If you didn’t hear Scott Simon interview Edward Hirsch on NPR about poetry on Saturday, April 8th, here is your chance. Hirsch, with great clarity and simplicity, explains what’s important about poetry and reads a couple of knock-out poems. Click on the NPR link above and be inspired.

The thing about poetry is that you don’t have to love all poems. And you won’t. It’s like relationships; some will absolutely knock your socks off, you’ll fall in love, and go through the day, the month, the rest of your life, thinking about this poem, remembering its images, the language. Other poems you might like; you’ll enjoy reading them again, but you won’t have them in your life forever. And others will leave you cold, you won’t want to continue even to the next stanza. And you don’t have to!

This idea really hit me today because April is poetry month and I signed up to have two poems arrive by e-mail every day. One is from Knopf:
knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com
and the other is called a Poem-A-Day at:
poetnews@poets.org One of three things happen when I read these poems each morning. I hit delete before I get to the end, I save it, or I leave it on the screen for awhile to reread and then print it out to read in my class. (To get your own poems daily during April, click on the addresses above.) The point is, don’t give up on poetry. Keep looking for that one poem, or those dozens of poems, that can become part of your life.

This morning, “The Trees” by Mark Haddon (author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) arrived via Knopf. In an image that was so lovely, so perfect, that I had to read it aloud to everyone at the breakfast table, Haddon describes the leaves of a tree as:

a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction

in the air that swims above the little gardens.

(I got some blank stares and eye rolling, but Emma, who just turned five, got it.) Haddon ends the poem with this stanza:

Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,

these are accidental things.

We lost this game a long way back.

Look at you. You’re reading poetry.

Outside the spring air is thick

With the seeds of their children.

I may risk becoming a copyright outlaw for quoting so much without permission, so please take a look at Haddon’s book The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea which was just published. If you click on the title you’ll go right to Amazon.

To Do: For 5 minutes, write prose or poem fragments using the frame of the last stanza of “The Trees” for writing prompts:

Your kindness to…..

Your skill at….

We lost….

Look at you. You’re…..

Outside the spring air is….

and continue on if you come up with something that excites you. If you’re into a writing project, prompts might unearth deeper material for you. If you don’t have a work-in-progress, this might spark one for you.

To Do: Go to my friend Billy Mernit’s blog and read two inspiring riffs on writing: “Mysteries of the Unrepeatable” (March 26th), which is about screenwriting but also applies to all writers, and “The Practice” (March 30th) which is about writing as a daily practice. (FYI: Billy and I are teaching a one day workshop on core storytelling elements in film and fiction at UCLA Extension this weekend, 4/22/06. There’s unlimited enrollment so if you’re interested and live in Southern California you can register online. )