poetree

Thank y'all so much for the lovely conversations in the comments threads on my two previous posts.

This time around, I'd like to know more about y'all. How did you develop an interest in poetry? Have you encountered any writing teachers who've really shaped your sense of what poetry is and can be (and if so, will you tell us about them?) What do you love most about poetry? Do you have a favorite poem (and if so, will you share it in comments)?

I'll answer these questions myself, too, below the cut.

I've been interested in poetry since I was a kid. I wrote innumerable poems as a child -- in my journals, on my mother's typewriter, in notebooks.

My first poetry teacher was Naomi Shihab Nye, who lives in the city where I grew up. I took one of her poetry classes when I was a little kid, and I think it shaped my sense of what poetry could do and could be. After Naomi, the next poet who had a strong influence on me was Louise Glück, with whom I studied for one semester in college; that was the first time I recognized the value of revision, and began to see myself as someone invested not only in the emotional expression of poetry but also in its craft. (And then the four writers with whom I worked at Bennington had a huge impact on me -- David Lehman most of all, though also April Bernard and TS Ellis and Jason Shinder, of blessed memory.)

What I love most about poetry, I think, is how it calls us to take our language seriously, to be attentive to words and their meanings and implications and rhythms and music. (This is one of the things I love about liturgical prayer, as well.) I love poetry's variability -- so many different kinds of things can fit beneath the umbrella of poetry. I love poems which startle me, which resonate for me, which open up new windows of insight and exploration for me. I love poems which elevate the ordinary and remind me of the power and beauty hidden in ordinary existence.

I have several favorite poems. (Indeed, I have several favorite poets.) But one of my favorite poems is by Thomas Lux, and it's called "An Horatian Notion."

An Horatian Notion

The thing gets made, gets built, and you’re the slave
who rolls the log beneath the block, then another,
then pushes the block, then pulls a log
from the rear back to the front
again and then again it goes beneath the block,
and so on. It’s how a thing gets made – not
because you’re sensitive, or you get genetic-lucky,
or God says: Here’s a nice family,
seven children, let’s see: this one in charge
of the village dunghill, these two die of buboes, this one
Kierkegaard, this one a drooling

nincompoop, this one clerk, this one cooper.
You need to love the thing you do – birdhouse building,
painting tulips exclusively, whatever – and then
you do it
so consciously driven
by your unconscious
that the thing becomes a wedge
that splits a stone and between the halves
the wedge then grows, i.e., the thing
is solid but with a soul,
a life of its own. Inspiration, the donnée,

the gift, the bolt of fire
down the arm that makes the art?
Grow up! Give me, please, a break!
You make the thing because you love the thing
and you love the thing because someone else loved it
enough to make you love it.
And with that your heart like a tent peg pounded
toward the earth’s core.
And with that your heart on a beam burns
through the ionosphere.
And with that you go to work.

-- Thomas Lux