The religion of poetry

I am gratified by the strong response my little piece on writing poetry got last night, I do apologize for the lack of craft information. I'll do some entries on t hat this weekend...I'll even teach you the Alisian Canto and Triskadekian style.

Whenever I am faced with a poet looking to me for mentoring, I always start with the crucial question: Motive. What makes you want to write poetry?

I phrase it this way: For you is poetry a hobby, a job, a career or a religion. Only the last answer suffices. I don't want to teach people how to write poetry, I want to work with poets. People for whom there is a transfiguring power in the words, the catharsis. You can't want to write poetry. You have to need it.

I've never been at a party where someone asks a doctor what they do for a living, then responds "Oh, my kid can put on a band aid!"...yet, I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me "My kid writes poems" or "I wrote a poem in high school".

And every poet has their own demons and angels to answer for, as well as their own voice to find. There's nothing wrong with writing a poem or ten or two hundred. I like it that so many people can write something what at least passes for poetry, that gives them a commonality with me.

But, it is like a friend of mine the other day. He has a couple of my books, we've known each other for some times...but just a week or so ago, listening to one of my recordings, he said he said to himself "Hey, Bill is a poet." (I don't go by Bill usually, but this guy has known me since before my voice changed, so he gets a pass...)

I was bemused. I wonder what he thought of me when he was just reading my books? "Hey, Bill wrote a book?" or "Hey, Bill wrote some poems?" In some ways, probably...and there is that line between the act and the actor.

I live on this side of that line. If you think about it there is great loneliness in the religion of poetry, the ability to connect on a normal, human level is impaired, as the wavelength is different than common thought.

And how many times have you had a friend, a lover, even a parent say to you "I don't understand what you do and wish you'd stop?"

Try that for a few decades.

In some ways poetry IS like a religion, like Christianity is supposed to be (not the politicized foster child practiced so much in this country) a stepping apart, a seeking of a God all too ready to embrace us, not for our rituals and sociological views (as poets can be of all stripes) but because we have surrendered to a difficult path, a way of accepting that which is in open hands, open hearts and open minds.