Each time I look out the window, I see a poem passing.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
The thing about poetry is this:
Sometimes you get an idea, and you say
here’s a poem. So you sit down and write,
choose your words, then cross them out,
choose different words, move phrases around,
until you have the poem you want. Other times
the poem doesn’t gel. Yet even then, the thing is,
poetry changes the way you experience the world.
You see differently, notice more details, and
fragments of poems flit through your head: similes, metaphors,
descriptive phrases, adjectives, verbs.
Everywhere you look, you see a poem passing,
even when you don’t write it down.