Lately I've been browsing the writers' bulletin board on Craigslist. It is a veritable land of bad poetry and crappy critiquing. Even if a poem is cliche or "bad" in some sense, it is not appropriate to immediately dismiss it as bilge with your rubber stamp. Rather, a critic should seek to demonstrate how the poem does not work, why the themes do not appear genuine, and most importantly, instruct the acolyte in the process of making poetry.

This is a non-poet's musings on poetry.

I'll admit: I'm more of a prose man than a poetry man. Though I am told that my prose approaches poetry at points, writing poems do not come to me nearly as naturally as do stories. When I do get the itch to write a poem, it comes out surreal and bizzare, rather like this:

Where the livers fall,
On the sidewalk, by the mailbox,
Fatty lobes quivering
as the cats come out to play.

Which I don't mind at all. I rather like it, in fact.

I have found that to write poetry at all requires not so much endless hours of labor as a spontaneous and agile imagination. Poems are born on tongues of fire lapping at the artist's brain, wrought of the raw ores of the unconscious. It may later be cut and polished into a crown jewel, but it needs that initial fire to come alive on the page.

So for the writer of poetry the question becomes one of listening in to the piper that plays his eerie tune in the forests of the unconscious; of training the mind to unchain the imagination and heed its small voice.

An exercise recommended by and for many writers, no matter what form they author, is free writing. Free writing is simply writing whatever comes into your head—every word of it—without omitting or revising anything. If you cannot think of anything, write "I cannot for the life of me figure out what to write" again and again until something else pops into your mind. It doesn't have to be a work of art: it shouldn't be. It could turn into a journal entry or a rant about how your mother never makes you pancakes. The key is just to write. Julia Cameron promotes a form of free writing in The Artist's Way, which she calls the Morning Pages. It is the practice of writing three handwritten pages of free writing the first thing in the morning, every day.

The idea behind this practice, and the idea behind any form of free writing, is to get the ideas flowing. The imagination is rooted in the unconscious, and many of our most interesting thoughts emerge from those waters. But all too often when such a thought becomes conscious, we recoil in horror and push it away. Voices lambaste the fledgling idea. They may say "What a disgustingly cliche little rhyme!" or "How dare you write such smut! No decent person would think of that!"

So concerned are we, day-to-day, with the dignity of our actions, the purity of our hearts and minds and the quality of our work that the best ideas—the ones that throw a wrench in that well-oiled machine—are rejected out of fear. We want to be safe and well-liked, and we may censor ourselves to maintain that approval. That censoring impulse is the enemy of all writers, and to write anything of value one must push those voices away and let the ideas flow uninhibited.

Free writing is a way of squelching the critical voices, though I have found that practically any kind of warm-up writing is helpful in limbering up the creative faculty. The essay I am writing right now, for example, is warm-up for doing some work on a story I'm drafting. The key idea is that your warm-up, your practice, is informal enough that you can toss any concern for how "good" your writing is out the window.

"Ah!" you say, "but then won't I be writing some horrible thing the sight of which will shame me?" You don't have any business asking that question until after you have finished writing the first draft. Certainly, it is important to polish our work with the judicious use of our critical faculties. However, in the heat of writing your inner critic will be in the employ of the base passions of shame, embarassment and fear. You must be courageous in the face of these emotions, for bowing to them will corrupt the originality and vivacity of your writing. Once the work is long finished, and your head and heart are clear, then you may look upon it with a critical eye, and edit in service of the idea, and not your Puritan upbringing.

Of course, one may limber up one's creative mind and can rattle off some ingots that can be fodder for poetry, but one finds themselves still preoccupied with cliche and shallow insights. I suspect, in such a situation, that the only cure is original experience. If your environment lies too close to the beaten path, likely it is it will be reflected in your writing. Julia Cameron has a technique appropriate for this circumstance, and that is the artist's date. An artist's date is an excursion of a couple hours, usually done weekly, in which one does something fun, new, creative and playful. It can be just about anything, so long as you undertake this endeavor ALONE. Others will just get in the way.

The idea behind the exercise is to "restock the pond" with new images and experiences, so that you avoid repeating the same ideas in your mind over and over again. I have tried the artist's date, and I must say they are very liberating. However, I cannot comment on its effectiveness, as I have not been able to maintain the habit for long. I do believe that it is a step in the right direction—if we seek originality, spontaneity, and depth in our writing, we must seek the same in our own lives. Otherwise, how do we have the courage to speak our minds?

These ideas can be applied to all writing, not just poetry. It seems I have veered off the course I set for myself. Yet these are critical skills required to write poetry well: to be able to let ideas flow naturally and make clever associations off-the cuff. You don't need to spontaneously create a completed poem, but rather a stream of improvised kernels with themes and metaphors that you can use in constructing a poem proper. There need be no point to the finished work: a poem simply is. It is a meditation, a literary hors d'ouvre—a gem of the soul.