Poetry Staples

I was rummaging around my kitchen the other day when an idea struck me: just like every pantry needs to be stocked with the basic foods most meals are built on, poets need a supply of staples they can use to create poetry.

I thought it would be fun to compare food pantry staples to poetry-writing staples. Here goes:

Flour, butter, sugar, salt & spices

Every pantry should have a five-pound sack of flour. Flour is either the first, second or third ingredient in most of the recipes in the “Cakes, Cookies and Desserts” section of most cookbooks (notice I started with dessert first) but it’s also a necessary, if not the most necessary ingredient in bread, muffins, and other baked goods. What’s the poetry equivalent of flour? 

I would say a good old-fashioned dictionary, not a digital lookup function but one you keep on the desk in front of you. I’ve referred many times to my 1965 Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (well, it was new in 1965!) which used to belong to one Doug Ruddell, whose name appears on the book’s flyleaf. I’ve used this book countless times, but one of its best features is that within its crumbling pages, I will often stumble upon a word I didn’t know. For example, I just looked down the page and found “despiteous,” an archaic word meaning “malicious.” (You might also want to get a copy of Webster’s Rhyming Dictionary, which lists over 71,000 rhyming words. Maybe rhyming in English isn’t as difficult as everyone thinks?)

If a dictionary is your poetry pantry’s sack of flour, then a thesaurus is a pound of butter. Butter (or margarine, olive oil, or other type of fat) sticks things together, gives foods flavor and richness, and provides moisture. Like a dictionary, every writer needs a thesaurus. I’ve spent many happy moments reading through the chunky paragraphs that make up each section of my 1992 Roget’s, which starts off with “Class 1 Words Expressing Abstract Relations.” The first word is—you guessed it—“existence,” followed by “being, entity, subsistence, reality, actuality, presence, fact, matter of fact, truth, science of existence, ontology.” And that’s just the first paragraph.

In spite of its bad reputation, sugar is still a vital component in many recipes. Sugar adds sweetness (obviously) but it also helps to retain water, gives texture to baked goods, and extends their shelf life. I like to think of craft-writing books as the sugar of composing your own poetry—a little goes a long way. In other words, craft books are an important part of your poetry pantry, but make sure to use them judiciously. I have some wonderful ones that I refer to when I need to know exactly how a sestina or pantoum is structured, or how to put a collection of poems together, or just to browse the wisdom of poets like Ted Kooser, William Stafford, or Steve Kowit. But if I spend too much time reading these books, I won’t spend as much time writing—there’ll be too much sugar in my batter and the cake won’t come out right.

To balance the craft books, I turn to actual collections of poetry. I like to think of them as the salt that brings out the flavors of my own writing. The same goes for spices, which need be used wisely so that they enhance rather than overwhelm the food. When I’m stuck on a poem or other piece of writing, I’ll pull out a book of poems from the bookshelf and read for a few minutes. Then I might freewrite for five or ten minutes to get my brain going again.

So there you have it: a pantry of staples for writing poetry. Of course, these can work for prose too.

What do you have in your poetry pantry? Let us know in the comments.