The poet has only one tool, the voice, and it starts in silence.

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A good poem rises out of compelling need or vision, out of what Wordsworth calls “a dedicated Spirit.”  Pry to the roots, the old familiar dark, to the sweet smell of peat and swamp water.

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A good poem works toward the irreducible, the purest point, the rightful door of departure.
                               
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Inspiration, the force that many believe drives the making of a poem, is usually what happens second, after much sitting and waiting, repeated drafting and recasting.

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Writing is a long, difficult, and humbling journey, one filled with repeated failures and uncertainties, with what Whitman calls “the doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time.”

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Poetry is too generous, its capabilities too great and liberating, for it to be reduced to a simple tool of self-expression. As Adrienne Rich reminds us: “If you go back far enough, language is no longer personal.”  At some point, all stories become one story.

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When a poem loses touch with the outside world and becomes so cloistered it is meaningful only to a small coterie of people, it loses its vitality, range, and finally its mission.

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Poetry opens doors beyond the immediate and through the saving grace of the imagination rescues us from the deadening practicalities of our  daily lives.

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A good poem breaks through the numbing, stultifying voice of our mass culture to successfully articulate, in all its breadth and meaning, a landscape of conviction, a deeper circuitry that helps give life its necessary shape and substance.

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A good poem works toward the recovery of a fundamental ground, a place composed of shapes and contours, patterns and moments that are common to us all, a shared property where we are able to retrieve a certain communality of spirit.

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Perhaps more than any other human endeavor, poetry is capable of giving voice to the deepest yearnings of the spirit, and in so doing  offers us insights into who we are, where we have come from, our values and aspirations.

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With its ability to transform individual experiences into spiritual acts, poetry creates a sacred language, one whose intent is to change life, as Rimbaud reminds us, not through embellishment but through consecration.

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Ultimately, it is not solely a question of being rooted in time and place, though these are important to any poet.  In the end, the whole life of a poem depends on its being grounded spiritually.
          
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A good poem is an experience to be shared and not, as many are taught, a puzzle to be solved.

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In the process of writing, the poet becomes caught up in the playful joys of discovery, of the imagination, in the immemorial spirit of the journey itself.  Every poem is a gift, a grateful giving-back of what has been found on that journey.

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Homer tells us that upon Odysseus’s return to Ithaca after his many years of wandering he looked out and asked three questions so fundamental they could well serve as the basis of any poet’s journey:  “Tell me this and tell me truly, so that I may know.  What land is this?  What community? What people live here?”

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At the heart of every good poem is an egalitarian social order in which every word, from nouns to verbs to prepositions to articles, plays an essential role.  As C. Day Lewis writes: “Poetry—the art in which mountain and mouse, flea and elephant are of equal value.”

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Prose is linear, poetry circular, a dance around the well.  Like religion,  it journeys toward communion, that place where all lines, spatial and spiritual, converge. A good poem reminds us again that the world is strung with embraces, a vast and vibrant singularity that binds us all to the planet.  

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“Everywhere connections,” Heraclitus writes, “combinations, fluid transitions.” Every poem is a creation myth, a healing song that reconsitutes the world at the moment of its conception, when all things were linked in natural unity.
                         
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The making of metaphor is the most profound and sacred act a poet can undertake, an act driven by a deep and human desire to piece a broken world back together.  
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Poetry is, in many ways, a sustained longing for home and reconciliation, the inseparability of subject and object, self and other.  

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A good poem forges a compassionate pact with the world and, like all enduring pacts, it is one that in the end sustains and confirms—the poet’s life, ours, and the great healing powers of language.
                                                
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When a poem is finished, there is a wonderfully rapturous moment when the poet is never more alive or the world more composed.  For that brief moment, both the poet and the world come together in pride, possibility, and affirmation.