Poet Jane Hirshfield said "... the feeling I have about poem-writing (is) that it is always an exploration, of discovering something I didn't already know. Who I am shifts from moment to moment, year to year. What I can perceive does as well. A new poem peers into mystery, into whatever lies just beyond the edge of knowable ground."
I bring a different poem to the writing classes each week, not only to inspire but to introduce new poets to the group members.
Becoming a Writer by Dave Margoshes
What could be easier than learning to write? Novels, poems, fables with and without morals, they’re all within you, in the heart, the head, the bowel, the tip of the pen a diviner’s rod. Reach inside and there they are, the people one knows, their scandalous comments, the silly things they do, the unforgettable feeling of a wet eyelash on your burning cheek. This moment, that, an eruption of violence, a glancing away, the grandest of entrances, the telling gesture, the banal and the beautiful all conspire with feeling and passion to transport, to deliver, to inspire. Story emerges from this cocoon, a crystalline moment, epiphanies flashing like lightbulbs above the heads of cartoon characters. All this within you where you least expect it, not so much in the head as under the arms, glistening with sweat, stinking with the knowledge of the body, the writer neither practitioner nor artisan but miner, digging within himself for riches unimagined, for salt. ~ from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009
(Tightrope Books, 2009)