![]() I started writing poems as a kid in an abusive home where the truth could not be spoken. (And sometimes poetry comes as response to very physical pain, as was the case during my wife’s treatment for cancer in 2015, and mine in 2016.) Writing poems isn’t so much an attempt to control these experiences as to understand them, and to convey both the experience and the understanding to anybody who might listen. I happen to be obsessive-compulsive, in a clinical sense, so it’s fair to say a poem starts for me as something like an intrusive spark, and the drafting and redrafting (etc.) becomes compulsive-and enjoyably so though the source of the poem is often the pain of loneliness, grief, anger, joy. Saying that poems come to me or through me-an image, a voice, the misty, muddy movement-without-form-may sound precious or pompous (and of course most of what I’m writing on any given day won’t strike me as particularly “good,” or good yet) but it’s honestly how I feel: I don’t know where they come from, I just know they’re not really mine. What techniques do you use to get started on a new poem? Share them with us below.“Perhaps this is the playwriting side of my nature, but I want the poem to retain something of my present tense, my breath and body.” Sometimes you can start writing whatever comes to your head and worry about the formatting later. Sometimes you don't need to have a specific plan.
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