13 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR POETRY: Tip Number 1--Explore the Sensory Anchors of Your Memories

The act of writing poetry brings the poet face to face with the power and mystique of the creative process. Poems often seem to give birth to themselves, and so it is not unusual for a poet to comment half-guiltily that a poem "wrote itself." In fact, the mystery at the heart of the process of writing poetry is the key to the lure of poetry for many poets. To be sure, they may love to play with language and layers of meaning. And they may enjoy the musicality of meter and rhyme. But, for many poets, these delights pale alongside the tremulous feeling of sitting down with a kernel of a thought or less in front of a blank sheet of paper (or a blank computer screen), opening oneself to inspiration, and being graced with a flow of words onto the page. The result is not just a poem, but an experience of awe and humility that comes from having touched something unfathomable and transpersonal, even sacred.



Occasionally, the fruit of this creative process is a poem born fully perfect, in which case the poet’s role is to recognize the fact and resist the urge to tinker. More often, however, poems are often born as gems in the rough, with room for polishing. The challenge for the poet is to accept the invitation and to add clarity and sheen without doing damage.



This series – 13 Ways to Improve Your Poetry – explores the poet’s addition. The ideas presented are by no means exhaustive or definitive. The intent is simply to share a few of the ways that I have drawn upon my human experience to embellish the creative process, illustrated by the 13 poems that make up a collection entitled Maine Girl.



The opening poem in the collection is Remembering the Pines. I knew I wanted to anchor the collection with a poem about the towering Maine pines, under which I spent a great deal of my childhood playing and which have cast their fortunate shadow over my entire life. I had already been inspired to write a decent little verse, but I felt it was still missing something and had set the poem aside to let it gestate.



Where I now live with my husband and collie on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, we have scrub pines on our property, which borders a tidal pond. These small and scruffy pines are mere echoes of the grand Maine pines I knew as a child. But they are pines nonetheless, and I revere them as such.



One day, I was trimming dead branches and, inevitably, got pine pitch on my hands. Suddenly, the sharp smell and stickiness of the resin broke through layers of forgetfulness. I was transported back to my childhood by a startlingly vivid flood of long-forgotten memories. At the same time, however, this feeling of being swept back in time was sharply juxtaposed with a very clear recognition of the here and now that was tied to a third sense -- the sight of my aging, wrinkled hands.



I instantly knew that this arresting paradox was at the heart of what I needed to add and convey. And so, a poem that had started as an evocative but impersonal description of light sifting through the cathedral Maine pines and the springy feel of a pine bed underfoot also became a very personal reflection on being at peace with one’s mortality.



The process of polishing Remembering the Pines taught me something about writing poetry. It is simply this: the resonance between a poem and the life of the poet can be powerfully enhanced by memories anchored deeply in our subconscious by physical sensory experiences. As poets, we can choose to be alert to these sensory anchors’ part in the creative process and to explore and communicate the thoughts and emotions they trigger. If we do, they may more strongly evoke the reader’s own remembrance.



Of course, it is also true that memories are imperfect and distorted. But, as Percy Shelley said in "A Defence of Poetry" in 1851, "Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

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Author and poet Deborah McGlauflin was born and raised in the Grand State of Maine. As an adult, she has traveled far from her roots in the course of a career focused on international development. But she remains a Maine girl at heart. Poetry is her avocation and she makes her poems available to all on her blog, Maine Girl.