Tuesday Poem: Giving birth

It’s scratching, sketching, hatching, culling
reflecting, collecting, selecting, electing
building, stitching, sowing, growing

It’s being mindful while netting metaphors
from speech and prosody's tidal reaches
lapping at our multitudes of selves

It’s saving sonnets lost in others’ words
taking pleasure with the tongue
seeking freedom in constraint

It’s congregation, congress, association
looking, sweating, kissing, cussing
this gestation, this poem writing





Like one or two other Tuesday Poem poets, several other New Zealanders, and over 3,000 global poetry writers, I have over the last 6 weeks been a participant in the University of Iowa's "Writers on Writing Poetry" MOOC. I registered for this online course because I was looking for new ways and techniques to explore and use when writing poems. To this end, I have not been disappointed and have been introduced to several ideas, many processes, and some exciting entrees into writing poetry. The course finishes this week and the above poem was my response to the exercise of writing a "constraint-based" poem. The constraint to be used was ours to choose and mine was to use a word from each of the titles that made up the12 Class Sessions. The words as they appear line by line in the poem are: sketching, collecting, building, mindful, prosody, multitudes, words, pleasure, constraint, association, looking, poem. And if you can get over all the -ing words in the poem, (which is frowned on by certain of today's poetry-writing teachers), I hope you enjoy.

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