Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.  Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.  Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.  ~Carl Sandburg

I recently finished my first novel, but I began my writing life as a poet.  For ten years, I wrote and studied poetry with the intensity of an apprentice, filling notebook after notebook with verse.  I studied poetry in college, and at the zenith of my poetic career Tillie Olsen, then 88, wrapped her hand, birdlike and tiny, around my own and made me promise to keep writing.

I wrote three short stories in college, and they were all abysmal.  After graduation, I began working on a novel at a friend’s suggestion, just to see if I could write one.  It, too, was mostly awful.  I knew nothing of plot, of emotional logic, of character development or dialogue or scenes.  What I did know, and what made my plotless actionless stories rather readable despite their definite lack of any kind of direction whatsoever, was language. 

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. ~Virginia Woolf

Ten years of poetry ingrained in me the beauty and importance of rhythm, syntax, and word choice.  Poetry taught me the potential for shades of meaning in each line, the depth and history of words, and how you can never divorce a word from its connotations.  Poetry taught me how to write beautiful sentences, how to shape a thought, how to pack phrases with meaning so they soothed or sliced.

Always be a poet, even in prose.  ~Charles Baudelaire

I often think of writing as building.  Writing a novel is like building a house, with similar concerns about foundation, structure, architecture, logical process, and so forth.  If you’re building an entire house, you might have moments of zen-like concentration as you engage in each task, but you might also keep all the big questions of structure and form in your head as you put up drywall and check levels.  Writing a poem, though, is like building a garden wall, stone by stone.  As you work, you hold each stone in your hand, feeling its texture and weight, without bigger questions like “What is this?” and “Where is it going?” to distract you from your task.  It’s a wall, you answer quietly.  It’s going along the back of the garden.  Now pay attention to how each stone fits against each other stone, how they grow warm in the sun.

Years of writing poetry gave me a mason’s knowledge of words, even as I tackled the larger questions of structure, plot, and pacing.  Now, when I get stuck in fiction, I go back to my roots and consider my prose from a poetic standpoint, or write poetry in a character’s voice, or distill the meat of the chapter into verse.  I turn to poetry for truth. 

We have seldom been in such dire need of poetry.  ~Mark Baechtel

I have long recommended playing with other genres to push yourself out of a rut, for insight and re-inspiration.  If you’re a fiction writer, delve into poetry for a bit, or attempt a few scenes in a screenplay.  If you’re a poet, tackle a short story or an essay.  As old Uncle Darwin knew, there is evolutionary strength in diversity.

Do you dip into other genres for inspiration?  Do you find yourself doodling poems in the margins of your notebooks?  Chat about your inspiration and perspiration in the Writer’s Lounge.