The Trouble with Poetry
Trillium. Pencil sketch by ay Zimmerman
I like to read Billy Collins's poem "The Trouble with Poetry" now and then because he speaks well of how poetry leads to more poetry. Many writers agree and tell us that if they start reading a book of poems, they are soon writing poems.
This sometimes happens to me, but I am frequently taken up by the poems I read and find myself unwilling to compete with them. For today’s edition of Crane’s Eye View, I offer a poem about poetry and a few written from the process described therein.
The Elusive Poem Poems never come to me when I am sitting at a desk, staring at a blank screen, or the open pages of my journal. On a good day, poetry comes to me as I walk the lakeshore taken up with beauty and a heron takes flight or a squirrel scurries away. Sometimes poetry comes to me when I walk a busy street lost in thoughts and schemes and a bus stops for passengers or screeches past an empty stop. Always carry a notebook, you never know when inspiration will strike. Sometimes a photograph will strike a memory. At Amnicola Marsh The raucous caws of crows becomes the sweetest song if you are a crow. Sometimes I caw to them and they answer, or laugh at me. My clumsy steps send a roosting heron away on silent wings. The blue heron gone the green arrives to hunt from a shoreline stump. Goose parents herd their young uphill, away from the predator’s beak. A wood duck swims by with eight young. Now it's seven. The drake is no help. Lotus leaves protrude above the full pond. But soon the flowers arrive.
Three-leafed plant. Pen and ink by Ray Zimmerman
Postscript
In the wake of the hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, some of you may wonder what the officially sponsored arts will look like over the next four years. A peek at the state-controlled arts of Soviet Russia should give you an idea of how the arts change when compelled to conform to a political and social agenda.