Decide how long your lines and stanzas will be, then stick to it, you can move them around later. Break each one with beauty, falling
snow or something else that’s clever or makes sense, but not too clever, clever looks like cleaver, and that is what you need
to take to your poem. Chop the excess sinews, the thes, those creepy adjectives that detract from the poem. Be specific, write, no scrawl, Braeburns or Red Delicious
over apple, Poodle not dog, puddle not water, fill your poem with p’s or toads or gardens, or wait… didn’t I read that somewhere? Read! Then focus
on the real, but only if it seems real— like I believe that Williams had a wheelbarrow, and that it was red and glazed with rain – just don’t look up
What not to do in a plem, and misspell poem Because the o and l are so darn close together – you’ll only get articles on mucus-killing foods
and how to clear your throat. Stay on task, don’t let the poem drift to places you can’t come back from. Hold the wheel and drive, wait, that’s an Incubus
lyric. Move lyric to the previous line so two don’t end with Incubus. Try not to say Incubus three times in your poem. Instead, get stuck, take a walk,
walk the dog, oh no, not the dog again…walk your grandma, wait… how did she get here? Know that no matter how much you try to avoid writing
about your grandma, she will show up. Use imagery. Include her orange tic-tac grandma-breath or some bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—use similes too,
but not if they are about the moon. If the moon does fall into your poem, smash it to shards, then edit out shards – please don’t make me explain why… reverse! reverse!
riding a poem is like writing a bike. Write it! Be sure to leave everything open at the end, like wonder, like windows, like wound, but keep the poem
on one page, concise, so as not to drone on and on. Writing a poem is like going to war, but the poem is your enemy… kill your darlings… when in doubt,
put down the pen and shoot your poem in the heart.
*
This is a Poem Whose Hand Holds a Leash
in the early morning, before the sun ruins the sky’s brilliance, when the grass, too, is filled with stars, and the world waits to be swallowed.
The poem doesn’t want to walk, although it knows it will be better by it. Sometimes it reluctantly takes the mile around the school,
or hits the pedestrian push button to ask to cross Goldenwest into the park’s brightening lagoons. The poem walks like a wave rolling
onto shore, like it has somewhere inevitable and ordinary to land. It feels the morning’s cold sincerity, its closed-flower gardens.
The poem is almost home when the sky wakes half numinous night, half pink light yawning and marvelous. The poem, still holding the leash, marvels—
*
Passport Office
The poem walks into the passport office. He sits down next to a particularly well- put-together villanelle. Even with an appointment, the bench is hard, his lines begin to fall asleep. He thinks he needs a revision and can hear the sestina on the other side of the room whisper to her young couplet, they’ll let anything be a sonnet these days. When he finally gets called, they double check his paperwork: title (too on-the-nose), place of publication (substandard), line-length (not consistent), and send him to the camera, where they snap a photo of him that he is not happy with and send him on his way. For six-weeks he’ll wonder if the passport will come in time. He tries to better himself before his trip by cutting down on adverbs and wishing Frost had been his father. When the passport finally arrives, he holds it in his end-words and similes.
*
Alexandra Umlas is from Long Beach, CA and currently lives in Huntington Beach, CA. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection At the Table of the Unknown (Moon Tide Press).
