Poetry Friday: Finding Inspiration with Toby Speed

It's Poetry Friday. Our rakish host is the Rogue Anthropologist, Kara Newhouse. Stop by Kara's blog for all of today's poetry links.

I am announcing my National Poetry Month series today. Find information on that project and how to sign up at the end of this post.

Have you been feeling a little bland in your boots since our Pantone Poetry Project ended? Lacking color and inspiration in your verse, perhaps?

From Bored Central

Today, poet and author Toby Speed -- who has been away from Poetry Friday for a while -- is visiting. When you have a daily writing project such as writing in response to colors, it can be hard to transition into another, or a looser writing practice, or no practice at all. It might feel like the safety net of a great routine has flown away in the wind.

I asked Toby to help us transition out of the structure of our colorful writing project by talking about how and where she finds inspiration for writing.

Welcome, Toby!

A Mash-up of Impressions: How I Write

by Toby Speed

Like most writers, my favorite eureka moment is when I get a great idea for a poem, a story, or a book. Seemingly out of the blue, an idea gels and presses for expression, and I can’t wait to get back to my computer to write it down.

But when I try to come up with an idea by sheer will it scampers away, clean out of sight, its tail disappearing under a rock before I can grab it. What’s left is the dust of an idea without the energy and resonance necessary to take it from start to explosive finish.

What confluence of events, stars, serendipity, and pixie dust does it take to coax forth a great idea and hold onto it? I can’t speak for other writers, but over the years I’ve developed a way to make it happen for me.

Instead of looking for ideas, I focus on impressions: An overheard bit of conversation. A sign on a truck going by. A cardinal outside my window. A discarded list in a shopping cart. Three words as I zoom past a radio station. The smell of baked apples. The song that captures me as I drive down a twisting road. I create a storehouse that’s a mash-up of sights and smells, bits of other texts, random phrases, and memories. Long before I know what I’m going to write – poem, novel, whatever – I’m gathering impressions that will combine to form ideas.

Gathering smells at the
Greenbelt Farmers Market in Maryland.

Many of them will find homes someday; I don’t worry about where to put them now. The confluence I seek is really nothing more than a bunch of impressions that will come together in just the right way and at just the right time to catalyze the writing process.

My children’s book, Brave Potatoes, grew out of the title, which appeared while I was pairing words in long columns on a yellow pad. Those two words combined with other impressions: a dream about flying, some memorable lines from Romeo and Juliet, and the sight of the prize potatoes at a county fair during a summer at the lake with my children.

The nursery rhyme, “Hey, Diddle, Diddle,” played a role in another picture book, Two Cool Cows.

I reworked bits of text from the old rhyme for a story that also incorporated other captured impressions. An erasure poem I wrote recently called, “The Mountains Forget and Remember,” used text from The Wind in the Willows and some visual fragments from the Lord of the Rings movies.

Besides writing down random impressions as they happen, I feed the well to make sure they keep happening. For example, a few weeks ago I downloaded all of Andrew Lang’s fairy books (originally published between the late 1800s and early 1900s) onto my Kindle. I had read them as a child and am eager to see how they resonate 50 years later.

I use the same storehouse of impressions for all my writing. For me, there is no great difference between writing for children and adults, or writing prose and poetry. The finished products are different, but the process is the same: I gather impressions, let them collide with each other, and one day while I’m vacuuming the living room a few of them combine to form an idea. Eureka!

This is a great creative method that works best with long gestation periods. It takes a little faith, a little courage, and repeatedly casting the net to see results. Perhaps a good idea really is a confluence of events, stars, serendipity, and pixie dust, after all.

Toby's adorable book on Goodreads.

Toby Speed writes mysteries, children’s books, short fiction and poetry. DEATH OVER EASY (Five Star), the first book in her mystery series featuring aviator sleuth Emma Trace, came out in October. Her short story, “At the Corner of Night and Nowhere,” is included in the recent anthology, MOON SHOT: MURDER AND MAYHEM ON THE EDGE OF SPACE (Untreed Reads). Toby is the author of seven children's books, including TWO COOL COWS, an American Bookseller Pick of the List and an IRA-CBC Children's Choice Book, and BRAVE POTATOES, which was on both the Publishers Weekly and The New York Times children's bestseller lists. Her most recent poems appear in The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly, Light, and Silver Birch Press. Visit tobyspeed.com to learn more.

Toby and I spent a little bit of time this morning, searching the Internet for some poems that fit her mash-up sensibility.

Some suggested reading:
A blog post on "impressions poems" at Goodreads. (Look for "Memories" by John Lavan halfway down the page.

Roethke's "The Waking"

"The Unwritten" by W.S. Merwin (Posted at Kurious Kitty and presented in the video below)



Both Toby and I loved this poem stitched of found lines, "Life Story" by Jeanne Shannon.

Life Story
by Jeanne Shannon
(published at The Found Poetry Review)

I started out in the Virginia mountains.
Cardinals flickered against the snow like feathered garnets.

In the kitchen we strung beans.

I was a Catholic school girl.
I was hinged between worlds.

In summer dusk I recited my future.

There were years of white gloves, straight-seamed hose.

I wanted to be a nun.
I said to the world Don’t try to tempt me with your ripe persimmons.

It was necessary to have more hope than fear.

I see us
in the garden, in light rain,
a young couple planting a row of peas.

Read the rest of the poem at The Found Poetry Review.

I love how Shannon gathers lines from other poets (and favorite poems?) and creates something new.

We all have favorite poems. But I've been thinking about something a little deeper: Source poems. Poems that I draw like water from a well, again and again, to quench some thirst.

For National Poetry Month 2014, I invite you to think about and write about your own source poems. A source poem could be:

1. The poem that made you realize you wanted to be a writer.
2. A poem that shifted your thinking about what poetry is.
3. A poem that changed how you view yourself and your place in the world.
4. A poem that you have memorized and internalized. It's cadence is a part of you.

A source poem is also:

1. A poem that you read again and again and again.
2. A poem that you love to discuss and share with others.
3. A poem that carries special meaning in your life as a writer or as a human being.
4. A poem that has a back-story for you.

This April, I invite readers to submit an essay/guest post about one source poem. Your post might cover all, or just some of the above points. We'll include the poem (or a portion of it). If you have or would like to write a response poem to your source poem, go for it!

This April, I plan to blog just three days a week. If you'd like to sign up for my National Poetry Month: Source Poems series, please send me an email at laura@laurashovan.com. Be sure to select a first and second choice date from this list:

Wednesday, April 2
Friday, April 4
Monday, April 7
Wednesday, April 9
Friday, April 11
Monday, April 14
Wednesday, April 16
Friday, April 18
Monday, April 21
Wednesday, April 23
Friday, April 25
Monday, April 28

Here is an amazing, drool-worthy reading of the source poem I will be writing about, William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just to Say."



In April -- it is the cruelest month -- I promise to tell you how I almost got into a brawl over this poem when I was a freshman at NYU.

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?