We Women Who Write

We women who write are a special breed. In us the creative urge takes on unique forms. We see possibilities in practically every scrap and remnant. A stroll through our thoughts brings on a state of euphoria impossible to induce even with happiness pills. An unusual phoneme or a sequence of extraordinary tropes may set off a chain reaction which ends only when a poem or book or drama is built around this rare find. There is always a file drawer or hard drive or brain circuit bulging with odd lexical fragments which we couldn’t resist collecting. These grow old along with us before we can bring ourselves to cut into this heavenly stuff. (It may be years before a poem comes along that is really worthy of it) A color, a texture, a line can bring the same inspired glint to the eyes of Miss Eighteen or Mrs. Eighty. Before the epiphany of one poem is attained, we are already dreaming up something new.

Most of us write because we love writing of great beauty and because we enjoy the experience of creating. However, creativity is often blocked by dependence on commercial poems. As the hours of looking through poetry books mount, so does our frustration. The creative artist in us has visualized something which we cannot find for all our looking. What we are really searching for is our own design idea, which, of course, is not there. So we begin apprehensively to take liberties with poems. We timidly attempt to combine one poem with another. But we are too fearful to make much progress. How we wish we knew more about poems! How we wish we could make our own!

This book is intended for the woman who had reached this stage in her poemmaking activity. The principles of poem construction are really neither too mysterious, too numerous, nor too difficult for the home writer. Any woman who can work her way through the labyrinthian directions for writing which accompany the commercial poem can surely leam the comparatively simple and clear rules for poem making.

I am neither an inventor nor a discoverer, except in such manner as all teachers are partly both. I did not originate the principles which govern poem construction. I am greatly indebted, in fact, to those who did develop the theory and who laid down the rules long before I was even aware that this information existed.

I am a teacher. The teacher’s job, it appears to me, is to make her subject clear, its mastery attainable, and its learning a delight. Any measure of success I have been able to achieve in this book (and in my classroom) I hope can be considered a contribution to this field.

after Adele P, Margolis