Few Words of Wisdom from “Nine Gates” Essays by Jane Hirshfield. A poem’s first draft feels as if there was something already there. Wisdom of your heart-mind encounters language and a poem might be born. Poetry comes out of emotional and intellectual experiences. Using stories, metaphors and simile. Just as clouds with sufficient water will rain, a human heart with sufficient feeling would find its most natural expression  in the images, emotions, words and music of poetry. Poetic forms appear when conventionalized habits of mind are tripped off allowing deeper grain to reveal. We see things as we are not as they are. What we see sees us. When we approach things with our full and unselfish attention they speak to us on their own terms and with their own wisdom.......

Have you been tinkering with the poem you started in the class? Or perhaps wrote another one? Great job! Few facts about poetry: The craft of writing poems is deliberate, attentive, and it requires absolute concentration. It is simultaneously intuitive and inventive. Poetry emerges like the bursting of a bud. It grows and ripens like fruit.Poetry grows on us. It helps refine our thinking and enhances journaling. You may not want to become a poet but you learn to have a grasp on words and how they have power to stir deep feelings and emotions in you that you may not have experienced before.  Reading poetry, like writing in a journal is a private, intimate experience. It stirs self-examination. It helps us deal with paradoxical emotions we don’t understand. Poems have......

As a college student, I admired poets and those who enjoyed reading poems, but rarely did I read poetry myself. Later in life, my younger daughter, Zoon gifted me Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things. I read and reread the poems, and loved each one of those jewels, simple yet stunning.  To understand the structure and methods of writing poetry, I read Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry and Molly Peacock’s How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle. Several years went by without my reading another poem. Writing one had not even occurred to me. Between 2007-2011 my website blogs were commentaries on several sacred text, all written in verse including Taoist, Tao-te Ching, Buddhist Dhammapada and Hindu Bhagavad Gita. Each week I copied one chapter from one sacred......