How to Write a Poem

Good morning!

Let's hope this goes smoothly with not too many interruptions.  Because it is hard enough to organize an essay right off the cuff (is that what I mean?) at this hour of the morning, keep it in my head and write it down, even without interruptions. And I really want to tell you some things I have learned about writing.

Here's the poem as it presently stands.  Note that.

(Cultural note for those not on the Mexican border: La Llorona is a famous Mexican ghost. She is a mother who lost her children, either when the Spaniards came over and changed the world, or during the Revolution, I forget which. She goes up and down the streets at night, crying for them. She scares everybody to death. She used to operate mostly in Mexico but now she spends most of her time on this side, where the benefits are better.)

I have become La Llorona,
That sad old thing, part pitiful
And all scary.  I used to fear
Meeting her at night around street corners
At night in Brownsville, when I was young.
Now I see her all the time.
I have become La Llorona.
Where are my children? My grandchildren?
Who wants their mother?
Who thinks of me, whose heart
Weeps blood and tears when I must think of them?
And now I know that when I die,
Die the happy sunny death of California,
I shall go down and haunt the dark dark streets,
Skulking around the corners near the river,
Crying there in the combustion-heavy nights
Of Brownsville, Tejas, where the trucks go by.
Ay, llora, Llorona.

Presently the poem ends there and is in that precise form.   Here is how it got written. I will tell you in the present tense.

A poem is presented to you like a dream.  It comes to you in a liquid-glass ball of emotions which live in your gut.  Like a dream.  You recognize the poem (most of us go around 99% of the time with unrecognized poems wrenching our insides) and then, like Dale Chihuly with his glass art, you begin to tweak it.  You pull out the ball and look at it as truly as you can, and as you pull it apart you name the names.  You give words to something not of words.  (You do that with dreams too, that is why it is so important to stick with the first words that occur to you from a dream. But back to poems.)

The liquid-glass ball of painful emotions is real. It's up to me to name the names and MAKE a poem of it.  That's all.  I decide the form, I write the lines, I shape the lines, I evaluate and judge the lines: were they true to the ball of pain? Because that is what it truly is.

My ball of pain that surfaces in the gut from time to time is my literal cry for my children.  It is a true emotion and needs no explanation.  Then, not so pure but part of me is the self-pity.  I dare to compare myself to La Llorona, then.  That is a part of the glass blob that I am trying to surmount in my life and have been working on for years. So I wrote down my thoughts and feelings about having been cheated out of the company of my children and grandchildren for the past fifteen years and more.  I tried to put them into lines with some underlying cadence,  and lines have changed a bit and will change more into better music, I hope.

There are still awkward lines or lines that don't quite say what I want.  My favorite line at present (which probably means that it's the worst) is: "Crying there in the combustion-heavy nights of Brownsville, Tejas, where the trucks go by." And they do. Makes  me smile.  Which tells us something.  We have moved abject self-pity up a step, to an observed funny picture, like a Mexican skeleton frightening and amusing us at the same time.  I believe that's called irony, my friends.  Whatever it is, it is part of my personality.  Mine. My poems are me and are not stealable. I own the well, my friends.  You have a well too.  Take a drink; write your poems. YAZZYBEL