The Poem Workshop

What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Find lines from different poems that you enjoy that relate to the same topic and arrange them to make a new poem. If you want to make it challenging try putting them into a closed form like a villanelle or sestina.

From the two words “what remains” write a poem. How do these words affect you? What do they mean? Do they refer to anyone? Did someone say them?

Read the first stanza of “Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” by Edna St. Vincent Millay and only the first stanza. Without reading the poem in its entirety, from only this stanza continue the poem with the idea of what that statement means to you. How is childhood the kingdom where nobody dies? Is it really that?

Take some time and reflect on something that happened while working. It can be anything, big, small, funny, or mundane. Then write a poem about it and end the poem with an idiom.

If you have the urge, take a seat in the midst of nature and memorize all you can about the moments you spend there. Experience every sense and then go somewhere quiet and write a poem about what you remember.

“…It is for the poet to chose whether or not rhyme is appropriate in each particular poem. But if you write traditional rhyming verse, you also have to follow a rhythmical pattern, the meter. The meter dictates not just the number of syllables in a line but also which of those syllables should be stressed.”

“There is a widely held but totally unfounded belief that poetry has to rhyme, or it’s not poetry. This enables the uninformed to dismiss much modern poetry as some kind of aberration. Yet rhyme has never been the defining characteristic of poetry.”