Poetry for Life: Take a Poet Home with You

In Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, professor and poet Marilyn McEntyre notes where many poems come from – in the midst of doing something else, “usually something quite unpoetic – making dinner, looking for a parking place or keys or glasses. They come as gifts – little phrases or images that flutter into awareness and distract it from its linear progress toward some more pedestrian objective.”

In my own experience, I’ve had poetic images and ideas for poems, and sometimes whole poems themselves, arrive unbidden in the middle of a meeting at work, driving to the airport, waiting for a movie or concert to begin, changing a diaper, heading back roses in the garden, and changing a light bulb. Some call it the poetry of the daily.

I like to think of it as poetry for life.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: The poet I took to work with me in July for Take A Poet to Work Day.