I Wonder. What if? Let’s Try.

Lately, I’ve been exchanging poems once a week with my friend Connie. These are not poems ready for public consumption; these are whatever I’ve generated over the previous week. Our agreement is to produce seven poems each and send them to each other every Wednesday. No worries about how raw they are, no pointing out unrefined phrases or grammatical errors to the other. Just generate verse, send it off, comment for each other on what’s working, what’s interesting, what questions come up as we read these drafts. We give each other permission to muck around and then point at the diamonds in the rough as we find them.

I hatched this idea a couple of months ago. I had a lot of reasons for it: generate ideas, have a regular connection with my friend, re-awaken some sleepy poetic sensibilities, create a body of material to work with in a year or so. But just playing has turned out to be one of the greatest reasons for doing this exercise. I’m grateful that Connie agreed to do this with me.

It’s incredibly hard for me to stay focused in the summer. The call of the garden, nearby hiking trails, anything that looks good through my camera lens is too strong to resist. Coffee at the beach on hot mornings. Sun shining through our birch trees in the evening. I can’t stand to be in the house chained to my computer on a summer day. Creative play allows me to keep that summer mood going; I can write these kinds of poems by hand almost anywhere I happen to be. Transcribing them to the computer then allows a first-round edit so that I am, at the very least, sending out a coherent piece. I suppose Connie could say otherwise about my coherence, but so far, so good.

This week, I produced my usual free verse along with several haiku/senryu and a haibun. The haibun was a complete surprise that flowed from the haiku exercise. I found myself thinking of my old friend Zola, who loved to write haiku and often did. My sensibilities about what works in Japanese short forms are pretty rusty, but I was reminded of the twist in thought that has to happen in a good haiku, senryu, or haibun. And I remembered why I like haibun so much: prose poem followed by haiku allows for that refined connection between two kinds of verse that spills over into how we work with a body of poems, how we get them to “talk” to each other.  And that, in turn, can nudge a poet like me to think about how other kinds of art connect, what a conversation between other kinds of work looks like.

Okay, reeling it back now. A little play opens up a lot of potential just by shaking up current thought patterns, pushing whoever is playing to consider this, that, the other thing, and whatever hasn’t been in the picture at all till now.

My not-quite-two-year-old granddaughter Maeve watches Sesame Street and sings along to a song that says, “I wonder. What if? Let’s try.” That’s how I feel this summer. If I wonder about it, I’ll write it and see what happens.

cover photo by kcmickelson 2023