working with what is given –

Two works that have certainly impacted my pen – Wen Fu (The Art of Writing) by Lu Chi and Making Your Own Days by Kenneth Koch. Both books serve as survival guides for writers. Lu Chi’s work is a manual for writing from the historical perspective and Koch’s book focuses on the inner workings of poetry – the how, when, and where.

Different approaches with a similar flavor that I strongly recommend …

from Kenneth Koch, Making Your Own Days

Poetry is often regarded as a mystery, and in some respects it is one. No one is quite sure where poetry comes from, no one is quite sure exactly what it is, and no one knows, really, how anyone is able to write it.

*

Paul Valéry said when he was thinking about the things that could be said in poetry and not otherwise: … poetry was a separate language or, more specifically, a “language within a language.”

*

The language of poetry doesn’t stay the same for poet after poet. Every time music creates (or contributes to) meaning, the way it does so becomes part of what other poets can do. And poets not only use what other poets have discovered but change it. It’s a language that doesn’t (can’t) hold still.

     ~

from Lu Chi, Wen Fu (trans. Sam Hamill)

The poet stands at the center of the universe,
     contemplating the enigma,

drawing sustenance
    from masterpieces of the past.

*

Eyes closed, we listen
    to inner music,
    lost in thought and question:

our spirits ride
    to the eight corners of the universe,
    mind soaring a thousand miles away;

only then may the inner voice
    grow clear

*

I worry that my ink well
    may run dry,

that right words
    cannot be found.

I want to respond to each
    moment’s inspiration.

Work with what is given

*

Thoughts rise from the hear on breezes
    and language finds its speaker.

Yesterday’s buds are this morning’s blossoms
    we draw with a brush on silk.

Every eye knows a pattern;
every ear hears distant music.

*

Sometimes a door slowly opens;
sometimes the door remains bolted.