On September 12, 2006, the much-anticipated literary anthology Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, will be published by Random House. Drawn from the acclaimed National Endowment for the Arts program and edited by the best-selling author Andrew Carroll, the anthology includes nearly 100 letters, poems, stories, and memoirs of service and sacrifice on the front lines and at home.

Those are the words that greet you on the National Initiatives page of the National Endowment for the Arts. The project, Operation Homecoming, has been two years in the making. Launched in 2004, the project offered workshops in writing at 25 different domestic and overseas military installations, and sent out a call for submissions to troops who have served in any branch of the service since 9/11. That call drew over 10,000 submissions for inclusion in an anthology. All of those submissions will be permanently archived by the federal government.

The workshops were conducted by writers and poets who included Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, and Marilyn Nelson. They encouraged servicemen and their families to open up and write honestly and creatively about their experiences during wartime – and the result, according to those who have seen advance copies of the book, is nothing less than stunning.

The anthology is edited by Andrew Carroll, the editor of War Letters, a collection of letters written by soldiers during various engagements. Beginning September 16, Carroll will be doing a 30 city tour to promote the book Operation Homecoming. For tour dates, visit Book tour dates.

A conversation this afternoon at the Shakti Women”s Writing Pact reminded me for the second time this week of one of my favorite collections of poetry ever – Hailstones and Halibut Bones, a book of poems by Mary LeDuc O”Neill. Originally published in 1961, Hailstones and Halibut Bones quickly became a classic of children”s poetry, inspiring teachers across the country and across time to create lesson plans based on her accessible, delightful poems about color. The title, for the record, is a direct reference to the color white, which is both hailstones and halibut bones, as well as bridal veils. O”Neill”s book includes thirteen poems about color, written in simple, evocative language that makes them fun and easy for children to recite and remember. Forty years after the book”s publication, a teacher writing on Amazon.com noted,

“As a teacher I have struggled to find new and innovative ways to instill a love of poetry in my students. This wonderful book of poems was such a big hit with my students that I bought extra copies for our classroom library. Mary O”Neill”s style of writing introduced the concept of poetry without overwhelming the children. They were eager to write and share their own color poems after listening to this collection of easy to follow poems. They also couldn”t wait to take the book home to share with their families. This is a great choice to use as a read aloud or as part of a poetry unit for grades 3 and 4.”

It”s a delightful book to share with your child, your nieces and nephews, a gift for a family with children or as a special gift to leave behind with a favorite teacher. The poems never lose their magic and power to bring color AND poetry to life.

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.”

I am a lover of poetic forms. Language is music and magic and poetry. Fitting language and meaning together into a set form is like working a puzzle, creating a work of art from scattered thoughts. This is not to say that free verse has no place in poetry – it is very much in favor in most academic circles at the moment – and with good reason. But poetry written in form, using meter or rhyme or end-words or slant rhyme – using whatever poetic devices there may be available – is a poetic discipline well worth pursuing, despite the beliefs of many that clinging to a form results in stilted, awkward poetry.

Part of this belief, I think, is in the fact that so much of the “formed” poetry that we read is in the form of rhyming couplets or abab four-line stanzas – which is a true shame when there is such a wide variety of poetic forms from which to draw. Most people – even those who don”t write, or even read, poetry often can name a few – sonnet, haiku, limerick, ballad. As popular as those four are, they barely scratch the surface of the myriad forms that poetry has taken over the ages – villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, tercet, cinquain, tanka – even the names have a poetic sound to them.

If you have never considered writing in form, have never studied poetic forms, then I would highly recommend adding a few interesting books on the forms of poetry to your bookshelf. My own personal favorites include:

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (Lewis Turco)

Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (Paul Fusell)

Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms (Babette Deutsch)

Rhyme”s Reason: A Guide to English Verse (John Hollander)

Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Form (Dacey & Jauss)

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (Mark Strand)

No one of these is, in and of itself, a complete guide to all the myriad forms of poetry – but any one is an excellent introduction to the notion of writing in meter and rhyme, and taken together, they will give any poet a comprehensive grounding in the art. And honestly? Flipping through to a random form and fitting a poem to it is just plain fun!

Poetry is sound is poetry. The difference between prose and poetry, according to many of history”s foremost poets, is the way that poetry plays with the ear, the stressed and unstressed accents, the elides and slides from one sound to the next, the staccato rhythm that you can achieve with a series of t-t-t words – it”s magic to the ear. That”s what you”ll find in Robert Pinsky”s The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide. Pinsky, a former US Poet Laureate, knows his theory well. His poetry is among the most open and accessible and memorable of all contemporary American poetry. Take, for instance, the first lines of his poem The Refinery

Thirsty and languorous after their long black sleep
The old gods crooned and shuffled and shook their heads.

Say it aloud and feel how the rhythm moves the line along, how the l sounds in the first line succumb to the sh sounds in the second – this is mastery of sound. So I feel justified in stating plainly that there are few others writing today more qualified to write on how to use the magic of sound in your poetry. The book is not a comprehensive or exhaustive list of exercises. It isn”t replete with diagrammed lines showing how the stresses of the lines rise and fall in dactyls and anapests. Instead, Pinsky moves to the heart of things, covering rhythm, stresses, accents, the differences between long and short sounds and how pitch, length and volume all contribute to accenting a syllable or leaving it unstressed.

While this may all sound like a book for advanced poets, it is not. If anything, beginners with little notion of anapests and iambs will benefit even more from learning by sound rather than by rote. This is easily one of the most valuable books I have ever had the joy of reading, explaining in clear terms how sound informs and elevates poetry.