Profession: Poet
March 9, 2021
Profession: Poet is a new monthly blog feature exploring craft and identity in poetry by Hanoch Guy, who writes poems in both English and Hebrew.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A POET
My experience is that, in order to write, I need a daily ritual. Think for a moment about your writing rituals. This is my ritual. First, I do stretching exercises, combined with deep breathing. Then, silence. The first steps of sitting down to writing are observation, awareness, and absorption. Every morning, I look for a while at the creek, which changes every day. Today, the banks are snowy and the pine branches are peppered with white flakes. I contemplate and write what emerges. At this time, I do not edit what I wrote.
Next, I turn to reading three daily poem sources. I love reading a haiku a day. at Haikuniverse. The three-liners are delightful sparks. Then I read Poem-a-Day from Poets.org., which shows the poem’s text followed by an audio recording. My third poem the daily poem from poems.com. This daily selection offers poems that are written in English and also translations that I like.
While I read the three poems, I have my notebook open in case I am inspired. Now I turn to the main course of the day, which is back to haiku. Twenty years ago, I stumbled into a used book store, where I found a wonderful book, From the Country of Eight Islands, An Anthology of Japanese Poetry. This book gave me intimate insight into haiku and other short poems. Reading the book inspired me to write hundreds of haiku that would become my first haiku book, A Hawk in Midflight, published in 2017. I am continuing to write haiku and have just finished a new manuscript, Dark River in the Woods. I am working on it today, editing, adding and deleting poems, and then will be sending it to my editor.
The second manuscript I am working on today, We Pass Each Other on the Road, is a collection of hundreds of haiku and micro poems. I am more and more into writing haiku, especially after reading again and again the work of Nick Virgilio of Camden, a master of the gems of haiku. Dark River was rejected four times so I continue to revisit it, adding poems and resequencing the poems. I realize that the sequence of the poems in a book may determine if it is accepted.
Now it is afternoon and I am getting tired so it is time for my daily walk. Before I go to bed, I have a habit of reading two or three poems of a favorite poet. This evening, I reread Kabir, a vastly popular Indian poet. I enjoy reading a few of his upside-down poems. I’ll write more about Kabir in a future blog.
Good night.
Please share your daily writing rituals in the comments section.
Hanoch Guy Ph.D, Ed.D spent his childhood and youth in Israel. He is a bilingual poet in Hebrew and English. Hanoch has taught Jewish Hebrew literature at Temple University and poetry and mentoring at the Muse House Center. He won awards in the Mad Poets Society, Phila Poets, Poetry Super Highway and first prize in the Better than Starbucks haiku contest. His book, Terra Treblinka, is a finalist in the North Book Contest. Hanoch published poems in England, Wales, Israel, the U.S., and Greece. He is the author of nine poetry collections in English and one Hebrew book.