Where Do Poems Come From?

A few years ago, when my partner’s family was visiting us in Madison, Wisconsin, I helped her young niece Maddie memorize an Emily Dickinson poem. Dickinson poems are so fun and easy to memorize. I credit my practice to my beloved teacher Lynda Barry, who had us do this during my last semester of grad school.

^{A page from Lynda Barry's fantastic book Syllabus, which records the semester-long workshop I was blessed to take with her at University of Wisconsin, called "The Unthinkable Mind."}

A poem memorized is something no one else can take from you. It’s a way of taking the rhythms into your body, a kind of close- verrry close- reading.

I confess I slightly abridged the lines when teaching it to the young human, but here’s the stanza in full:

Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair!

Some Vision of the World Cashmere –

I confidently see!

Or else a Peacock's purple Train

Feather by feather – on the plain

Fritters itself away!

The part we memorized together went like this: “Some Rainbow – coming from the Fair! / Or else a Peacock's purple Train / Feather by feather…” You can see I trimmed a few lines, with apologies to Emily. The poem is about the arrival of spring, the wonder and transformation of everything in bloom.

Fast forward a few years. I need to set the scene here. I’d hardly left the house in over a year throughout the pandemic. I was exhausted, beyond burned out. It was the end of the spring trimester of a long year of teaching online for the college, and I love teaching, I mean I'm a freak for it, but morale was seriously low.

So, my partner was out of town visiting her family, and it was all I could do each day to eat some food, get some sleep (not enough), make sure the broody hen drank water once a day, and keep one rabbit from eating the other rabbit’s tumor until we could get in for a tail amputation. Yeah, I know. So gross. Point being, I felt like a zombie. I'm describing all of this for a reason, I promise.

^{Sylvia the broody hen, having been moved to the roost. She looks peeved and would rather stay in the nesting box around the clock.}

So that was my situation when I got this voice memo from my partner on my phone, and it went something like this: “Hi babe, I’m hanging out with Maddie and we have a question for you. She wants to know, where does a poem come from? Can you call us back and let us know?”

Kids and their amazing questions, right?

Now, I’m a guy who’s dedicated my life to poetry. Clearly. I’ve taught workshops with people of all ages. Like, I love talking about poetry. But that day, that question stumped me and freaked me out. Because honestly, I felt worlds away from wherever it is that poems come from.

You know the drill. The logistics of life can take over, and everything’s a grind to just get through the day in one piece. I know you understand. So many of us do.

But poems sneak in, anyway. They’re so good at that.

It’s exactly this experience of being burned out or simply uninspired, exhausted, making it through another day, that I believe makes poetry such a gift. I can be crouched over a grumpy rabbit, trying to syringe feed him pain meds while my espresso burns on the stove, and right in that moment, into my head pops a Rumi poem I know by heart, again thanks to my teacher Lynda Barry: “You’re sitting here with us, but you’re also out walking in a field at dawn…”

To be clear, I believe strongly that there are many ways to bring meaning, dignity, and fun into your life. Poetry just happens to be the way I know best. And now, weeks later, I’m ready to answer Maddie’s fantastic question. Maybe you wonder it too.

Where do poems come from?

"I'm only half joking when I say a stork brings the poems. They are little creatures I have to train and send out into the world."

Terrance Hayes (Oprah)

Don’t they come from a purple lightning bolt, or delivered on a platter from a muse? Not really. Well, sometimes it feels that way! More on that later. To begin, poems can come from anywhere and everywhere. I’ll try to narrow it down a bit, but it’s still important to start there.

You know how sometimes you spontaneously break into song? Or something happens and you just have to tell a friend about it? Poems can come from those places— to channel an outpouring of emotional expression into music and language. Or to tell a story.

Poems can also come from...

1. Dreams
2. Nightmares
3. That word or phrase you can’t get out of your head
4. Family stories passed down
5. Other works of art
6. Those questions that keep you up at night
7. A desire to transmit information
8. To tell a story
9. To express emotions
10. Ordinary, everyday experience
11. Memories, real or imagined
12. The landscape where you grew up
13. The feeling of longing for or missing a person, place, or thing
14. Tiny details you observe and what it makes you think about
15. Wishes
16. An interest in language and what it can do
17. A stirring in your soul
18. A change in the weather
19. Objects
20. Big feelings like grief

It’s different for everyone. On that note...

Poems come from people

As far as I know, the art we call poetry is something humans do. I’d love to be wrong, but I feel comfortable going out on this limb at time of publication.

No matter its source or spark, a poem becomes a poem because a person brings it into being. Even if the inspiration is otherworldly, helped along by spirits or nonhuman animals, poems come from people.

Apparently, there have been experiments in robot-generated sonnets, but it seems important to point out that humans built those robots, you know? So those poems are still coming from people. People have long worked with technology to write, whether the technology is scrolls, typewriters, or pens. Or robots.

A person starts writing a poem, and each line of the poem comes from the line before it.

A person writes a poem, and often moves that initial draft through a process of revision, so a poem emerges from earlier drafts of itself. Drafts that a person stuck with, and took the time to work through.

Poems come from people. We even have a word for this: poet, a person who writes poems.

One of the fundamental beliefs here at Spellworks is that anyone can write a poem. From small children to very old people, no matter their wage job. If you write poems, you’re a poet. That’s it. You don’t need to wear a beret, or be miserable, or smoke cigarettes, or live in New York City. But you can do all those things. You can also live anywhere you want and if you write poems, you’re a poet, if you want to be. Poems come from all kinds of people. Thank goodness.

Poems come from practice

Okay, I promised I’d come back to that part about lightning bolts, whether poems get served up on a platter.

Here’s the thing: occasionally, it really can feel that way. You notice a source or spark, crack open your notebook, and stay behind the poem, transcribing it exactly as it takes shape.

^{Yours truly always has a notebook nearby, but I wonder how much better my poems would be if I had a purple pom pom pen?}

I would say it feels this way maybe 1 out of every 100 times. Please note, that’s a made-up statistic, because I am a poet and not a statistician! Hopefully, though, the essence comes across.

Mostly it doesn’t feel that way. If you wait for a poem to arrive like a lightning bolt, to be absolutely struck by the clarity of a poem delivered fully formed, you’ll be waiting a long time. I know because I’ve tried it that way before, and because I’ve worked with so many people who thought that was the only way.

And because poems so rarely ever arrive that way, it’s easy to believe you’re not actually a poet if you have to work at all for the poem to come. Friends, there’s another way!

A poem is a made thing. Sure, it’s helped along by mysterious forces beyond your control. Definitely. We believe in magic around here. But you meet magic halfway by practicing. You practice by experimenting with different sources and sparks. You invite the sources and sparks by being willing to write before you feel inspired. I'm a big advocate for keeping a notebook for this very reason. (That's why the very first Spellworks course I'm offering is Keeping a Notebook.)

Look, some poems don’t want to be first to the party. They’ll show up only when something’s already happening on the page. You practice by keeping your writing tools nearby. You write a little here and there. It’s not a big deal. When a poem comes, you’re ready for it because you’re already writing. 

Where poems come from, where poems go

Each poem can come from somewhere different. Sometimes this is a source of anxiety for poets; I can’t tell you how often I hear poets express nervousness that they may never write another poem. I know I’ve felt that way. But I’ve felt that way enough times by now to know it doesn’t mean much. Because poems can and do come from anywhere and everywhere.

And here’s something really key: a poem's source or spark is not always its subject- what it ends up being "about" in a discernible way. Sometimes it is, but the connection can also be less direct, more associative.

Let’s take an example. Going back to my list from above, maybe a change in the weather sparks a poem. It brings you to the page. That poetry feeling rides in on a breeze, or that midnight thunderstorm, or, yeah, a scary heat wave. Any of those things might send you to the page. Then it’s up to you to follow the poem.

^{Please enjoy my very scientific flowchart. Various sources of inspiration can blend with one another and lead to something surprising.}

Maybe the change in weather brings you to the page to tell a seemingly unrelated story, and the ambient vibes of the weather touch what kinds of words come to mind, setting a stormy mood of the poem, even if that thunderstorm is never mentioned.

Richard Hugo calls this “writing off the subject” (from his book The Triggering Town). It’s the idea that you have to be willing to let go of whatever brought you to the page, in order to show up for what happens on the page once you start writing. Linda Gregg puts it another way in her essay “The Art of Finding”:

“Your resonant sources will be different from mine and will differ from those around you. They may be your long family life, your political rage, your love and sexuality, your fears and secrets, your ethnic identity—anything. The point is not what they are but that they are yours. Whatever these sources are, you must hunt out them out and feed your poems with them, not necessarily as topics, subjects or themes, but as the vital force that fuels your poems.”

Fueling your next poem

So here’s a slightly different version of Maddie's question: where is your next poem coming from?

Friend, it could be coming from anywhere. I want you to start with one really simple thing. It’s just to keep a notebook on you, or some other way of writing things down. That’s it. Of course there are steps that come after that, but this is a pretty big one. It’s a pretty powerful way of meeting your next poem halfway. (PS, check out our upcoming course Keeping a Notebook- it starts February 6.)

I love to give this challenge because it seems so simple, but it makes a huge difference. Science has actually backed this up: the habit of writing things down can in fact give you more to write about. I’m referring to a study published in 2016 in the journal Consciousness and Cognition that found that dream recall is enhanced by keeping a logbook. I believe it’s the same for writing poems.

So here’s my advice for fueling your next poem. Dig up an empty notebook, or fold a piece of paper and keep it in your pocket, or open up your notes app and dedicate a note to this. Make it a practice to keep these tools on you wherever you are. And simply write things down.

^{Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson, looking pensive at her desk in front of a window in this film still from the hilarious rom-com Wild Nights With Emily (2018).}

Remember, we can’t afford to wait for only those easy poems that hit us like a purple lightning bolt. Some poems will only show up to the party once something’s already happening on the page. So you’re just going to write a bit here and there. It can feel like chicken scratch, totally nothing. And then a poem comes…

To Maddie in Olympia, Washington, I hope I’ve answered your question. Some rainbow… 

Okay, let’s recap…

• Hello, uninspired zombie. I’ve been there, too. I'll be there again. It happens.
  
• Poems can come from anywhere and everywhere. They don’t always feel like a poem at first, but anything can be a spark or source that brings you to the page.
• Poems come from people following that spark or source and writing something down.
• Poems come from practice. You’ve got to be willing to write before lightning strikes.
• To fuel your next poem, start by just keeping a notebook nearby. I hope you'll also check it our upcoming course, Keeping a Notebook.