Email I sent to a friend after telling her her comments on a poem I'd sent her were in themselves a poem, and she asked me if she should try writing poetry:

"You don't need to try. You've already done it, written a poem and a good one. If you want to write more, it's simple, at least it is for me. I start from a feeling and say what I need to to evoke it for a reader.

"As for what I need to say, I begin with free association. This produces a list of things I associate with whatever it was that stirred up the feeling and can include metaphor and simile, tho it doesn't have to.

"I then work to sharpen up the images and language and edit to remove things, even very clever things ("Kill your darlings" they say in MFA workshops), that distract from the emotional impact. "I also try not to be too explicit. As the Roman grammarian Servius Maurus Honoratus says, and I fervently agree, 'The art of poetry is not to say everything.' If you're too explicit, it puts the reader in a prosaic frame of mind, rather then evoking feelings. Poetry is like rhetoric, political one-liners or bumper stickers. (Auden said it's memorable speech.) It should push buttons, be subliminal, tho not so much so as to make it obscure. At least that's the way I see it. Others have diffferent views.

"I'm also concerned with the music of the sound which consists of rhythm (close to meter but not the same--for a wonderful example of non-metric rhythm, google the text of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill") and devices such as alliteration and rhyme, tho I only use rhyme sporadically and I never use it or alliteration deliberately. I just take it as it comes, and come it does, a lot of it automatically. Our minds work that way.

"I'll also take out things and use syntax you wouldn't normally in prose to make the sound flow better. I'll even put things in that aren't substantively necessary (the sorts of things I'd otherwise edit out) to make the sound flow.

"There you have it, a five minute seminar on writing poetry. Just add water and serve. Or, more helpfully, if you want to send me draft poems, I'll give you my thoughts. But the one you've written is perfect, aside from my one small suggestion. Doesn't need anything but a title. How about 'On Reading a Friend's Poem about the Coming of Spring'? Very Chinese."

Here's the poem I sent her:

Inching up on the Equinox

It comes a couple of minutes closer
every day,
the fiery notches in the ridge across the valley,
where the sun rises,
each one farther north,
the snow, so long on the ground,
reduced to patches,
and the path where I walk by the river
soft again,
ready for grass to sprout.
In a few weeks the starkness of winter trees
will be laced with budding leaves
and the woods, silent today,
will ring with the songs of birds.

and hers:

Lovely, lovely.
Two days of sun and we are so grateful.
I'll print your poem and put it on on the wall
along with my hope list,
Meanwhile I'll watch the woodpeckers
and the lady cardinal
munch suet in the bare garden.
They also are waiting for spring
along with the rest of us.
Oh my, the sound of a loon.
My friend last night promised I would hear them
soon.