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008; an appropriation from the Minnesota State Legislature; The McKnight Foundation.

See a sample:

origin of red from Wildwood River on Vimeo.

Writing Workshop: Dancing with the Past

Breath-rending and Heart-taking

The Art of Poetry
Arte Poética by Jorge Luis Borges

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mP9KHXslb0&feature=youtu.be

(Borges reading in Spanish with English subtitles)

To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges

Ars poetica is the term for poetry about the art of poetry.

The Ethereal Gets a Haircut

Evening Prayer
by Arthur Rimbaud

I spend my life sitting - like an angel
in the hands of a barber - a deeply fluted beer mug
in my fist, belly and neck curved,
a Gambier pipe in my teeth, under the air
swelling with impalpable veils of smoke.

Like the warm excrements in an old dovecote,
a thousand dreams burn softly inside me,
and at times my sad heart is like sap-wood bled
on by the dark yellow gold of its sweats.

Then, when I have carefully swallowed my dreams,
I turn, having drunk thirty or forty tankards,
and gather myself together to relieve bitter need:
As sweetly as the Saviour of Hyssops
and of Cedar I piss towards dark skies,
very high and very far;
and receive the approval of the great heliotropes.

An evening prayer? Maybe our illusions are a form of prayers. The juxtaposition of drinking beer and pissing next to the title of Evening Prayer startles the reader, and breaks the illusion of prayer.

The narrator of Rimbaud's poem, which might be Rimbaud himself, seems boyishly adolescent. There's an edge here that I contemplate.  He's subversive.  Is he simply earthy or rude? I like the line: "an angel/ in the hands of a barber".  There is a sinuous form in all the image: the deeply fluted beer mug, the curved neck, the Gambier pipe (a clay pipe that has a figure for a bowl), the curlicues of smoke.  In this first line, the poet takes us from the abstract into the concrete. The ethereal gets a haircut.

I like this prayer because he makes us wake up. It's a prayer as reality check.  The pipe is an interesting object; imagine drawing on a stem with a clay head, and in the place where the brains would be, fire and smoke.

We're always intoxicating ourselves with something:  beer, tobacco, dreams. The dream of life is Rimbaud's topic. In the poem, “a thousand Dreams within me softly burn” like the odor of excrement in a dovecote.  Another poet might wax romantic or turn sentimental with a dovecote, but Rimbaud keeps it real, and grounded in the physical body.  It is an exact detail, real.   Notice that the droppings are steaming or smoking, and he writes that dreams are burning.  The same image occurs in the last stanza with urine.  Rimbaud creates a stink after stink.

Bob Dylan, Poet

See my flash fiction in Dandelion Review, "Handful of Rain." 
 https://thedandelionreviewdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/dandelion-issue-3.pdf

Bob Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, and every year, this small town on the Iron Range holds a festival called Dylan Days to advance the arts and celebrate Bob Dylan. Last Friday night, Zimmy's Restaurant hosted the singer/songwriter event.  Because I was invited to keynote the awards for the writing competition and to teach a creative writing workshop, I did some research on his lyrics he wrote to discuss his techniques and find inspiration.  

In 1991, “The Song Talk Interview,” Paul Zollo said: “There's an unmistakable elegance in Dylan's words, an almost biblical beauty that he has sustained in his songs throughout the years. He refers to it as a "gallantry" in the following, and pointed to it as the single thing that sets his songs apart from others. Though he's maybe more famous for the freedom and expansiveness of his lyrics, all of his songs possess this exquisite care and love for the language. As Shakespeare and Byron did in their times, Dylan has taken English, perhaps the world's plainest language, and instilled it with a timeless, mythic grace.”  

From this interview, I've excerpted Dylan's responses about song-writing that reflect good poetic technique:  

1.  As an artist, Dylan said it was his job to "sing out against darkness wherever he sees it -- to 'tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it' until his lungs burst."

2.  About his own songwriting, Dylan said,"for me, it’s always been more con-fessional than pro-fessional.” 

3.  “...write about what's true, what's been proven to you, write about dreams but not fantasies.”

4.  “Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.”

5.  “Well, to me, when you need [songs], they appear. Your life doesn't have to be in turmoil to write a song like that but you need to be outside of it. That's why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who's never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.”  

6.  “There's just something about my lyrics that just have a gallantry to them.”

As a poet, I prize his narratives. They are spare and full of exact detail.  Singing against darkness is clear when he wrote songs of protest, but the singing against darkness can also be seen songs like Mr Tambourine Man, Visions of Johanna and All Along the Watchtower.  He conveys a desire or a longing that makes the lyrics work so well as poems.  

As an artist, Dylan was "present" or "awake" in the moment.  He did not wander into abstractions or tell the listener what to think or how to feel.  He used figurative language (metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy) and carefully crafted the words' sound, rhythm, and meter.  He revised a lot, even after a song was recorded on an album.     

Here are the writing prompts I suggested for timed in-class exercises (about 8 minutes of flow writing with no erasing).  I invite you to try these exercises, and see what happens. Each one yielded some excellent first drafts at the workshop, and I hope those writers finish those poems. 

Prompts: 

Write about a person who you don't know but who caught your eye.  Describe this place and focus on a detail about that person.  Use vivid images. 

Write about a place:  This is a frequently used writing exercise that workshops often employ.  Richard Hugo, writer and author of The Triggering Town, said he always began writing about a town. When he did, it didn't take long before the real subject of the poem showed up. 

Choose an experience in your own life when you have felt lonely. Write about the time and the place using exact details.  You cannot use the word lonely in your writing, but you must convey the feeling the images, objects, or description.  

Write about an object well worn by your hands.  Take the persona of that object and write as if it could speak.  (This exercise provides good practice with staying in metaphor).  

After the free write exercises, I would mention the source:  Mr Tambourine Man, Visions of Johanna, etc.  

We talked about "voice."  Each writer has a unique voice.  Don't try to sound like Bob Dylan or anybody else!  Value your own combination of observations, obsessions, and phrasings. Your landscape, experience, and world view will be revealed in your voice. Strive to be authentic.  Be honest and true to your experience.  

The term "wordsmith" is archaic, but it carry the image of metal-working and blacksmiths.  Language is like ore; it must be mined.  It must be made into iron, and then it must be heated and shaped and welded and polished.   

Present your work out loud to others after you finish a poem. It will enable you to assess your final revision. There is no better way to "hear" the work. Even without direct feedback from listeners, you will be able to observe the sound, rhythm, and words as if from a stranger's eyes and ears.    

Walt Whitman, in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass wrote: 

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Like Bob Dylan and Walt Whitman, live your poems.  Write against darkness.  Speak your truth.  Bring all of your attention to the moment you are living, and then to the poem you are writing.   

________

Work Cited

Bollier, Thomas, Chris Kirk and Richard Kreitner. Slate Magazine "Bob Dylan Song Map." May 24, 2013.  Web. Retrieved 30 May 2013. 

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/map_of_the_week/2013/05/bob_dylan_map_every_place_mentioned_in_a_bob_dylan_song.html

Crosby, David. "10 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs." Rolling Stone Magazine. Web.  Retrieved 30 May 2013. 
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-10-greatest-bob-dylan-songs-20110511/mr-
tambourine-man-20110511

Dylan Days.  Sponsored by Dylan Days, a nonprofit organization to advancing the arts in Bob Dylan's hometown.  Web. Retrieved 30 May 2013.  http://www.dylandays.org/a/j/

Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing.  Copyright 1979.  W.W.Norton and Company.

Whitman, Walt. "Preface to Leaves of Grass."  1855.  Bartleby.com.  Web.  Retrieved 30 May 2013.  http://www.bartleby.com/109/15.html

Zollo, Paul. "The Song Talk Interview." Web. Retrieved 30 May 2013. 

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/1991zollo.htm

Where Is the Line of Energy?

Muriel Rukeyser said, "The work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy." In the article "Gesture Writing," Rachel Howard suggests that writers can learn from drawing techniques.  Poetry is even closer to visual art than other genres; the economy and compression of language, the image and metaphor make it so.

Life drawing requires the visual artist to look for the energy of the work using strong gesture and line before doing fine details. Howard says:

Realizing that writing is a lot like drawing gives us a deeper approach. Because really, before we put a word or a mark on the page, both writers and artists must first step back and see. And seeing is not simple...Ellen Collett said:

As fiction writers know, every story is told by a narrative voice, and voice reveals itself by what it sees. Voice is a synthesis of seeing and speaking, of sight and syntax. While syntax — the mechanics of diction — can be made to toe the line and conform to a particular “style,” seeing is trickier to control. Seeing is choice. It’s inherently personal.

To see in the way that Collett is describing, to see deeply enough to capture the vibrancy of life on the page, a writer must move her consciousness out of information organizing mode into an intuitive way of seeing subtle organic connections and capturing them in bold strokes.

When Howard used the technique of gesture drawing, "There was the whole. It made leaps. It had perspective. It had emphasis and connection. It had life."

Poetry has a lot of energy: opposing forces, resistances, enjambments, and tension between the lines. Drawing can lend its gesture, but there is also an element of sculpture in poetry.  An excellent poem has been described as a "perceptual object" or "tensile being."  Poetry is physical; by this I mean it must be in the body and engaged with all of the senses.  Christopher Allen said of sculpture: "The material must undergo transformation; and it must have its own distinct and even stubborn character, so that the transformation is a kind of metamorphosis."  The language, the image, the metaphor, the patterns are the materials in poetry; the line of energy initiates the transformation or metamorphosis in a poem, creating new meaning at each reading.

Where is the line of energy in a poem?  Throughout the poem, and then, if it's a good poem, into the reader, the place of its transformation.

 ________________________

To read "Gesture Writing" in the NYTimes:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/gesture-writing/?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Advice to Poets from Wislawa Szymborska

"How to (and How Not to) Write Poetry"
Real letters to real questions from poets:

Excerpt:

To T.W., Krakow: “In school no time is spent, alas, on the aesthetic analysis of literary works. Central themes are stressed along with their historical context. Such knowledge is of course crucial, but it will not suffice for anyone wishing to become a good, independent reader, let alone for someone with creative ambitions. Our young correspondents are often shocked that their poem about rebuilding postwar Warsaw or the tragedy of Vietnam might not be good. They’re convinced that honorable intentions preempt form. But if you want to become a decent cobbler, it’s not enough to enthuse over human feet. You have to know your leather, your tools, pick the right pattern, and so forth. . . . It holds true for artistic creation too.” 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178592

Why People Don't Like Poetry & What To Do About It

Poets have an obligation to consider why poetry is the least marketable of all genres. What do we do wrong?  In a poem, Rosario Castellanos wrote: 

Silence alone is wise.

But with my words, as with a hundred bees,

I am building a small hive.

Silence might very well be best, yet we are given the language and must use it for beauty's sake as well as practicality.  Poetry is a form that repels some people; perhaps they are afraid of being swarmed or stung.

Bad poetry gives poetry a bad name.  Bad poetry is pedantic.  It might be ostentatious, overwrought, or even unctuous.  It tells the reader what to feel.  It does not evoke an emotional response, and it can be too superficial or sentimental.  It lacks focus.  Metaphors are mixed. It relies on cliches. The mind wanders, the language is stilted or overly sing-song. The poet has arranged the lines in ways that are distracting and don't contribute to the meaning of the whole. Exposure to poetry like this is painful.

According to Mirriam Webster, solipsism is the philosophy that the self cannot know anything behind the self, and secondarily, "extreme egocentrisim." Solipsism might be one of job hazards for writers. Individual consciousness and experience offers a starting place for creative work, but how can we avoid boring others? Get off dead center. A friend of mine used to say that about people who despite the direction of dialogue always brought a conversation to their own struggles, accomplishments, wisdom. They are self congratulatory. It makes you want to run away, fast. How can you tell if you are solipsistic? Look for a glaze in the eyes of those around you, a certain lack of engagement, or withdrawal. At your desk, question the material and more importantly, yourself. What are your motives? What is your quest? Have you arrived at the true subject?  Have you developed your material enough to leap over the boundary of self? Can you find other patterns besides your own?

What is good poetry?  Of course, it's different for everybody, and it's difficult to articulate. I like what Emily Dickinson said, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." Good poetry is physical. It engages the senses. It opens the mind and senses. I also like what Dylan Thomas said, "Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toes twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing." In other words, poetry connects to emotion, and it plays with language patterns in a way that is physically satisfying. In her work, my artist friend Gladys Koski Holmes felt she had to "break something open." This definition, applied to good art or poetry, satisfies me because it suggests that "aha" experience. It achieves or alternately, descends to a different level. It engages the imagination.  Carl Sandburg said, "Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly."

Aside from that, poetry needs good readers. It needs those who have a quest. The language of poetry is concentrated; it needs those who want to breathe a richer mix of oxygen. It needs people who are engaged in the creative process, who like to be challenged intellectually and who are not intimidated by ambiguity. Poetry needs readers who are willing to be changed by what they read.  It needs people to use their minds and bodies to receive literature; in other words, those who like to dance to new music.

Work like a bee, if you are a poet, from bloom to bloom, drunk with nectar, and make honey. (Keep in mind that bees have flight patterns, and notice how methodical and organized is a hive). If you are reader, visit the hive and savor the complex flavors.  Here's more of the poem that I began with -- poetry is the best way to speak:

THE SPLENDOR OF BEING

by Rosario Castellanos

  

Silence alone is wise.

But with my words, as with a hundred bees,

I am building a small hive.

All day the hum

of happy work strews the air

with the gold dust of a far-off garden.

Within me a slow roar grows as in a tree

when a fruit ripens.

All that was earth -- darkness and weight --

all that was turbulence of wild sage, leaves rustling,

is becoming flavor and roundness.

Sweet imminence of the word!

Because a word is not a bird

that flies and escapes far away.

Because it's not a rooted tree.

A word is the taste

our tongue has of eternity;

that's why I speak.

...

(excerpt from the longer poem translated by Magda Bogin)

Stavans, Ilan, editor. The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry. c2011. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York.  (pp 446-447)