How I Write Poems

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“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” ~ Rita Dove

I studied English at Bradley University, a small private school in Central Illinois. I chose English because I was an avid reader/writer and because I didn’t know what else I could possibly study. When I finally declared my major at the end of my freshman year, my friends all said, “Finally.” I was the girl who wrote poems in the margins of her notebooks during chemistry class and read Anna Karenina over winter break for fun. It was obvious to everyone that I wasn’t destined to become a doctor.

I enrolled in a writing workshop in the fall of my sophomore year, and one day, my professor posed a question to the class” “What is a poem?” We were all a bit stumped: a story, but shorter? a thing that rhymes, maybe? a way to convey emotion? a prayer? finally, someone said, “Anything. Anything can be a poem.” which is of course not totally correct. My cat is not a poem, although some of the things he does are poetic. Walking across my keyboard in the middle of a sales call, for instance, ingratiating my potential client who has two cats himself.

Poetry is old. But I think poetry is cool because it conveys feeling and ideas in a relatively concise and musical manner. Sometimes, people think poems are hard to understand, and…