I remember Jeremy, a little English boy whose mother had to tell
him that his music lessons were ending. His music teacher had
decided he wasn't musical. He looked crestfallen and said to his
mother, "But I feel musical."

Many people feel poetic. Capable of poetry. Sometimes they
feel that way even though they have no particular idea or image or
feeling they want to write about. Just a feeling that they would like
to write a poem and that they could write a good one. It's a feeling
that inhabits the midparts of the body anywhere between the gut
and the breast.

Most of us ^* sadly learn to put those feelings away. They lead
only to disappointment. We search for what to write a poem
about, and either we don't come up with anything or, worse yet,
we do -- in which case we produce a piece of writing that is poetic
in all the worst senses of the word: sticky, mawkish, embarrassing.

But it turns out that this is the worst possible approach to writ-
ing poetry -- searching for what to write a poem about-particularly
if we are inexperienced. It turns out that there is a completely dif-
ferent approach, and that is to ignore almost entirely the whole
question of what to write about. Assume simply (and correctly) that
you have plenty to write poems about and that your job is to keep

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