The Poetry of Yes

The Poetry of You

National Poetry Month carries valiantly on. While it is right and good to celebrate poets and poetry worldwide, it can be quite wonderful to throw caution to the winds, take pen in hand, toss a beret on your head, and try it out for oneself.

The world is full of NO right now. I’d love to see us create a wave of YES, in the form of poetry. Many will balk. Some will say, “I cannot write” or “I am not a poet.” Incorrect! Here is a thing you really can do.

Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry that consists of only 19 syllables. Three lines only of poetry. Line one—five syllables. Line two—seven syllables. Line three—five syllables. The idea is to make each one count and to make meaning with only a handful of words, a sprinkling of syllables. Surely you can manage this?

To make it even easier and more fun, I suggest a vertical format. And just to, as I said earlier, fill up the world with something beautiful and positive, I’m asking that we all use the lovely word YES as our jumping-off point. We need more YES in the world at large. Yes I do, yes I am, yes I can, yes I will. We can each stand to have a bit more YES in our lives, even if things are absolutely fabulous in yours at the moment.

So. Write the word YES vertically, like so:

Y

E

S

Start the first line of your haiku with Y, the second with E, and the third with S. Easy! And fun! And then in the comments please show me what you’ve come up with. I bet that by the end you’ll have more than one haikus that you really do love.

Here’s one of mine:

Yellow daffodil

Ephemeral visitor

Say you’ll stay to tea.

As you can see, I have used YES as the focal point for many a collage over the years.

If you are not in love with the idea of haiku, you might choose to write a free-verse poem or a rhyming poem with the theme of YES. Or a sonnet (from the Italian sonetto meaning “a little sound or song”)! That could be quite wonderful.

I would like us to spend the remaining days of National Poetry Month not only reading but actually writing poetry. You might want to get a copy of Poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge. It is full of lovely, enlivening ideas for writing poetry, even if you’ve never written anything besides your name before (which cannot possibly be the case but you know what I mean). One of her students said, “Sitting and writing poems with Susan is like taking a lid off a jar.” Let’s all get the lids off of those jars!

Please do write something and please DO share it with me.

“Mid-winter evening,
alone at a sushi bar—
just me and this eel.” - Billy Collins (For this poem, he won a $25 prize, of which he said, “I did the math, and that's $1.48 a syllable. Any hack would be glad to write at that rate.”)

“i imagine that yes is the only living thing.” - e.e. cummings

“What is 'no'? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the 'yes'.” - Jeanette Winterson

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Thanks for listening,
Kay

P.S. MerryThoughts is the name of my first book, out of print at the moment. The word is a British one, referring both to a wishbone and to the ritual of breaking the wishbone with the intention of either having a wish granted or being the one who marries first, thus the "merry thoughts."