Finding Poetic Inspiration in Everyday Life

Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” But what triggers deep wells of emotion, particularly when life feels more like a desert and nothing feels worth writing about? What draws the muse closer when those wielding power use chaos and distraction as political tools?

Being a poet often means daring to feel in a world that preaches hard self-reliance and stoicism. It means being in touch with what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the rio abajo rio, the river beneath the river. Our task is to go beneath the surface, find the nuggets of wisdom in our everyday experiences, and then arrange them in artful verses that touch the soul.

The ancient bards of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are said to have employed sensory deprivation techniques to quiet the mind and foster poetic flow. One method, for example, involved reclining in total darkness with a stone lying on one’s chest for an extended period of time. Staying beside a waterfall all night to provide what we would call “white noise” was another way they are reputed to have drawn inspiration.

The Bard by John Martin (1817)

I think it’s fair to say that 21st-century life does not allow much time or opportunity for this level of dedication to poetry, and Professional Bard is, sadly, no longer a career option. We squeeze our writing in between our daily obligations or go on a retreat if we’re fortunate. A modern sensory deprivation chamber costs around $10,000 on the low end. A one-hour session in a tank costs around $80 to $100. It is, apparently, a privilege and a luxury to shut out the world completely. The best I’ve been able to do is invest in a good pair of earplugs and a sleep mask.

The desire to be more hermetic and unbothered led me to the writings of Teresa of Ávila and other mystics who managed to find the divine in the mundane. While cloistered life offered some insulation from the world's vulgarities, it was not without its duties, demands, risks, and frustrations. Teresa herself wrote of the exasperation she felt in teaching and leading the restless nuns of her convent, as in this humorous confession: “Nuns are usually unhappy,” she wrote. “Believe me, I fear an unhappy nun more than many devils.” (I’ve heard stories from friends who attended Catholic school that would corroborate her statement!) Even so, Teresa cultivated a deep inner life and left a blueprint for attaining self-actualization in the pages of The Interior Castle, all while the fires of the Spanish Inquisition threatened to engulf her.

Every era has its unique challenges—perhaps ours is an excess of information and a scarcity of truth—but the quest for meaning and substance endures. We endeavor to make sense of the senseless. As Gregory Orr notes, “Poetry is compelling in a crisis not just because it is concise and immediate, but also because it is superbly designed to handle both aspects of experience: the reality of disorder and the self’s need for some kind of order.”

This is why the advice to read more books, keep a journal, use writing prompts, or travel to new places can fall flat. Those are all fine practices. They can assist in honing the craft, but they don’t address the source of poetic inspiration directly. That must come from our ability to extract universal meaning from what life throws at us.

To that end, I have found only two reliable things that help me write poems. Both are simple but not easy:

1. Maintaining a regular contemplative practice.

Even if it’s just 10 minutes a day, I gain more from relaxing into stillness and opening myself to the present moment than I ever do from jumping through hoops of writing exercises. The muse doesn’t find me working frantically, desperately trying to prove myself—she finds me in stillness and acceptance. I take what I’ve gained from deep contemplation into my writing, and I let it bloom there.

2. Dancing with the disorder of life.

I can’t turn away from a certain degree of discomfort if I expect to engage with poetry. Prompts are of no value unless they find an inner cord that was already there, waiting to be tugged. A good poem arises like an itch near a shoulder blade that finally gets scratched. It deals with what needs to be dealt with—grief, pain, injustice, beauty, joy, paradox, mortality, transformation—and it does so with the kind of grace that extends outward to the reader or listener. Orr talks about how the poet stands on the threshold between disorder and order, and something inside of me always knows if I’ve stepped into that threshold completely or if I’ve held back. It’s the same when I read poetry. I relate more to poets who are comfortable with a higher degree of risk and chaos. For me, that’s where the rio abajo rio lives.

I hope I'll have the opportunity to stay beside a waterfall all night like the bards of old and see what emerges on my page. Until then, I will keep going to the edge and finding healing in that space where one half of me is welcoming the "strange angel" at my door and the other half is busy translating and arranging what she says.

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Sources:

1. Estés, C. P. (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.

2. Carr-Gomm, P. (2002). Druid Mysteries: Ancient Wisdom for the 21st Century. Rider.

3. Orr, Gregory. (2018). A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry. W.W. Norton & Company.

4. "The Song of a Man Who has Come Through" by D.H. Lawrence https://allpoetry.com/The-Song-of-a-Man-Who-has-Come-Through