Monthly Archives: August 2025

6 posts

Word Up!

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Aspiring poets always think it’s all about the poetry. Read poetry. Write poetry. Study poetry. Buy poetic ability (via those expensive stores, M, F, and A). But, no. There’s more to it than that. There’s the simple stuff, often overlooked. Let’s start with words.

I can hear you now: “Words? What do you mean by words. I use words all the time! What do you think my poems are made of — broccoli stalks?”

Well, first of all, that would be pretty cool. And nutritious. But I mean word choice — or, as the French call it, le mot juste –— and word choice depends upon a solid store of words, one that has a loading dock out back where trucks marked Brains R Us can bring in more supplies each day.

School didn’t end with school, in other words. You need to boost your vocabulary, mostly so you can understand as many words as possible when you read poetry, but also so you can avoid using these words in your own poems.

Ha-ha. A little curveball for you. I say avoid using them because, like thesaurus-itis (that dreaded disease), strutting-your-vocabulary-itis can be life-threatening to poems. Occasionally you will use a new vocabulary word, but mostly you will take a pass on it, especially if it’s a fancy, Latin-based word.

Don’t get me wrong — the dead language will have its place in your poems now and then, but the lion’s share will be Anglo-Saxon based. Plus, you want the nuclear option to use any old (or new) word you know because that’s power, the kind hidden in your pencil or keyboard thanks to the cauliflower pulling the strings (we’re back you your brain via vegetables, you see).

So, how do you do it? One simple way to boost the number of words available to your poems is to look up any word you don’t know. Another is to sign up for Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day. I look forward to my morning word-in-the-inbox. Yes, it’s often familiar, but its roots, related words, and etymology are often not so familiar. What’s more, M-W gives you two examples of the words from the real (vs. the one in Washington D.C. right now) world.

How cool is that? Ask your air conditioner, then word-up

 

 

Joyfully Ambushed

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One theme touched on in Matthew Zapruder’s book Why Poetry is “associative movement,” a term he rather dislikes as being too “clinical sounding,” but uses anyway because its meaning is so vast that it’s hard to label and shelf as something else. What can it mean? Lots of things, but for my purposes, I’ll call it the feeling readers of poetry get when they are “joyfully ambushed.”

That term itself is associative. When I preach poetry in the classroom, I praise the value of “unexpected word pairings” — words we seldom (or, better yet, never) see together. Our first reaction, when we read them, is, “Wha–?” And our second reaction is, “But, you know what? I kind of get that, now that I think about it!”

The ambush is part one: the jolt, the surprise, the unexpected idea. The joy is part two: the caboose connection, as if the train of the poet’s thought has latched onto you at the last possible moment, and now you feel the pleasure of being pulled along by this new association.

On a larger scale, Zapruder goes beyond words and discusses how many poems “leap” from one thought to another, similar to the “monkey mind” practitioners of meditation warn us about. In this sense, poets are like hydroelectric plants on a river, harnessing the turbulent white water of their minds to create poetic energy.

A microcosm of the “leap” theory is seen in haiku. Never mind the syllable-counting so beloved by schoolchildren’s fingers, the essence of good haiku is line 3, which takes a tiny leap from lines 1 and 2–different, yet the same. A new trajectory, but in the spirit of the set-up. Zapruder uses a Basho as a for-instance:

 

The cicada.
Nothing in its song reveals
that tomorrow it must die.

 

And then a Sora:

 

The coastal wind
disorders above the sea
the seagulls’ wise drawings

 

Robert Bly even wrote a book called Leaping Poetry. Zapruder shares a quote from that book which discusses leaps from image to image:

In “Nothing but Death,” [Pablo] Neruda leaps from death to the whiteness of flour, then to notary publics, and he continues to make leap after leap. We often feel elation reading Neruda because he follows some arc of association which corresponds to the inner life of the objects; so that anyone sensitive to the inner life of objects can ride with him.

Most people think of daydreaming as the enemy, but in associative parlance it is above all an ally. You need only order these Dionysian delights with a dash of Apollonian “structured mayhem” to find “the inner life of objects,” as Bly puts it.

Metaphor itself provides such associative treats. A is like B? Readers delight in C-ing such novel connections. It’s as if they have been allowed to clamber upon the back of the poet so they can cross a river for the first time and get to the other side–a new place affording a new view and offering a new reckoning on life.

Zapruder’s book is rich with researched gems, quotes that reinforce his lines of thought. I particularly like this one by Roger Shattuck, taken from the introduction to his book The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire:

I spoke at the start of a criterion applicable to all art: that it should present both clarity and mystery. These terms and the evaluations they permit can now be elucidated. The clarity of a literary work of art lies in its reference to experiences already familiar and available to the reader, which allow him to orient himself within this territory called art. The mystery points toward experience not yet known, to an extension of the consciousness.

Ah, yes. The old “extension of the consciousness” bit. It’s not just our bodies that need exercise, it’s our brains, too, and there is no better fitness coach than a talented poet taking us on associative leaps we’ve never experienced before. Aerobic food for thought. Eating and breathing poetry. Me, I’ll walk knowing I might be “joyfully ambushed” by such clear mysteries (or mysterious clarities) any day of the week.

That’s why I read—and write—poetry.

Salad Days for Poetry: They’re Wilting

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As Shakespeare would say (and did in Act I, Scene 5, of his 1606 play, Antony & Cleopatra) alas for the “salad days” of poetry.

No, he didn’t mention the poetry part, just the salad days part, through the mouth of the beautiful Cleopatra reminiscing about her foolish, younger (read: greener) days.

Over time the foolish part has fallen off the salad, leaving the younger part, so the expression “salad days” (the green of youth, which we have a tendency to worship) now indicate only a good thing.

But alas, when it comes to poetry, the salad days are behind us — at least if you use The New York Times Magazine, a Sunday staple for many readers, as an indicator. During Trump’s first administration, poetry enjoyed an explosion of voices, many minority and under-represented ones previously unheard from. Each Sunday you could find a poem in the Times Magazine, too, curated by a rotating editor. The last was Anne Boyer, who resigned in November of 2023 to protest the war in Gaza.

Despite Trump’s second administration and its push against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI) on all fronts, minority voices and identity poetry have remained as strong as ever in Poetry World. Not so in the bigger landscape of journalism. Though the New York Times remains a bastion of truth against Trump & his sycophants’ frequent lies, they decided against continuing the poetry column after Boyer’s political resignation. Thus ended a creative stretch in a highly-visible market, one once edited by the likes of Terrance Hayes, Natasha Tretheway, Matthew Zapruder, and Rita Dove.

It appears that poetry is being pushed back toward the ivory tower of its undoing. No more will you see sweet little poems like this one about a couple in the Puerto Rican countryside, which once appeared in the Magazine‘s Sunday pages. It reads like a side of salad, I think, and was written by the very cooly-named poet Blas Falconer. I leave the dressing to you:

 

“A man and a woman touched”
by Blas Falconer

at night under stairs,
pinball machines ringing, and,
Sundays, he drove her to

the springs of Coamo, the chapel of
San Germán. Had she ever known
happiness? The road
littered with mangos seemed

to go on
forever. She thought,
The people can’t eat

them fast enough,
as if she were not
one of those people.

 

Ah, love and sadness. And sweet mangos. And the salad days of our youth. Foolishly, we thought the good times were here for good. In Poetry World — and in the dark countryside surrounding it, now run by corporations, greed, and corruption — I guess we should have known better.

“The Black Wastes of Moonless Waters”

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There’s probably no more welcome expression in the English language than “do-over,” as in, “I’d like a do-over, please.” Not surprising, considering that we get almost nothing right the first time… or the second… or the third. The numbers expand as the task grows more complicated, and what is more complicated than this thing called living a life?

With this question in mind, Philip Levine thought all the big thoughts in his poem, “Let Me Begin Again.” If it appeals to the lost Buddhist in you, no surprise there. I myself am lost more often than not. I keep sensing tiny prayer flags in my soul, flapping their frustration.

 

Let Me Begin Again
Philip Levine

Let me begin again as a speck

of dust caught in the night winds

sweeping out to sea. Let me begin

this time knowing the world is

salt water and dark clouds, the world

is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn

comes slowly and changes nothing. Let

me go back to land after a lifetime

of going nowhere. This time lodged

in the feathers of some scavenging gull

white above the black ship that docks

and broods upon the oily waters of

your harbor. This leaking freighter

has brought a hold full of hayforks

from Spain, great jeroboams of dark

Algerian wine, and quill pens that can’t

write English. The sailors have stumbled

off toward the bars of the bright houses.

The captain closes his log and falls asleep.

1/10 ’28. Tonight I shall enter my life

after being at sea for ages, quietly,

in a hospital named for an automobile.

The one child of millions of children

who has flown alone by the stars

above the black wastes of moonless waters

that stretched forever, who has turned

golden in the full sun of a new day.

A tiny wise child who this time will love

his life because it is like no other.

 

I like how his birthday on January 10th of ’28 brings the comment “Tonight I shall enter my life / after being at sea for ages.” It’s an apt description for the vast oceans of our pre-birth (and perhaps of our post-deaths, too, as only Levine could — or more likely couldn’t — tell us).

The kicker, though, comes at the end: “A tiny wise child who this time will love / his life because it is like no other.”

Food for thought, that. While we’re alive, the “this time” is in our very hands. Too many of us don’t realize that.

With Poetry, Small Observations Bring Big Results

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Sometimes, as a writer, an idea strikes you so much that you decide to honor it as a personal truism. You hold this truth to be self-evident; the job, then, is explaining how the sun rose on this dawning.

Today’s poem, by the late Jim Harrison, is a great example of one of these abstract truths made concrete. If you can build the idea to the poem’s last line as Harrison does, so much the better. And if the raison d’être is rooted in imagery (here the sounds and sights of trains powered by coal furnaces), better still.

What I like especially is the concept of something appearing to be eternal: the poet ages from boy to man (subject to both change and eventual demise), but the object of his poem seems to be eternal. For me, this idea often springs from animals and nature, but for Harrison, the old train works equally well.  Let’s see how.

All aboard!

 

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found…
Jim Harrison

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found
a large cinder on a long walk along abandoned
country railroad tracks, a remnant of steam
trains, the cinder similar to those our fathers
shoveled from coal furnaces in the early winter mornings
before stoking the fire. In your dark bedroom
you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump
when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.
Now the trains are all diesel and in Livingston at night
I hear them pass, Burlington & Northern, the horn
an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.
Some complain but I love this night music,
imagining that some of the railroad cars are from
my youth when I stood in a pasture and thrilled
to my favorite, “Route of the Phoebe Snow.”
To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.

 

I don’t know about you, but I love “In your dark bedroom / you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump / when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.” Even if you’re too young to have known these sounds, Harrison makes them real through his description. This talent is a must in the poet’s toolbox.

Then, the train’s horn: “an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.” And the lovely flourish at the end: “To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.” That says it all, no? And the readers know it, because each of us could replace “a cinder” with something—seemingly small—that makes us excited about life. Think about it.

Though nowhere near as accomplished, my poem “Here and Gone” was going for the same strategy as Harrison’s: the concept of eternity in the form of something from the past (in this case minnows, dragonflies, and small-mouth bass) looking the same while time works its cruelties on its observer. It’s from my second collection, Lost Sherpa of Happiness:

 

Here and Gone
Ken Craft

excluding a war zone
human death remains
the mad relative
hidden from sight
while nature
files and catalogues
its dead on the public
narrative of roads

why then
looking down on these shallows
at this same school of minnows
hanging in the same green-peg balance
as last month;

looking at
this same dragonfly
stutter-flying the water’s stippled surface
as last summer;

looking at
these small-mouth bass
swimming over the same soul shadows
against gold-gilled sand
as ten years ago;

am I reminded of you

and why would this moment
choose me to endure the eternity
inherent in minnows, dragonflies,
and soul shadows

 

What about you? What sounds, smells, sights, tastes, or touch sensations seem eternal and timeless in your world? What simple thing makes you excited about life?

 

Slaying the “Muse of Sluggishness”

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The early risers. It’s a club that just as soon not meet, because what’s best about early morning is solitude—a time when a writer can send his convocation to the Muses. While the house still sleeps, I mean. And only the clock’s ticks can be heard. Or the dog’s breathing. Or the heat radiator’s pings (winter) or the air conditioners hum (climate-changed summer).

Fitting music for writing, the early hours. One can’t help but believe that not only the household sleeps, but the world, for part of the magic of writing in the dark before dawn is the deliberate deception that you are the only one in the world awake. A childish delusion, then. Indoor light reflects your face in the dark window pane, and taking the dog outside reveals only a world with birds on the verge, raccoons on the move, and, weather depending, peepers singing (warm world) and owls whooing (cold, mysterious world).

We are the perfect audience, then, for Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s “The Early Hours,” a poem as much about writing as not writing (or, how writing is often hidden in the act of not yet writing). Paradoxical? Here’s the poem:

“The Early Hours”

Adam Zagajewski

The early hours of morning: you still aren’t writing

(rather, you aren’t even trying), you just read lazily.

Everything is idle, quiet, full, as if

it were a gift from the muse of sluggishness,

just as earlier, in childhood, on vacation, when a colored

map was slowly scrutinized before a trip, a map

promising so much, deep ponds in the forest

like glittering butterfly eyes, mountain meadows drowning in

           sharp grass;

or the moment before sleep, when no dreams have appeared,

but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world,

their march, their pilgrimage, their vigil at the sickbed

(grown sick of wakefulness), and the quickening among medieval

         figures

compressed in endless stasis over the cathedral;

the early hours of morning, silence

                                                               —you still aren’t writing,

you still understand so much.

                                                 Joy is close.

 

A muse of sluggishness? I missed him (and am convinced it’s a “him”) in Greek mythology studies but understand his presence, once announced. Then, the two metaphors—one about a love of maps formed in childhood, the other about that odd moment before sleep, the one where “no dreams have appeared,/but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world.”

Perhaps the biggest pay-off to the poem is how it refuses to acknowledge so-called “writer’s block.” Pre-writing, after all, requires NOT writing. Thinking. Dreaming. Creating and recreating the groundwork for poetry. Until, you can’t help but admit, “Joy is close.”

And that, for this poem’s particular trajectory, is the perfect closing.