Poetry Starter #3 - Home Room

Home Room

Poetry is the home for all my yearnings
each poem a separate room
where wandering words
find a cool bed, a bowl of soup

where names of trees and cities
and people I know who want to know
knock on doors, ring bells,
invite me in for coffee and a rhyme

where a loose tooth
and a caladium can meet
in the same stanza
share the same breath
split a doughnut on the sofa . . .

Let me come home then, and
let me bring my lusting with me
and if you find a room
that fits, that pulls you
in and pushes you out,
then call that a “home room”
hang your own pictures
on its invisible walls,
(use juicy colors
that fill up your mouth like a sneeze--
crocodile green, periwinkle,
saffron--)
carve your own desires
on its invincible hearth

Make a poem
build a home.

When I was in school, we had a daily “home room.” These days I think these classes are called “advisory periods,” or something like that. I’m sorry that the old-fashioned name is disappearing. In home room we were never divided by ability or talent, we were simply there by alphabet. We didn’t have to do anything special to be in home room. We were just there, and there was quite a bit of comfort in that. Plus, there was never any homework. It was always just a short class in which we heard the daily announcements and sort of geared up for the oncoming day. I always thought of home room the way a homing pigeon might think of its nest--the one place where nothing was expected of me. All I had to do was show up. I like to think of poetry in this way too--that it doesn’t matter if the poem “works” or not, that it’s not going to be graded or evaluated, that whatever I put on the page is great. And if I paint it some weird color, well, who cares?

1. Buy yourself a wonderful notebook or journal in which to put your poems. You may be like me and write many of your pieces on the computer. If so, print them out and paste them into the notebook. Make the notebook wonderful. Decorate it. Give it a title. Love it.

2. Read as much poetry as you can. Don’t worry about whether or not you “get it.” Just let it soak in. Read it out loud as it’s intended.

3. Hold your own poetry readings with your friends. Have great refreshments. Applaud after every poem.

4. Write a poem a day. Take a look at David Lehman’s “The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry,” which is a collection of daily poems that he wrote over the course of three years. He wrote them as a challenge to himself to write a daily poem no matter what his circumstances. He wrote on trains, in restaurants, before bed, wherever he found himself with a piece of paper and a pencil. You can do this too.

5. Write all the time.

from POEMS FROM HOMEROOM, Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, 2002.

Happy Writing!
Kathi