Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read & Write Poetry
By Sage Cohen
Published April 20, 2009 (Paperback) Writer’s Digest Books
More Info: Sage Cohen
Writing the Life Poetic - by Sage Cohen – draws up from deep inside me the place I’d buried that used to write poetry. Maybe I will begin writing poetry again. I quit it when I started believing that I was creating the trauma in my young life instead of transmuting the violence into something like crystal – easily shattered, but it casts rainbows on the wall.
So I quit. One last hurrah – I took a poetry class the semester after I graduated from the University of Florida. I didn’t want to leave school just yet, even with my High Honors and my BS in Journalism and Communications. One more class. And, the takeaway was the best – the professor said to us – and I know it is commonly told among writers, but for me, it clung brand-new. He said, “Murder your darlings.”
In Cohen’s book, I sprawled out in the exercises. One asks “which of the seven dwarfs would you be?” Me? Dopey. Because the rapes and the violence and the drunkenness made me silent. And sweet. I never lost sweet. Another urges the reader to experiment, like in the poem Cinderella’s Diary by Ron Koertge. The first stanza:
I miss my stepmother. What a thing to say
but it’s true. The prince is so boring: four
hours to dress and then the cheering throngs.
Again. The page who holds the door is cute
enough to eat. Where is he once Mr. Charming
kisses my forehead goodnight?
Another question: Who does red love? Oh cool!
She doesn’t miss a trick – there is voice and writing for publication. And, Cohen tackles titling and truth and following the golden thread. That last from a poem by William Blake, and the subject of a discussion between Robert Bly and William Stafford. The latter says that every golden thread leads us to what Blake says “Heaven’s gate, built in Jerusalem’s wall.”
You never let go of the golden thread.
I did, for awhile. And, now I will pick up that golden thread again.
