Birth of a poetry blog

At some point, something clicked.

I honestly never thought I would write poetry. Ever. I am an arts journalist/editor, and I aspire to writing a book or two in the creative nonfiction genre. But poetry? Not likely.

I thought that, even though 10 years ago I worked as office manager at the esteemed Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Wash. I only worked there for about a year and a half before I moved on. During that time, my own writing stalled. I was, frankly, intimidated by the power and mystery of a really good poem. It made me realize, even though I was already a published writer, I had so much more to learn about my craft regardless of genre.

After I left Copper Canyon, I continued to read poetry on a sporadic basis. "Sporadic" is still a heck of a lot more than I had before moving to Port Townsend (hardly ever, even though I had worked in a university research library for the humanities) and much more than the average American who quits reading it after grade school.

During this time, the poetry kept coming to me. I didn't have to go look for it because Copper Canyon always sends me every book they publish, for review in the newspaper. Sometimes I read a few poems from them, but mostly I kept the books around in case the poet made an appearance and I needed to print a poem next to the press release or news article. Copper Canyon has given me carte blance permission to do so...how many arts editors can say that? And how many arts editors can say they live in a place where the readership values the occasional poem in the paper? I have always felt very lucky that way.

So poetry was just a spectator sport for me until I began taking a class called "Creative Exercises" from Anna Quinn at The Writers' Workshoppe in town. I didn't sign up for it. Anna offered it to me when there was a paid slot open because someone moved out of town and didn't want a refund.

One exercise we did had us make lists of words. In my "workshop journal" I wrote 11 lists of varying lengths. I don't know what the prompt was for each list now, but in the end we were to choose some of the words and write something. I ended up writing this:

A Poem's Bio

I am the circus
under the sky
performing twists
and pirouettes
the bright feathers
in my hair
loosen and fall
like hang gliders
in the Grand Canyon

Still, I did not think I was a poet, even though I did read this piece at the Workshoppe's quarterly public reading. Not long after that, I was in a workshop at Centrum's Port Townsend Writers' Conference, and I wrote what I thought was a short prose piece. I shared it in class, and afterwards a couple of people, including the teacher, told me they liked my "poem."

I thought, well if everyone thinks it's a poem, I might as well put it in that form. Then I wrote another one, and things started really rolling after that. Since then, I've written a couple more because I signed up for a poetry-in-progress at the Workshoppe. I find that poetry is a nice short form, easy to handle psychically after my brain has been fried from writing news articles and processing press releases. It feels more like fun than a busman's holiday, which is what writing creative nonfiction in my off-time was starting to feel like.

I've been reading how-to books, too. First I read Kim Addonizio's Ordinary Genius cover to cover. Then I read Ted Kooser's The Poetry Home Repair Manual. And now I'm almost finished with Addonizio's and Dorianne Laux's The Poet's Companion.

Reading, writing, thinking about and learning how to make poems has now become a daily habit. I don't claim that what I write is all that exceptional. At some point I will probably submit poems to journals and what not, but I don't aspire to having Copper Canyon Press notice me and therefore offer me a book contract because I know I'm not C.D. Wright or W.S. Merwin. Not by a long shot. I'm just having a good time.

Something has clicked.

And I don't know if the switch will ever flip back the other way, but my plan here is to keep track of my studies and work and provide a place for links to articles and so forth, all in the service of poetry. I'm calling this blog "The Infant Poet" because despite my loose association with Copper Canyon Press (Disclaimer: This blog is not authorized by the Press and doesn't speak for them in any way), I am just a beginner, and this blog will reflect more of what I don't know than what I actually do.

If anyone has read this thus far, then here is a link I want to save because the relationship between math, science and art is always of great interest to me:

"National Poetry Day: unlock the mathematical secrets of verse" by Steve Jones; The Daily Telegraph; Oct. 5, 2010.

Kathie Meyer, the Infant Poet