The epigraph to Dorianne Laux’s book on craft for poetry is this:

“You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.”

— Robert Hass

Some days I find it wildly surprising that it’s been a million years since I wrote and / or taught poetry. If I were in some magical confluence, able to do both again, I would be recommending students read Finger Exercises for Poets.

From the introduction to the book:

“My instrument is the immensity of language.… There are eighty-eight keys on a piano, six hundred thousand words in the English language. The patterns, sequences, and permutations of both are endless. For me, language is another kind of music.… I practice poetry. This book invites you to practice along with me.”

I love that Laux understands deeply that the practice of poetry is also the “project of the self.” When I did teach, one of the exercises I always gave, which would surprise no one, would be to “look at a thing.” And this is also one of Laux’s practices for students. She shares the Russian word, “ostranenie” meaning “constantly attempting to discover new ways of looking at everyday things.” She says if we love an object enough, it “starts to open up and offer itself to our imagination.”

She shares a favourite poem of mine by Charles Simic. (You might remember how chuffed I was when Simic allowed me to use his poem about the librarian in my book Everything Affects Everyone).

Stone

by Charles Simic

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

I’ve read many/most of the poems in FEFP but they’re lovingly spoken about here, and offered up as inspiration alongside Laux’s own beautiful teachings and encouragements. She shares Tony Hoagland’s poem, “A Color of the Sky,” and the way a “little dogwood tree is losing its mind.” The excess of the blossoms “seems quietly obscene.” But:

“It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.”

Laux spends a chapter asking, “Why Poetry?” and this could be applied to any of the creative arts. She says: “Why poetry? To be bewildered. Fully bewildered in the center of the bewildering world. To exist in the swirl, to find the calm in the eye of the storm. Then, to make a kind of beauty of the chaos, then to throw it away, and make more.”

Blossomise by Simon Armitage is a beautiful and nifty volume — poems by Armitage illustrated by Angela Harding commissioned by the National Trust to highlight and celebrate the spring blossoms in the UK which have declined in number of late. Obviously, the consequences of fewer blossoming trees has an effect on the human population and on various species. I’m not sure that I was expecting much TBH from a commissioned sequence, but I am delighted by these poems.

We have “Planet Earth in party mode, / petals fizzing and frothing / like pink champagne.” Refreshing and suprising takes, include the CV of Blossom, and also the lovely music in a poem which asks, “How many summers / up ahead? // How many autumns / in his hand?”

Somewhat reassuring is that slim and beautiful books like this go on existing.

The last book for today is Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris. The title echoes Anne Lamott’s title, Bird by Bird (which is something I’ve been thinking about having recently made a library list that references that classic).

The epigraph to Blade by Blade, coincidentally is by Dorianne Laux, from Laux’s poem “What’s Broken?” It goes:

“What hasn’t

been rent, divided, split? Broken
the days into nights, the night sky

into stars, the stars in to patterns
I make up as I trace them

with a broken-off blade
of grass.”

I first came across the work of Danusha Laméris through her poem “Small Kindnesses” which you can read on her website. It’s stunning. But this book contains a lot of dog-earable poems. “Blue Note,” where she talks about her brother naming his plants after jazz musicians, a poem beginning, “Often, we love best what is hidden,” a poem titled, “The Heart is Not,” and one called “Starlight” about a visit to a flower farm where she says aloud, “Can we just stay here?” and then, “It hurts to love the world.”

A favourite of mine from this collection is titled, “Today the Pleasures.”

Today the Pleasures

by Danusha Laméris

Today the pleasures are too numerous to name.
Walking over the bridge and up the drive
to get the mail, then setting down the packages
to open by the front door, a fat swath of sun
falling against my arm as I open a box
of two slim volumes of poems, then a box
with blue ink refills for my favorite pen,
one that glides so nicely across the pages
of my grief. All this, I think all this, and also
the broccoli soup I made with bone broth
from last month’s turkey, blended to a creamy green.
Yes, the world is falling down, death taking
a stroll down every street. And yes, it’s getting hotter
by the hour. And still, today the wind
has quieted and the dogs next door announce
their gods, who, so far, keep lifting the sun
and letting down (just enough) rain.

{source}

Questions / exercises:

Ask yourself, Why Poetry? and write as many answers as you can before moving on to ask, Why Blossoms? Why Beauty? Why Clouds? etc

What pleasures are in your day ahead?

What can you create in half an hour each day?

February 7, 2025