A quick quote about Quickmuse, the 15-minute poem site, led me to an interesting column in Boston”s Sunday Globe. Ellen Steinbaum, a Globe correspondent, started out talking about how writers write, touched down on Quickmuse, and then settled in to talk about how a poet is inspired and writes. Steinbaum talks with Joyce Peseroff, a poet with four books of poetry and numerous publications to her credit, about how one writes a poem. It was interesting reading, because Peseroff”s experience distills what I”ve seen and heard from most “successful” poets: those whose works are published and/or widely read. In a nutshell, Peseroff – and others like her – follow a similar formula.

— Be open to everyday things. Some of the most poignant, lasting poetry has its roots in the mundane – the taste of an orange, the feeling of a knife slicing into a tomator, the soft float of a dandelion seed on a stray breeze. Says Peseroff in Steinbaum”s article:

`I try to keep alert for images, sounds, rhythms, something that feels like it has potential. It has to have some kind of emotional engagement for me, something that brings a lump to the throat.”

— Write about things that are “emotionally engaging”. If it brought a smile to your face, made you see red or sent a quiver of sheer awe through you, then you have something to write about. Work with emotion – because more than anything else, poetry is distilled emotion. It is that emotional engagement that comes through in your work, the hook that tugs at your reader and makes them feel what you felt.

— Mull it over. Some images just tug at you. You feel that there is a poem in them, or that they fit into a poem. It may be the perfect phrase that jumped to your lips. It may be the way the sun filters through a child”s bright curls or the smell of turned earth – or something far less pleasnt. But the poem just won”t come. Tuck it away and wait. It will, when it”s ready. Or, to give credit to the poet rather than to anthropomorphize the poem itself, when you”ve processed and are ready to write about it, you will.

— Write it down. Pen and paper, computer keyboard, tape recorder mic – it doesn”t matter. When you actually start to shape a poem, you become engaged with it. It takes on a concrete form that you can push around and manipulate, moving line breaks, erasing words, sculpting it into a rough or finished piece.

— Open yourself to criticism. Some poets have flourished in near isolation – we all know Emily Dickinson, after all. But there is a magic in engaging yourself with other poets and writers and sharing your work with them that transcends laboring away in your lonely garrett. Exposing yourself and your work to other voices and eyes is an inspiration in and of itself. Whether it be a writers” group that meets around a table in a coffee shop or your living room, or an email list of poets whose work you trust and admire, the input of others words both in their own poems and in response to yours is one of the most energizing, inspiring influences of which you can avail yourself.

Joyce Peseroff”s latest book, Eastern Mountain Time, was published in January 2006 by Carnegie-Mellon Press. The publisher says, “Peseroff speculates with a clear-headed, wry look at the world”s catalogues and almanacs of largesse lilies, Jerry Garcia, men in fog, animal joy as well as its sorrow. In startling, original poems full of leaps and digressions that reveal the mind in action, readers will encounter life through a person made raw by observation, a mind processing loss and mortality in a petal, a poet alert to how syntax and language can reconfigure the experience of grief.”