30 Habits of Highly Effective Poets #24: Barbara Westwood Diehl on Googling

Do you have a go-to website that you use when writing poems? Many of the poems in my middle grade novel use rhyme. I have a rhyming dictionary. It is on my bookshelf in the basement, gathering dust. Why? Because www.rhymezone.com is right at my fingertips.

Today's highly effective habit is Googling or, more generally, following the thread of an Internet search. Procrastination technique? Maybe. But the search may lead you to an interesting discovery, a small corner of scientific knowledge or an outdated law that might inspire a poem, according to poet Barbara Westwood Diehl. Barbara is the founding editor of the online journal Baltimore Review.

Here is what Barbara has to say about googling:

Google has been the doorway to a lot of my poems. Sometimes it’s just a tool to find pronunciations and definitions. Sometimes those definitions are breadcrumb trails to other words— better words to slip into my poems. Sometimes, I have no idea what word I’m looking for, so I type something along the line of “kinds of angels” or “what mountains are made of” in the search box.

Most of the time, I’ll find what I’m looking for—or I’ll find something amazing and get seduced to a place far from where I had in mind. And then, although that place may be fascinating, it’s far from where I need to be to write my poem. Sometimes, those breadcrumb trails blow away into the woods, and I’m utterly lost. Sometimes, it’s nice to be lost.

Still, poets should be intensely interested in the world around them, whether they’re out on city streets, hiking in the woods, looking through a microscope—or losing themselves in a maze of Google searches. There is so much to learn, and so much to write about. Maybe too much, at least for me. Sometimes all that information can be overwhelming—I want to use all of it!—and that feeds my natural tendency to procrastinate. I have to remind myself that this poem won’t be my last. All those wonderful words can be slipped into other poems. Later.

Google came in handy for this one:

Canadian Rockies @beautifulsceneries.info

Blue Mountain

by Barbara Westwood Diehl

So mountains were a disappointment,

and not at all what you imagined.

I’m sorry they were not the blue

they seemed from far away,

during the long ride through Utah

toward the Wasatch Range of the Rockies

and Mount Olympus, and all that time

you had to anticipate something mythic—

the Macedonians appeasing their deities,

killing cattle and goats at the feet of Apollo,

or the Arapaho with bow and arrow,

hunting bison and elk in the foothills—

not the temple and saints of Salt Lake City

with its marshlands, mudflats,

and Mormons.

Did we keep the mountains distant for too long,

a blue-white blur of air and ice caps,

letting you believe in clouds as heavenly gates

and not just clouds, as if cirrus and cumulus

were not miracle enough, letting you believe

in mountains made of six-winged seraphim

crying holy, holy, holy, instead of

telling you the whole world is made of faults,

the slow rending and closing of earth

over time, not by divine genesis,

but the brown lip of wounds healing—

instead of telling you there is more wonder

in the guts of a thing, the magma below,

the veins of icemelt, schists

with garnet hearts? 

Montana's Garnet Mountain

It's Tuesday, poetry prompt day. Let's search the internet for ideas. Try one of these:

• Unusual mountain names.
• Strange laws. (Really, Rhode Island? No one can bite off another person's leg?)
• Cloud vocabulary.
• Recipes using breadcrumbs.

Or make up your own search topic. When you find something that interests you, follow the topic through at least three "clicks." Do you have enough information to get started on a poem?
 

National Poetry Month Issue 19

National Poetry Month spring break continues.

We've had an "Iced Latte" with Shirley Brewer, gone on a family outing with Sonia Linebaugh, and today we are at the beach with Barbara Westwood Diehl -- all Maryland poets. All three have work in the anthology, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems.

In today's poem, Barbara looks at something we often try to overlook: vacation traumas. My memories are filled with them -- my brother's hand closed in a hotel door (he still has the pins in his fingers), my friend Pam coming home from Ocean City with the worst black eye you've ever seen (her youngest daughter was the accidental culprit).

Even when the family in the poem moves their  beach towels away from an upsetting scene, and the poem moves on, the family -- and the reader -- can't forget what has been seen.

Migration

by Barbara Westwood Diehl

We are on vacation. We migrate every morning toward the shore,

scattered, at first, like kites pulled through the sky on taut strings,

then reeled in, an embroidery of beach umbrellas on sand.

Every morning, we pull toward the ocean. We are refugees

stumbling through sand, carrying babies and beach blankets.

Planes pull banners through the sky, telling us where to go.

There are boats, but not for us. We watch them far away,

the sailboats and fishing boats, the cruise ships and cargo ships.

They are our horizon. When boats come close, we wave at them.

We do this every day. We walk among the living and the dead

the ocean leaves for us. The waves have swept a sea turtle to shore,

fearsome even in death, like a long sunken ship raised from the deep.

We cannot look away. There are always the claws and shells,

the empty eyes of fish, but the turtle is whole. The great head

lolls like a grandfather's. The arms and legs dig like a child's.

Read the rest of the poem at Tarpaulin Sky.

Writing Exercise:

You know you have a vacation story. We all do.

The temptation is to put the surprise or turn -- in "Migration" it's spotting the dead turtle -- at the end of the poem. For today's poem, though, let's avoid ending with a bang. Put your dark moment closer to the middle of the poem. Let the people in the poem try to get on with their holiday. See what happens.