Tool For Tuesday: Be a Poet. Give Yourself Poetic License.

In school you learn how to write: subject, verb, ending, period. The girl went to school. But if you are a poet, you’re given license to mess things up a bit.

To school went the girl.

Give yourself permission to unlearn the rules you learned. My friend Lily grew up in a very neat house where she was not allowed in the living room. Her house is now one of those cozy kind of flop-down-where-you-want places.

Break the rules. Give yourself permission to be a poet, to see things clearly, to clearly see things, to switch the rules around, to eat ice cream before dinner and go to a different church or no church at all. Or decide to wear white after Labor Day or write a poem that you’ve never written before.

This is your one life. One is this your life. Life is this one your. Do not waste it thinking about what others might say. Do what you must do. Do what you thought you never could do.

Tool For Tuesday: Be a poet. Give yourself poetic license to use wrong grammar. To be bad. Or to be good. To be a different, reckless, hopeful, new you.

Azar Nafisi, an Iranian writer, wrote: “America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?” Do not lose your poetry. Do not lose the secret sonnets in your own heart and soul.

Sixth Blog Post: Unleashing our poetic license (jalansalon16.wordpress.com)

About dianabletter

Diana Bletter is the author of several books, including The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (with photographs by Lori Grinker), shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award. Her novel, A Remarkable Kindness, (HarperCollins) was published in 2015. She is the First Prize Winner of Moment Magazine's 2019 Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, tabletmag, Glamour, The Forward, The North American Review, Times of Israel, and is a reporter for Israel21C, and many other publications. She is author of Big Up Yourself: It's About Time You Like Being You and The Mom Who Took off On Her Motorcycle, a memoir of her 10,000-mile motorcycle trip to Alaska and back to New York. She lives in a small beach village in Western Galilee, Israel, with her husband and family. She is a member of the local hevra kadisha, the burial circle, and a Muslim-Jewish-Christian-Druze women's group in the nearby town of Akko. And, she likes snowboarding and climbing trees.

View all posts by dianabletter →

4 Responses to Tool For Tuesday: Be a Poet. Give Yourself Poetic License.

Marylin Warner says:

July 30, 2013 at 11:03 pm

When I was teaching h.s. learning center, the best way to get the students to share their poems was to take them outside, give them colored chalk and have them write their poem in one square of the sidewalk. Then they traded for another color and illustrated it. These were 14-16-year-old students who had low reading levels, and suddenly they blossomed into poets. From then on, if they were balking at spelling lists or diagramming, they headed for the cabinets where we kept the chalk, and outside we went!
Next time I hit a writing snag, I’m going for the chalk!

- dianabletter says:
  
  August 1, 2013 at 1:23 am
  
  I love this idea! This is great. I will definitely use it! Thank you for sharing that!
  
Cynthia says:

July 31, 2013 at 1:08 pm

I love my sister. My sister is love. How’s that?

- dianabletter says:
  
  August 1, 2013 at 1:23 am
  
  Love the poem. Love the sister. Love is the poem!