How to Write a Poem and the Gift of Where to Begin

How poems beget poetry, eleventy hundred meanings of a word and why English is a poor substitute for language

"We ourselves are a poem,(that) there is a poet behind the world, who not only speaks that world into being but speaks us into it, so that we might behold its glory and respond ourselves with poems spoken back to the maker."

—Malcolm Guite, The Word Within the Words, Fortress Press, 2022

When I am sketching out the bones of a poem, my notes often look like a wonky sunflower—a roundish center shape with a word in the middle and spokes (or flower petals) coming out like rays. When I'm making a web, those center words are generated from sticky notes and notebooks I’ve scribbled in through the years, pausing as I am wont to do when I land on a word I find pregnant with meaning, committing to paper in order to use it later.

This is something all writers do, yes?

I demonstrated this web brainstorming idea in a small workshop last year, helping people generate their own ideas from a single word. The model works well for my abstract brain, but maybe you’re more linear or sequential. Perhaps when you draft a poem it begins with a single sentence inspired during a walk with the dog or sitting on the porch in the quiet or while slicing onions. Moving ones body often lends itself to creativity, at lease clearing away plethora of input in our ping-ponging brains.

sunlight through trees, Golden Gardens Park, Seattle WA

Very often, though, poetry inspiration comes from other poems and poets.

Some years ago during a weeklong workshop, I heard poet Malcolm Guite discuss the genesis of one of his sonnets.

Malcolm was describing his poetic responses to the O Antiphons in his book, “Waiting on the Word,”¹ in particular, O Sapientia, where these lines appear,

O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me,
O Memory of time, reminding me,
My Ground of Being, always grounding me,
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,

Describing the genesis of the poem, he illuminated the different meanings of the word bound—

• past tense for binding up a wound

• bound as in Tigger

• bound as in ‘he’s bound to do it’

• bound as in bound for glory

• bound as in book binding and boundary and edges…well, the list is a long one.

He explained the thought process and origins behind the line in "O Sapientia” above, “My Maker’s bounding line, defining me.”

The word ‘bounding’ relates to the very early days of book binding, the details of which I don’t completely recall, but found fascinating nonetheless. Then a poetry rabbit trail took me to words like boundary and books and well… all the ways I have been bordered by the gift of reading during my life. ²

Then I wrote this:

My Life is Bound by Books

Edges of a land I walk inside where quiet

lives and words whisper. Borders contain

my steps, become a place of freedom as I

journey. My Maker’s bounding line holds

me as He hands me another tome from life’s

shelf labeled “Providence and Prayer.”

Divine Librarian, He points to gifts

of wonder, joy and peace, if only

for this brief space in time.

Covers close.

I shelve the volume, holding treasure

in this wide field grown with words,

bounding away into the world.

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Wordsmithing before poem-writing to investigate the genesis of a word can lead to a deep well of inspiration. But honestly, sometimes I think English is a poor substitute for language. Latin and Greek have much more depth of nuance and meaning that adds heft and flavor to what we want to communicate. Many, many of our English words come from Latin, which the Webster’s Dictionary points out frequently.³ Studying the morphemes (chunks of meaning) in a word’s roots can unwrap any number of possbilities as a launching pad for a poem.

Words like sound, cast, make, rule, temper, pitch, scale, foil… rich with facets of meaning, depending on which way you turn them.

Now It’s Your Turn

Try this: Using this short list below, choose a word as a launching pad for a poem then draw a circle (or rectangle) in the middle of a page with 6 - 8 spokes going out like sun rays. Next, add a word or phrase that comes to mind around that particular word in the middle.

Flesh out the words and phrases into sentences. Sit with your scribbles for awhile and come back to write your own poem. See what shape it takes, what it’s trying to say. What is God speaking to you or about your world through the words that have come to the surface? You never know how you might connect with God through making friends with poetry.

I’d love to see what you write—come back and share?

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Jumping Off Words—your poem launching pad

• Channel

• Sound

• Cast

• Anchor

• Recover

• Temper

• Pitch

• Scale

• Ruler

• Foil

• Tender

• Bound

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ICYMI

Last week I introduced the PoetScribe community, a virtual community of scribing and copying poems. If you’d like to participate and find out more, just read the post first and then click on the button to download your PoetScribe pages.

1. Here’s the link to Malcolm’s seven O Antiphon sonnets

2. How Books Saved Me—a post from my website

3. Ahhh, to be rich enough to afford the 20 volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. One can dream.