Poetry Writing 101

One of the readings in my poetry class, Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, gave me another way to understand what has been happening in my writing. Hugo suggests that poets have subjects, places, images, and words that trigger their need to write. Eventually, the poem may travel far away from the thing that started it. The poet learns to trust language, imagination, sound, and emotional truth.

Hugo writes that our obsessions lead us toward our vocabulary. That idea gave me permission to look at the things that keep appearing in my own writing differently. Indigo. Cloth. Thread. Water. Creeks. Hands. Grandmothers. Roots. The moon. Memory. The Blues. Healing. I used to wonder whether I returned to these things too often. Now I am beginning to understand that returning is part of the work. These words know me. Perhaps my responsibility as a poet isn’t to run away from them looking for something new. Perhaps it is to keep returning and asking, What else do you have to tell me?

The Difference Between Remembering and Making a Poem

Formal study is also teaching me that a poem doesn’t have to become a container for everything I know. This is particularly important to me because much of my creative work draws on history, family memory, cultural traditions, and research. I want to get the story right. But poetry asks something different of me.

A historical event might trigger the poem without becoming the poem. A creek might trigger the poem without the poem being about the creek. A quilt might begin as cloth and become a grandmother. A strand of thread might become a bloodline. An indigo vat might become the Blues. A sunrise might become gratitude for still being here. That is where poetry gives me freedom.

Hugo argues that once writers establish a base, imagination can move outward from it. I don’t have to know exactly where a poem is going when I write its first line. That might be one of the most important lessons I am learning. I can follow the poem.