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.”

You remember Quickmuse, right? That”s the cool website where two well-known poets are handed a passage of literature and get a set amount of time to come up with a poem based on it. The coolest part of Quickmuse – according to some – is that you get to watch the poets in the process of composing their thoughts, and then their poems. And the program that Quickmuse uses (Poematic, with appropriate kudos to Fletcher (Fletch) Moore, who wrote the thing) records the keystrokes and plays them back on demand, so if you can”t be online to watch the agon while it”s happening, you can watch it in exact replay later on the site. The latest update on Quickmuse landed in my mailbox this morning, to wit:

This week, from the frigid and barren wastes of New England, we bring you two fine poets…

David Rivard: What can we say about David Rivard? He won the 1996 James Laughlin award for Wise Poison, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, a couple National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America. A lecturer at Tufts and the poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Rivard is also the first person to use the word “noctilucent” on QuickMuse. Read David”s poem here.

Adrian Blevins: Then there”s Adiran Blevins. Her book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, made Tony Hoagland yelp, “Poetry lovers, this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang. When you open this book, you should hear the ballistic explosion of a cork jumping out of a bottle, or the starter”s gun, which signals that the wild race has begun.” She”s a proud owner of a Rona Jaffe Writers” Foundation Award and an assistant professor at Colby College. Read her poem here.

Being the sort of good girl who follows instructions, I did as instructed and clicked the links to read the poems inspired by this bit of writing:

Advice from the Experts

By Bill Knott

I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter”s curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don”t, don”t jump.

I liked both poems – to an extent. I liked the Blevins poem a little more in some ways – it”s more immediate, more in the moment. She talks about jumping ”

like a
girl in a field, flat out,
unencumbered as rice”

about leaping in feet first without taking the time to look at what others would tell you and advise you. The poem may have a few rough edges, but it shows her professional polish – a pleasure to read.

Rivard”s poem takes just the opposite tack – he talks about the way that society advises us to take the bull by the horns and make that leap of faith, grab for the gusto and flow with the moment – and how much he doesn”t like it. His language is both more formal and less structured than Blevins:

I don”t know about you

but the chance to leap has never interested me

actually

he says, and then goes on to list a dizzying series of images and ends with… well, let”s just say, I give the poet points for managing to use two $10 words in one sentence – noctilucent and ranunculus. Don”t get me wrong – I love words, from the humblest of penny words to the most grandiose terms that ever graced the pages of a dictionary. I have, at times, been tempted to compose a poem with no meaning – just the sounds of those delicious, roll-off-your-tongue-and-melt-in-your-mouth words. But I like the poems I read to be “accessible” on a basic level. I want words that don”t send readers scrambling for the dictionary so they can understand the poem. I”d far rather have my readers picking through threads of images to relate them to each other than stubbing their toes against words that stop the images dead while you figure out the definition.

Perhaps it”s unfair to judge a poet harshly for a poem written under the constraints imposed by Quickmuse – but there it is. Part of me, reading Rivard”s poem, is sitting there wondering just how the thought process went when he decided to write “noctilucent” instead of “night-lit”. But those are the choices that make us poets, no?

Yes, it is – Walt Whitman was born on this day in 1819. Whitman is widely considered to be one of the most influential American poets of all time. Other poets, from Emerson to Ginsberg, reference his work and claim his influence. Whitman”s most famous works were Leaves of Grass (in several editions over his lifetime) and Drum Taps (eventually incorporated into Leaves of Grass). Whitman”s poetry shattered existing conventions of poetry, taking on the Victorian sensibilities with poems about prostitutes and slaves, prisoners, sexuality and his love for men. His “songs” were both celebrations of human spirit and damnation of tyranny. Whitman once said that it was the duty of the poet to cheer slaves and horrify despots – and he aimed his poetry to do exactly that.

Whitman absorbs and reflects the time around him. He is not an Ivory Tower poet writing in the halls of academe for an audience of academics. Rather, his poetry speaks to everyone. He took his inspiration from the streets around him, from the popular culture of the day. His poetry is about opera, about music, about the people around him and about his growing awareness of man as part of the world. His major work, Leaves of Grass, was published in as many as five different editions, each with more poems than the last, each showing a growth toward the poet he became.

Celebrate Whitman”s birthday by listening to Whitman”s poetry read by the likes of Jeffrey Wright, Joao de Souza and Paul Giametti in a show that aired on NYPR (New York Public Radio) on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Leaves of Grass.

May 25 is the birthday of one of the preeminent of all American poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1803, Emerson was a contemporary of Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom he associated closely. While his poetry is often seen as harsh and didactic, his prose has the cadence of poetry, and in this lifetime, he was a wildly popular speaker. Some of his most familiar quotes are taken from speeches and addresses delivered at various events.

While most think of Emerson as a philosopher, Emerson considered himself a poet. In a letter written in 1835, he wrote:

I am born a poet, of a low class without doubt, yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation.

Of poets in general, Emerson stated:

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. …

You can celebrate Emerson”s birthday by visiting the home of the Emerson Society, formed in 1989 to foster appreciation of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where you”ll find links to his collected writings, including all of Emerson”s published poetry. Enjoy.

Though his critical reputation has risen and fallen, especially in academia,during the years since his death, Emerson continues to be a national icon as a representative American voice. Called the Sage of Concord and the “wisest American” by admirers, he inspired Thoreau, Alcott, Whitman, and many later writers with his challenge to be self-reliant and with his innovative style, and countless readers from other walks of life have turned to him for consolation, reassurance, and uplift. Hawthorne and Melville, however, in their fiction quarreled with his vision, and many critics have reviled what they consider his easy optimism and blindness to social and cosmic evil. To this day, readers are drawn to Emerson,whether to find inspiration or to quarrel, as a benchmark of personal and national character, and his reputation has never been higher. Emerson Society

On May 10, 1994, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the first ever Black president of South Africa. While he did not write it as such, this excerpt from Mandela”s Inaugural speech has been widely quoted in poetic form and is one of the most stirring pieces of oratory poetry ever written.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves,
who am I to be
brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God;
your playing small
doesn”t serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking s
o that other people won”t feel
insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest
the glory of God that is within us.
It”s not just in some of us;
it”s in everyone.

And as we let our light shine,
we unconsciously
give other people permission
to do the same. As we are liberated
from our own fear, our presence
automatically liberates others.

-Nelson Mandela, May 10, 1994