The thing about poetry is it isn’t just an art form. Poetry has a function. It serves a purpose. You might say all art forms serve a purpose, and you would be correct. I’m not saying poetry has some sort of arrogant egoism inherent to it that other art forms don’t have. I am saying I am more aware of the powers behind my own art form.

Poetry is a bridge.

I originally thought of poetry as glue, but glue suggests a substance that sticks two unrelated or arbitrary things together; bridges act as a catalyst for bringing two related or adjacent things together as a collective. I like “bridge.”

So what does poetry bridge together? Fiction expresses ideas through words, without the use of music. Song writing expresses ideas through words, with the use of music as a separate but vital entity. Written poetry expresses ideas through words, with music vitally as part of the expression. Another example: written poetry and song lyrics express themselves on the printed page. Hip Hop and Rap are very poetic forms of performance music. Spoken word poetry bridges these two worlds together.

I was at a monthly performance and reading in Washington DC (Cheryl’s Gone at The Big Bear Cafe) a few months ago, and there were two interesting artists who were on the program. One was a novelist and read two chapters of his book. Another was a songwriting duet, who performed with guitar, xylophone, and other instruments. These two performances would have seemed awfully weird together on the same evening, if it had not been for the poets who also performed. The evening went like this: fiction reading — poetry reading — spoken word poetry — song. And it worked — the event was seamless in its structure.

Now, I am sure poetry isn’t the only art form that bridges other art forms together. I would never suggest that. But I might assert, with some strong bias to go with it, that the poetry bridge is made of stone; whether the other art form bridges are as well I’ll leave up to the artists themselves.

Two other notes: 1) I had dinner with my dad a couple weeks ago, and he asserted that hip-hop/rap was the new poetry. 2) I saw Nikki Giovanni back in the days of snow, and she asserted that she welcomed Jay-Z as one of her own. Thus not only does poetry seem to be a bridge, but it may be shifting in its foundation.

The circumstances behind our respective diagnoses are all different. My mother-in-law was feeling nauseous and unable to eat for months before she was finally diagnosed several specialists later. I saw that a crumb-sized mole on my foot had mushroomed to the size and depth of a pea. But it’s my wife’s step-mother’s diagnosis that is truly incredible. Earlier this summer, she was in a head-on car crash in broad daylight that not only required surgery in her leg, but also cracked five of her ribs. If it hadn’t been for the other driver, uninsured and reckless, she wouldn’t have cracked those ribs, and there never would have been a reason for the MRI that found the mass.

When my mother-in-law passed away, the poem I wrote for her was an easy one, in terms of topic and structure. Before she passed, I had actually been thinking of the poem that would need to be written if her fight didn’t end well, so it had basically written itself by the time of the service.

When I was diagnosed, that was an entirely different story. They say in times like this a lot of bad poetry is written for every good one. That was certainly true for me. I wrote a lot. I do have a couple of instant keepers that came out of it, but I don’t believe in throwing the others away. Revising, I told my eldest son the other week, can take years. I didn’t listen to my golden rule of writing poetry: resist the urge to write. Instead, I wrote when it came to me, with no regard for patience or rationality. Very little good comes to my poetry when I write this way; I don’t know if the bad poems came from this refusal to follow my golden rule, or because it was the saying that a lot of bad poems come out of experiences like this, or if the two are somehow intertwined and really the same thing. But regardless of the reason, the poems need to be worked on, however long it takes, until they are ready.

It was poor timing in another way, as well. I had just clued myself in on the great powers of social media for writers that Spring of 2010, and while I had begun to come out of my introverted shell like a lone poet wallowing in the corner at a party, I had at least attended the party. Social media networking had also grown a sprout for me to actually network in the real world. My first real chance at doing this (outside of an on-line poetry class, which is suspect) was attending the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival that October in Sheperdstown, WV. I had signed up for a couple events there, but ultimately I was still too weak to go. It would have been an all-day event for me, and I just didn’t have the energy after having two major surgeries that summer. I distinctly remember “meeting” Deborah Ager of 32 Poems on Twitter, knowing she was already there, and thought there was someone I could actually meet and greet. It was this sort of social process for poets that had come to mean so much to me in the past six months, and I blamed cancer for stalling it.

This year, I don’t know what the creative process has in store for me. My father-in-law’s wife’s cancer diagnosis came a few weeks ago, but it looked like surgery could remove the mass and the survival chance was high. Now that we now how far it’s spread, we’re looking at a new prognosis altogether. The wonderful woman the cancer is attached to is full of energy, entertaining, a wonderful cook, and a good wife and mother. I care for her deeply, even though in the 15 years I’ve known her, I’ve spent relatively very little time with her. I am not as close to my step-mother-in-law the way I was my mother-in-law. So I don’t know what poem will come out of this experience. It’s not easy to think about the potential poem the way it was in 2009. And in some ways perhaps it will be harder to get it right than it was in 2010. All I know is that four years ago I knew no one who fought the cancer battle; now, I know too many. This is the kind of thing poets dream of, in a way, topics that are in your face and challenging to the soul, but ultimately I would rather have the people in my life than the poems for whom they are written.

Whatever your issues, you have to find the time to write. Writers constantly wonder about this issue. We talk about it over coffee, over beer, over bourbon, over the swimming pool and under milky clouds.

You’ve got fight for writing.

When I graduated from graduate school, I thought time would come down out of the sky and present itself to me. I’d think I’d write at the end of the day, after Friday, after dinner, after, after, after.

It’s funny how after took a long time to arrive. I wish I’d realized I had to fight for it.

Now I sneak for it. I sneak out — not really but it’s fun to say so — in the wee hours. Did you know Starbuck’s opens at 6:30 a.m. on Sundays? I had no idea people were alive at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday. They are. They even have the audacity to come into the coffee shop when I am there.

After my first early-morning jaunt on a Sunday, I was hooked. I had to have more. I can only imagine the feeling was like tasting an addictive drug. I had to get away the following weekend.

On the third weekend, my novel was shaping up well. I had more poems written. I felt alive. I looked forward to my pre-dawn excursions. The bitter cold did not stop me. Unfair traffic tickets did not stop me. I kept going. I asked my husband about heading out before work on weekdays.

Try it and see.

I wish MacDowell would have their parties in Washington, DC. They have them in NY, which makes sense given all the artists live there. Yet and yet.

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Congratulations to friend and 32 Poems contributor Erika Meitner. Her book, Ideal Cities, won the National Poetry Series and will be published by Harper Collins.

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I still go back and forth about whether I should use italics online. What do you think?

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Someone gave me good advice. Work on it (it=something I care about deeply) and everything else will fall into place. A few weeks after I was told that advice, an unusual email landed in my in box that is part of the everything-falling-into-place category.

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I’m 9,000 words into my novel draft.

A few of the stereotypical “poetry words” include: dark, darkness, moon, love, dawn, dusk, and words that mean various shades of red.

My own forbidden words include: light, sky and, yes, dark.

I’m curious why I want to write about light and the sky so often. At times, I allow those words to creep into drafts and edit them out.

Writing Prompt: If you’re here looking for a creative writing prompt, try this exercise. Write down 6 of your forbidden words. Write down 6 words you’ve never used in a poem before and that don’t often come up in your daily reading or conversation. Write a poem with the 6 “new” words and see where it takes you.

What are your forbidden words? Please share them with us in the comments below.

Just for you…5 Ways to Find Time to Write Poems

1. Use Bloglines to subscribe to your poetry blogs. Stop using those links in your blogroll! With Bloglines, you can see who has updated so you don’t waste time visiting blogs without new posts since the last time you visited. You are able to read blogs in your Bloglines viewer and easily page through blog posts.

2. Batch Tasks Together: I save up a bunch of 32 Poems subscriptions (did you know you can subscribe now and get one additional free issue in your subscription?) and complete them all together in one batch instead of doing a few here and a few there. The process becomes quicker and more automated if I do them all together. Even better will be when I have software to do this task for me.

3. Figure Out the Most Important Item You Must Do: Are you doing the most important task right now? If not, get it done. You’ll save yourself some energy from worrying about that task.

4. Do Easy Tasks Now: If you get an email with an easy request, complete it now. Then, you do not have to bother with adding it your task list, writing it down or saving the email in a special folder. Do the task and delete the email.

5. Use Lists. I started to place my tasks in Outlook even though I don’t use that for email. Using this task list saves me time, and I can easily rearrange tasks (which is hard to do with paper!).

Have fun saving time and having more time to write poems. Read this for more info on Time Management for Poets.

• Poet Soup: An Interview with Charles Simic
• A Vendor of Verse — Need Cash? Sell Poems on the Street
• Crucial Books for 3 Writers (I love these kinds of articles.)

I elected to attend a school in the DC area that did not provide funding to everyone. My friend went to that school a year of ahead of me, so I knew there was some animosity between the haves and the “nots.” Even though I did not receive funding to that school, I went ahead and attended for a few days.

What I noticed was that the classes seem disorganized and the classes were huge for grad school. My poetry workshop had 21 people in it.

I left after a few days and never felt bad about it. I won’t say the name of the school — it’ll be hard for you to guess — because they have new faculty and the program is completely different now.

I applied again the following year. In that year, I worked at a theatre and met a rather colorful and dramatic person. He told me about the University of Florida. If I’d not waited and applied a second time to MFA programs, I would not have learned about the one at Florida.

The University of Florida ended up being the perfect place for me. First, the geography is right up my alley. I like to be warm. I like how Florida smells. I like the tropics and green trees year round. I lived only a few hours from my grandmother and got to know her better. I like little interesting creatures such as lizards. Second, the classes were small. My entire year of poets contained only 4-5 people. The entire poetry workshop was only 10-12 people, which seemed much better than 21 to me. One other benefit is that Gainesville is an inexpensive place to live. That’s important when you have to live on very little money.

I moved into a tidy apartment complex with a swimming pool and spent my mornings writing. It was heaven. I taught, had funding and part of my tuition was paid. If I’d known I was allowed to have a part-time job at the time, I would have left with no debt. My second year, I worked part-time as a copywriter and ended up taking no loans. I was able to live on a small amount of money and end up “free” of the loans I took during my first year within a few years.

I met some of my favorite people at UF: Bill Beverly, John Poch, Dale Young, Geri Doran, Sidney Wade and William Logan. With a few of these people, I started 32 Poems.

For a lot of reasons, Florida offers a good program. I can’t say it’s good for you, yet I can say it’s worth researching if you want an MFA in creative writing.