Secrets of good poetry

A “good” poem is meant to be read, not once but as many times as it takes to reach that “oh” moment inherent in each good poem.

Conversely, many poems by new poets and poets who never read poems by other poets have no secrets. One reading reveals all they have to offer, making them boring or long-winded or too personal to connect with readers outside the poet’s private circle.

An effective poem has comparatively few words but much to say. This might be an insight into a spiritual realm few readers enter on their own. Or it might be a call to observe the intricacies of nature and our unique relationships with one another in a particular time and place.

“Good” poems occur as we give ourselves to them, opening our eyes and ears and letting our thoughts touch whatever is around, whether in a physical, mental, or spiritual realm.

Somewhere, somehow a poet must capture wonder, causing readers to perk up, pay attention, and read the lines again.

And, yet, too few of us allow enough time to throw ourselves into poems, whether we’re reading or writing them, but when we do, we come away with an experience or insight or awareness previously unknown to us.

It’s a busy world we live in, and, whether we read or write, poetry slows us down. But, even if you do not buy and read the poetry books occasionally reviewed on this blog, just reading the reviews will give you a feel for good poetry.

Then, if you do leap into faith in poetry, whether your own or someone else’s, be prepared to feel foolish at first! For, most likely you will not “get” what you’re reading the first or second time you read. Or, if you write to discover, as I often do, you might not even get right away what you’re writing.

Nevertheless, go with it! Flow with it. Let the words fall where they may.

Later, you can revisit your own poems and revise, but for the initial writing or reading, abandon yourself to the poem.

A mystery is at work here – a creative force looking for voice.

Give yourself to it.

Give yourself to the poems you write and the poems you read, then be prepared to be amazed!

© 2014 Mary Harwell Sayler


Need help with your poems? Get a critique! Need more help? Read about poetry writing. Need to tune or attune your poetic senses? Read poetry by someone else, which, preferably, would be me.

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Review of Pity the Beautiful by Dana Gioia

In the preface of his seminal book, Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture, Dana Gioia set forth this standard: “While it is a critic’s task to analyze a literary work, the reader needs only to experience it.”

So true, but then when I received a review copy of Dana Gioia’s new book of poems, Pity the Beautiful, for the sole purpose of reviewing (aka “critiquing” aka “analyzing”), I felt at odds with those roles, first trying to assess what the poet had accomplished and how before giving myself up to the experience of reading, enjoying, absorbing, and “being there” in the poems.

As I read it or, perhaps, felt it, the opening poem “The Present” hints of the pity of putting aside the enjoyment of a gift given, whether by God or another Lover, who left an unopened gift beside “our bed.” Both possibilities of the Giver also seemed likely in light of the second poem, “The Angel with the Broken Wing,” who once “stood beside a gilded altar where/ The hopeless offered God their misery.”

The next poem “Prophecy” beautifies that source of misery by saying, “I found my Via Dolorosa in your love,” but whose love? God’s or another person’s and does it matter? Or, to be more precise, can we separate one love from another as God is love and source, moving like living water through us and our relationships?

To be clear though, this collection of poems does not focus on lost loves, but life itself. Again, in “Prophecy,” for example, “It’s not so much what’s spoken as what’s heard –/ and recognized, of course. The gift is listening/ and hearing what is meant only for you.” So there’s that gift again, opened and heard or not – a theme that winds down “The Road” where the narrator has “sometimes felt that he had missed his life/ By being far too busy looking for it.”

Conversely, some of us seek gifts that don’t really matter, such as experienced in “Shopping” where “I would buy happiness if I could find it,/ Spend all that I possessed or could borrow./ But what can I bring you from these sad emporia?/ Where in this splendid clutter/ Shall I discover the one true thing?”

The second of five sections takes a different route toward discovering that “one true thing” in “Prayer At Winter Solstice” where we see fresh views and insight in a plethora of blessings: “Blessed is the road that keeps us homeless./ Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way” and, later, “Blessed is the cold that teaches us to feel” and “Blessed is the pain that humbles us.”

While few of us seek such thorny gifts, the poet helps us to see these incidents and discomforts as gifts to be received gratefully for the deepening of our spiritual lives, which joy and sorrow widen in subsequent poems.

For example, the humor used in addressing “The Seven Deadly Sins” coaxes us to recall similar experiences where “The food’s so bad that even Gluttony/ can’t finish his meal.” With wit to remove the sting, we might be more likely to identify areas in our own lives in need of reconsidering or correcting as we accept and forgive our disappointments in ourselves.

Then, the opposite of humor arrives to increase our awareness of life’s gifts in the beautifully wrought, heartrending poem, “Special Treatments Ward,” which begins with the introduction: “So this is where the children come to die,/ hidden on the hospital’s highest floor.” These beautiful children “wear their bandages like uniforms,” while tired mothers spend the nights on cots until “they slip/ beside their children, as if they might mesh/ those small bruised bodies back into their flesh.”

Oh, isn’t that what God Our Heavenly Father/ Mother does for us in Christ Who bears our bruises?

Well, I could go on to tell you about the remaining sections of the book with its ghost story and lively rhymed and metered title poem where we “Pity the night/ the stars lose their shine” or “The Argument” where “After you put the phone down,/ The words don’t vanish all at once.” But I would have to address almost every poem in the book to give you a glimpse of the beauty that, without a hint of didacticism, encourage us to accept each gift and fully experience our own lives.


© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer


Pity the Beautiful, paperback




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Drawing Lines

A poet-peer once told me that many poets who ask “What do you think about my poems?” do not actually want feedback, but a pat on the back. This came as a surprise but also explained why poets often don't want to pay even a small fee for a professional opinion. Since I want my poetry to be the very best I can offer, however, I didn't really understand what my friend was saying.

Then, recently, the publisher of my upcoming book of children’s poems liked the preliminary drawings I sent and gave me the go-ahead to sketch illustrations in pen and ink, something I always meant to do but never did. After completing a few drawings, I showed one of a cute little animal to a family member, who said, “The tail should be longer.”

Suddenly I understood! I'd wanted to hear, “Wow!” or “Nice job,” but instead I got advice. Although I felt like saying “Bummer!” I said “Okay,” then quickly went back to my desk, later realizing I'd learned two very important points:

1. Even the most helpful suggestion can sting. Eventually, I saw that, yes, I did need to elongate that little tail, which, yes, made the artwork better, so I’m thankful for that now. However, I have no plans to be a professional artist, which makes me less inclined to receive remarks I might consider a criticism.

2. Our attitude toward feedback depends on where we draw the line in our work. For example, if I see myself as a person who likes to write poems I might react negatively to suggestions and just want some praise or a hug. If, however, I see myself as a poet – or a person on the way to becoming a poet, I’ll be more apt to receive and apply helpful suggestions.

Where do you draw the line?

© 2014, Mary Sayler

If you’re ready to get a professional opinion of your work and discover what you can do to omit flaws and strengthen strengths, consider a critique.

If you’re not yet ready to risk feedback on your own poems, consider studying poetry forms and techniques developed by countless other poets over the centuries. The examples in this e-book come from classical poetry in the public domain and also contemporary poems, with neither using the offensive themes or language that have discouraged many Christian poets from studying and developing a literary style.

Christian Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry, Kindle e-book version of the poetry home study course Mary wrote and used for years with poets and poetry students

Poetry Book Review: Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns

In Idiot Psalms, just published by Paraclete Press, Scott Cairn’s new book of poetry takes off with “High Plane,” an almost sonnet, almost blank verse poem whose musicality makes melodious revisions in the tentative descriptions of flight, life, and the divide between knowing and remaining open to the unknown. The poem and its placement before the beginning of the IV sections give us a preface and a hint of the poetic questionings yet to come.

In the first poem of the first section, for example, “Parable” asks “To what might this slow puzzle be compared?” as we try out metaphors that might clarify the mystery of “The Vast and Inexplicable” even though none “quite seems to satisfy.”

Gliding on to “Threnody,” I halted mid-flight to look up the title word, which means a lament that, in this instance, refers to a recurrent dream of a deceased parent, returning where “none of us/ dares speak, neither of his death nor/ of his sudden, startling return.” The inexplicable continues in “Irreducible is what I’m after,” where “words are more precise or less precise, but they/ are not exact…” so that “even as/ I speak I see my good intentions leaping clean/ beyond my reach….”

In “Idiot Psalm 1,” we encounter Isaak, just “shy/ of immolation,” who, having been let off the sacrificial hook, sees God as “Beloved if obliquely so.” Later, in “Idiot Psalm 4,” this son of Abraham admits, “If I had anything approaching,/ a new song, surely I would sing” – an admission most of us might well make from almost any unfavorable condition or position into which we’ve been tightly wedged for far too long. And yet, tension-relievers come as we “keep things metaphorical/ and in so doing hope to keep/ anxiety at bay….” or as we witness the wit drawn when “the sea will of occasion/ skip the boats like flat stones back to shore.”

Consistently, honest observation and insight speak through these poems such as “Two Trees,” where we might get beyond that initial quest for knowledge of good and evil and “move finally/ to the second tree, long/ abandoned, all but lost/ to tribal memory.” Although this tree of life “stands to quicken any who/ would care to eat of it,” the poem “Heavenly City” reminds us “The world remains a puzzle/ no matter how many weeks one stands/ apart from it, no matter how one tries/ to see its troubled surfaces, or hopes/ to dip beneath them for a glimpse of what it is/ that makes this all appear to tremble so.”

And yet, the difficulty of the search does not deter Scott Cairns from seeking to define the mystery, for example, in “Idiot Psalm 10” where glimpses of God occur metaphorically as the “Hidden Hand upholding” and the “Great Zookeeper, attending” and the “Most Secret Agent of our numberless/ occasions….”

As we near the end of the book, the poem “Draw Near” concludes with this admission: “I have no sense of what this means to you, so little/ sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse/ of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.” That “Whom” clarifies with the “Annunciation” where “we all become/ the kindled kindred of a king whose birth/ thereafter bears to all a bright nativity.”

In that light of Christ, referred to as the “Holy One,” the final poem in this highly recommended book asks that we might come to “the cup, before the coal/ is set upon our trembling tongues, before/ we blithely turn and walk again into our many other failures” and somehow “apprehend something of the fear/ with which we should attend this sacrifice,/ for which we shall not ever be found worthy,/ for which – I gather – we shall never be prepared.”

©2014 Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer


Idiot Psalms: New Poems, paperback

Review of An Invisible Rope, Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz

[Note: The following review of An Invisible Rope, Portraits of Czesław Milosz edited by Cynthia L. Haven was originally published in Summer 2012, VOL. 4 ISSUE 10 on Cerise Press.]


When a great poet such as Czeslaw Milosz stands high on the literary scene, a first impression may merely show a cardboard cutout of a celebrity recognized by bushy eyebrows above clear, blue eyes and the booming sound effects of hearty laughter. To reveal the full depth of the poet, however, this collection of essays provides perspectives from those who knew a multi-dimensional man and his multi-faceted contribution to poetry in general and to Polish literature in particular.

In the “Introduction,” Editor Cynthia L. Haven lists a virtual Who’s Who of poets who thrived as translators under Milosz’s tutelage: Robert Haas, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Lourie, for example, each of whom has contributed significantly to the literary community and the insightful essays in this book.

The story begins “Way Back in Wilno” where Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier met Milosz prior to WWII. During the time, she was a child and he a student of her father, Manfred Kridl, a professor of Polish literature in Wilno (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania) the site of a major Polish university.

Although Milosz graduated from Wilno University with a law degree, he did not practice law. In a letter written years later to his former instructor, he explained that his leftist opinions on Polish politics “did not mean that I am in the least attracted to some internationalism or cosmopolitanism. I am steeped in Polish literature and want to remain faithful to it.” Nevertheless, Valkenier reminded readers that Milosz’s “first success with a wide English-speaking audience” came through “his political book, The Captive Mind, an analysis of what attracted Polish intellectuals to communism.”

For readers interested in poetry rather than politics, the first few chapters may seem filled with political turmoil, propelling the poet out of his native land in search of himself and asylum.

While in Paris, Milosz translated various books of the Bible into Polish at a time, according to essayist Marek Skwarnicki, “when publishing the Bible in Poland had been forbidden by the official atheistic Communist government.” Skwarnicki, a reporter who often accompanied Pope John Paul II on his journeys, also reported in his “Half a Century with Milosz” the gist of a question Milosz asked in his last letter to the Pope. As Skwarnicki recalled, Milosz wanted to know “did the pope, who read everything that Milosz had written, feel that in any of his poems, Milosz had overstepped the boundaries of the Roman Catholic orthodoxy?” Skwarnicki went on to say, “This question moved me enormously, for it is well known that the chronicles of Milosz’s soul are very tumultuous.”

Troubled by religion and politics, Milosz found an easier calling in mentoring poets in and out of the classroom. In the essay, “My Apprenticeship with Milosz,” Reuel Wilson, son of writers Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy, wrote, “Milosz’s lack of prejudice and his omnivorous intellectual curiosity made him an ideal teacher. Having chosen to defect from his job as a diplomat representing his country’s Communist regime, he made a total break from Europe when he moved from France to California. Isolated from old friends and his reading public at home, he successfully reinvented himself as an American university professor” with full tenure at Berkeley where his initial “move to California entailed a substantial culture shock.”

As Wilson further recalled, “In the classroom, Milosz dressed rather informally. He often wore a plaid work shirt under a well-worn brown sport coat. His looks were striking: of medium height, he exuded physical energy and wiry resilience. I think he worked regularly in the garden beside his Tudor-style house on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, where he lived with his first wife, Janka, and their two sons.” With Milosz at home overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, Wilson noted, “He could have stepped out of the primeval Lithuanian forest that his ancestors might have inhabited. Like them, he had a belief in the spirit world and a sense of intersecting time.”

In the essay, “A Difficult, Inspirational Giant,” Peter Dale Scott similarly commented, “I remember my admiring impression of Milosz as a figure of religious enlightenment, nudging the world toward a third and more spiritual way between the godless communism of the Iron Curtain countries and the godless capitalism of the United States.”

Poetry at the time had its political and religious zeal too. In “Remembering Czeslaw Milosz,” double Pulitzer prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin talked about Milosz’s prose work, The Captive Mind, saying, “That book appeared at the height of the timely but noisy controversy over the differences, real and concocted, between ‘academic’ and ‘Beat’ poets. For me the New Criticism had once seemed a liberation from late Victorian literary and cultural assumptions, but I was trying to get past all that, and I had been drawn to the poetry of other languages and traditions. Milosz’s book had been a talisman and had made most of the literary bickering among the various ideological encampments, then most audible among the poetic doctrines in English, seem frivolous and silly.”

In “Nine Flashbacks,” Berkeley student Bogdana Carpenter, who later went on to write about the works of contemporary Polish poets, had this to say about her mentor’s method of teaching: “Milosz’s open and unconventional approach put Polish literature in a new and unexpected light, far from the stereotype image of my Polish professors. They were also a dialogue, in fact, a double dialogue: Milosz conversed not only with us sitting around the table but also with the authors whom we were reading, regardless whether they were our contemporaries or had lived five centuries earlier.”

Conversely, Henryk Grynberg reported in “Milosz the Refugee” an interview when the poet “thought that American poetry is mostly incomprehensible because its ‘interiorization and subjectivization has caused a break in contact between the poet and reader.’ He said that ‘Americans reading Polish poetry in translation are amazed by the amount of the objective, eternal world [depicted], outside of the human being as the subject, not just a psychological state of mind and purely subjective perceptions’.”

Poet Morton Marcus opened his essay “Uneasy Exile” with Milosz’s two-line poem “On the Death of a Poet,” published before his own death: “The gates of grammar closed behind him./ Search for him now in the groves and wild forests of the dictionary.”

In the essay “I Can’t Write a Memoir of Czeslaw Milosz,” Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski wrote about the differences in their eras, growing up in Poland: “He belonged to a chapter of the history of Polish literature that seemed to be, seen from the landscape of my youth, as remote as the Middle Ages…. He grew up in a small manor house in the Lithuanian countryside where woods, streams, and water snakes were as evident as streetcars and apartment houses in the modest, industrial city of my childhood. His Poland was totally different from mine: it had its wings spread to the East. When he was born in 1911, he was a subject of the Russian tsar.” And yet, “Beginning in 1951, the year of his defection, Milosz had become an outcast, a nonperson. If his name did appear somewhere in print, it was frequently accompanied by an official Byzantine formula: ‘an enemy of the People’s Republic of Poland’.”

In her essay, “He Also Knew How to Be Gracious,” poet and educator Anna Frajlich provided this insight: “In Poland, his erstwhile friends attacked him cruelly after he defected to the West; in the West, most Poles attacked him equally cruelly for his former associations.” Nevertheless, “With the passing of time, he forgave most if not all of them.” And Milosz continued to “show what is significant about the Polish contribution to universal values and culture. He did this by teaching, by translating his fellow writers – even when his former friends back in Poland denounced him – and by publishing Polish literature in the original and in translation and writing about it.”

Ironically, Milosz’ own poetry was banned in his homeland even later than 1980 when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. After that, he complained to Madeline Levine that “he was writing into a vacuum.” As the poet-professor-translator recalled in her essay, “I Promised to Speak My Mind,” Milosz told her, “Since he’d won the Nobel…almost no one would tell him that something he wrote wasn’t good enough,” so he made her promise she would always speak her mind.

Milosz certainly spoke his! Upon his first meeting with Harvard Professor and well-known poetry critic Helen Vendler, Milosz reportedly exclaimed “with acerbic disapproval, ‘Ah, the pope of poetry’.” In her essay, “Pretending to Be a Real Person,” Vendler admitted being “pained” when “merely doing my best to spread the word about contemporary poets whose writing, to my mind, deserved recognition.” And, “So I attended the rest of Milosz’s intensely felt lectures, regretting our distance from each other but exhilarated by the immersion in his mind.”

Somehow writer Judith Tannenbaum convinced Milosz to immerse himself in teaching poetry to maximum security inmates in San Quentin! In “Milosz at San Quentin,” Tannenbaum explained, “I introduced his work to my students soon after I began teaching at the prison. I told them that Milosz had been born to the Polish-speaking class in Lithuania in 1911 and that he had lived through much of the horror that the twentieth century had to offer. He lived through World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw; he first served, then broke with, Communist Poland; he spent most of his life in exile.” Using this dispossession of home to establish a connection with inmates, Tannenbaum “talked of how Milosz’s poems conveyed both the cruelty he had witnessed and the joy of being a creature with consciousness, alive on this planet, able to witness. I let my students know I loved the poems’ ability to express the limitations of being human, while always remaining on the side of the human.”

When both of his wives preceded him in death, the human side poured into the poem “Orpheus and Eurydice,” which began, “Only her love had warmed him, humanized him./ When he was with her, he thought differently about himself./ He could not fail her now, when she was dead.” After quoting those lines in the essay “On the Border of This World and the Beyond...,” author Joanna Zach commented that Milosz “made me feel that what people say to each other is always important, irrespective of the subject matter, because, by merely using words, they contribute either to clarity and order or to chaos.”

Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney added his insights to Milosz’s pursuit of clarity in the essay “In Gratitude for All the Gifts,” saying “His (Milosz’s) yearning for a more encompassing form of expression than is humanly available was a theme to which he returned again and again…. Yet he also exulted in the certainty that he was called as a poet ‘to glorify things just because they are,’ and he maintained that ‘the ideal life for a poet is to contemplate the word “is”.’”

Reflecting a similar thought in the essay “Missing Milosz,” Professor Natalie Gerber quoted a line from Milosz’s poem “Ars Poetica” in which he wrote, “how difficult it is to remain just one person.” To that thought of the changing form of is-ness, Gerber wrote, “and that challenges us not to take refuge in private fancies, as romantic poetry does, but to participate in and be answerable to history in one’s own voice.”

Finding a voice and one’s is-ness often begins the life of poetry-writing. In “Interviews with Robert Hass,” the Pulitzer prize-winning poet described a place where poets and angels tread. “You know, to write a book of poems is to wrestle with an angel, and the first part of the task is to figure out what angel you are wrestling.” Hass then added, “You know, you scratch in the sand for a while, writing out of your obsessions. And after a while, you figure out what it is you are doing or need to do.”

In this collection of well-chosen essays that can only be touched on here, Editor Cynthia L. Haven gives a rounded view of the work Czeslaw Milosz did and the ongoing need he felt for connections. Caught in political battles, spiritual struggles, cultural conflicts, language changes, the traumatic loss of two wives, and the physical estrangement of exile from his homeland until he could finally move back to Poland in 2000, Milosz experienced various degrees of isolation throughout his long life.

An Invisible Rope comes to us from Ohio University Press in 2011, the 100th anniversary of Czeslaw Milosz’s birth. Somewhat akin to an umbilical cord for poets and poetry, that rope invisibly connects poets of the past to poets today and onward toward a literary future. Milosz keenly felt this connection among peoples of all kinds, and during the years his work was banned in his own country, he held onto the hope of connecting with readers.

The rope uncoils, too, from “A Magic Mountain,” a poem by Milosz which Robert Hass quoted in the final chapter: “I fashioned an invisible rope/ And I climbed it and it held me.” As Hass explained, Milosz “had to invent the idea that there was still somebody to read his poems.”

For years, he had no way of knowing if anyone in Poland read his poetry or not. After reading this book, however, poets and poetry lovers will most likely want to read not only the Nobel-winning poetry of this noble poet but the works of Polish poets whose poems Milosz translated into English for the love of poetry and the belief in its ability to connect peoples everywhere.

©2014 – 2010, Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer


An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz by Cynthia L. Haven (Editor), paperback




Czeslaw Milosz: Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004, paperback




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The Life and Death of Poetry: poems by Kelly Cherry

When a review copy of The Life and Death of Poetry arrived from the publisher, Louisiana State University Press (LSU), I felt a bit disappointed at first not to have an autographed copy from Kelly Cherry -- a poet whose work I’ve long admired. I was relieved, though, not to have to worry about marring such a treasure when my pencil and I immediately began to carry on a conversation with the poems in the margins of each page.

Although I still do this with almost every Bible I own, I seldom scribble in poetry books now, jotting down thoughts or, in earlier days, marking rhyme schemes and deciphering patterns as I learned to tell a terza rima from a villanelle.

With Kelly Cherry’s poems, however, I perched on the edge of discovery as the book opened with the “to be” of a new genesis, a birth, a being in the poem “Which is a Verb,” where:

We fell out of eternity
into time, which is a verb.
Life was rushing past us,
and we began to rush too.
Everything was a blur.

From that chaos, “We lay down on the red grass/ and clung to the world as it whirled.”

Like Dante, we enter the poems as a wayfarer or pilgrim, but, instead of falling into The Inferno and working our way up and out, we find something of a reversal or, perhaps, a divergent path from the one where Dante began “midway in the journey of our life” and found himself in a dark wood. Conversely, “A Sunday in Scotland” begins as the “I” of the poem finds a path through the wood, “past fallen stone – a Roman wall in ruin” and into a sonnet, rather than the terza rima pattern Dante employed.

The life of poetry, however, consists of more than clothes, and so the poet casts aside traditional patterns for such poems as “Fields with Shrew,” where “…every living thing/ inscribes itself on land, sea, or air.” But then, in the next poem, the writing, the being of poetry begins, interestingly, with the realization of death.

In “Field Notes,” the bee is silent and bird flat on its back, so one cannot help but wonder if the shock of death, the knowledge of death, the awareness of death that separates us from the clueless creatures of the earth provided the first instance of poetry.

Despite the initial reminder of our own mortality, the poems practice new verbs of music (“melody/ heard only by the bees”), imagery (“blue jay in the snow” as a “text/that cannot be read”), repetition (“The Loveknot”), chant (“Night Vowels”), and a medley of the many aspects of language to be played with and explored.

The sounds and music of language and its silences continue in the sequence “Welsh Table Talk,” mid-way in the journey of our book reading. Accompanied by couplets, sonnets, free verse, and mad friars, the lines lay out the uniqueness of story as the topic each of us must consider in reading poems by other poets or in writing our own inimitable poetry.

Kelly Cherry not only writes hers with skill and levity, she shows us the life of poetry, culminating in the final section, “What the Poet Wishes to Say.” With wit, musicality, and wisdom, she tells her students, “A writer with nothing to write/ is in danger of falling into/ one or more of four/ pitfalls: drink, drugs,/ adultery, and translation.” She then concludes the long poem with a penetrating question each translator must surely consider before stating, “God help you now” – advice I take literally as a fifth route into prayer or, perhaps, as an antidote for the other four options.

The remaining poems of this highly recommended book continue to offer good counsel, insight, and interesting experiences for poets, poetry students, and poetry readers, reminding us in the end that “Poetry’s just poetry.” Nevertheless,

The body
Is as helpless as a reed,
But it has a heart
A poem can move to love.

©2014 Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer


The Life and Death of Poetry, paperback



The Life and Death of Poetry, Kindle e-book



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Living in the Poem

Poetry has been part of my life almost as long as breathing. So, for many years, I’ve been writing poems, buying hundreds of books of poems, reading poetry journals, studying poetry, reviewing books of poems by traditionally published poets, writing about poetry forms and techniques, and working with other poets and writers through consults or critiques.

Having had the privilege of being a freelance and assignment writer for most of my adult life, you might expect me to have several books of poems in print, especially since I’ve stockpiled more poems than Emily Dickinson! But here’s the problem that I, and perhaps other “self-taught poets” encounter – knowing where to start in selecting and arranging poems for a book.

With fiction, this proved to be no problem. I just started with a synopsis, a theme and purpose, and a list of story people and their main character traits.

With nonfiction, this also proved to be no problem. I just started with an outline of the main topic for each chapter, then listed the main points to make under each of those subjects.

With poetry, however, who knows where to begin?

And so I didn’t – for years. Then in 2012, I placed some poems with Written River and discovered the editor/ publisher, Jason Kirkey, also publishes books with an environmental theme. When I asked if he might be interested in a whole book of nature-based poems, he said he’d take a look. Later that year, he published my first full-length book of poetry, Living in the Nature Poem, which today (hallelujah!) was featured as the first Editor’s Choice of the new MicroReviews on Rattle .

How did I get there? After going around in circles with my poems (many of which had encouragingly been published in journals, anthologies, or e-zines) I did a word search in my Word file of poems for ones I’d categorized as “nature.” This showed me I had more than enough poems for a book of poems with a theme of nature, ranging from the nature of nature to the nature of God and almost every living thing in between.

If I had it to do over, I might cut a dozen or two poems to give me a good start on a second book with this theme. Besides, I’ve learned that some readers only want 60 to 80 poems in a book as this gives a satisfying "read" at one stretch with no left-overs.

Apparently Kelsay Books came to a similar conclusion because that’s their length preference, so when I asked the editor/ publisher if she would consider a book of “Bible people” poems, I put together a manuscript with those length requirements. This helped me to decide what to include and what to omit, while the biblical time frame helped me to arrange the poems in a logical sequence. So, Lord willing, before 2014 ends, Outside Eden will see print along with my easy-to-put-together book of children’s poems, Beach Songs & Wood Chimes, which I’m happy to say, Kelsay Books also accepted.

I still have poems awaiting the trial of assembling a new book, so if you have suggestions or thoughts on how to go about putting together a book of poems, please let us know in the Comments below. But if you’re also living in the poem, you might find, as I do, that selecting and arranging poems is like favoring certain aspects of life to highlight – perhaps those with reader appeal, rather than personal favorites - as we keep on writing through a life of poetry and mystery.

©2014, Mary Harwell Sayler

Living in the Nature Poem, paperback



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