Steroids For Rookie Poets

    The first time a new swimmer confidently slides into the waters of Lake Poetry, truth greets him. He learns that below the still blue surface is a quagmire of poetic failures: dead first lines, stunted themes, gnarled thoughts and decayed ideas wrenched into bad poems. Not  knowing the rudiments of gliding along smoothly with words, imagery, color, sound, and rythm,the swimmer loses energy, flails away madly until exhausted and broken, he sinks.

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge made it sound so easy. Writing good poetry, he said, is a matter of  Putting the Best Words in the Best Order. Any literate person can do that, right? But ever since Coleridge stated his maxim, untold numbers of  bright, well-read and highly educated people have tried to apply it to their work, with dismal results. Failed poets account for all the discarded notebooks and black turtleneck sweaters found in trash cans.

    Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by poet and teacher Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge is the equivalent of steroids for rookie poets. If  it was a body building book for poets, I'd be telling you, "It will show you how to add fifteen pounds of writers muscle to your body in just six weeks!"  That's my estimate of how long it takes a legitimate prospect to mine all the gold that's in Poemcrazy. 

    While 208 pages long, Poemcrazy is not a book you can rip through in two or three days. To reap the full benefit of what I regard as the best book available for freshmen poets, you have to dedicate yourself to not merely reading it, but also to discipline yourself to following through on the exercises Wooldbridge (shown at right) prescribes. Follow my advice and when you're done, you'll be  exhilirated  by the realization that you possess genuine knowledge about how to create poetry. You will be free to write your heart out.

    Wooldridge's book works beautifully because she's been poem crazy since she was 14. Her enthusiasm flies off the page and seemingly transmits poetic smarts to your brain instantly. Her secret is to open a writer's eyes and ears to the untapped and most powerful element of poetry which is too often taken for granted: words themselves.

     She reawakens us to the vitality of words: magnolias, sidewinder, bamboo, jackhammer.  And the sounds of words we don't hear because we are not conditioned to listen to language with the ears of a poet: Nasturtiums, catalpa, malevolent, cantankerous, gnome. There are insects that entomologists have christened with names that are images as well as labels: firebrat, jumping bristletail, slantfaced grasshopper, Aztec dancer, keeled treehopper

     Wooldbridge offers a way to link ordinarywords together with imaginative results: tumbleweed sadness, moon flickers, peach fandango, luminosity probe, phantom wombats. Another of her tips is to give color to ideas and abstractions and brew originality: blue love, chartreuse agreements, yellow deliberation, vermilion regret.     Wooldridge says, "I think we naturally see things metaphorically." For example, a hairpin turn on a mountain road looks like a hairpin. Cattails weaving in the wind look like cats' tails. Rethink names, for new ways to see things: licorice whips, horseradish, buttercups, Queen Anne's lace. She reminds us that plant life is loaded with fresh possibilities: fiddle neck, butter and eggs, popcorn flower, owls clover and checkerberry.Why be tied to red, yellow, blue, etc. when you can go to a store and get free paint chips for use in giving worn-out colors radiant new names: hollyhock green, tin roof grey, Chinese lantern, beach umbrella  yellow, blue phosphorous ?

    Wooldridge posits that there are things floating in our minds she calls "poemfish." They are alive and we must catch them the moment they appear. She talks about poems coming to  her "... like a small fish, a possum, or a puppy ....". If you let too much time pass before tending to them,    they vanish. The thing is to write "it" while it's still there, even if it means putting your bare feet on an ice cold floor at 3:00 a.m.

     Poemcrazy  isn't about playing with words. Wooldbridge goes much further, giving us strategies for seeing poetry in the world that surrounds us. She urges taking charge of our lives -- the emotions, the physicality and the spirituality -- and probing the poetic potential we each possess. Even a moment has monumental possibilities as  Wooldbridge quotes part of an Emily Dickinson poem, "Inside a moment, centuries of June." Her book beckons to the poet in us, entreats us to artfully apply our natural tools of  sight, sound, smell and touch in searching for poetry "in the holiness and joy of one's daily life."

    She borrows from Slavko Mihalic who said,  "There's a very tiny crack in which another world begins and ends." 

    If you're sweating magenta, holding tight to the tail of a chartreuse craving to drink oolong from the pentameter pump and free your muse, then rush out and buy this book today. Poemcrazy will show you how to pry open that tiny crack and enter your own personal world of poetry.