Frances Mayes is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany, and In Tuscany, as well as five books of poetry, most recently Ex Voto. Until last year, she taught at San Francisco State University, where she was Chair of the Creative Writing Department. Mayes has published poems in the Atlantic Monthly, the Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Mother Jones, the New England Review, the Mississippi Review, and more. She divides her time between San Francisco and Cortona, Italy.

Long before she fell in love with Tuscany, Frances Mayes fell in love with poetry. The author of five poetry collections, she was also a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. In this accessible field guide, Mayes invites readers to share her lifelong passion. Beginning with basic terminology and techniques, The Discovery of Poetry reveals how focusing on each aspect of a poem can help you better understand, appreciate, and enjoy the whole reading and writing experience. In addition to creative composition ideas, lyrical and lively discussions are followed by a thoughtful selection of poems. With its distinguished
anthology of work from Shakespeare to Jamaica Kincaid, this is an insightful, invaluable guide to what Mayes calls "the natural pleasures of language-a happiness we were born to have."


Frances Mayes is the author of the bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany, and In Tuscany, which have been translated into twenty languages. She has written five books of poetry including, most recently, Ex Voto. Formerly the chair of the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, she divides her time northern California and Cortona, Italy.

Sources and Approaches

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

-emily dickinson

The Origin of a Poem

What motivates a poet to write? When Emily Dickinson said about her art, "My business is circumference," she was talking about her desire to explore experience by drawing it into a circle of her own, a world. Similarly, Wallace Stevens wanted each poem to give "a sense of the world." D. H. Lawrence thought the essence of good poetry was "stark directness." Telling or uncovering truth is the prime motive of poets like Muriel Rukeyser, who once asked, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open." William Wordsworth valued "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." When William Carlos Williams called a poem "a machine made of words," he simply meant to say that the best-formed poems function smoothly, with oiled and well-fitted parts, not far from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ideal, "The best words in the best order."

Many poets aspire to reach "the condition of music"-some aim for the heavenly music of the spheres, while others want the words to "boogie." William Butler Yeats thought, "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." His writing emerged from the internal fault line between conflicting thoughts and emotions. Yeats's desire to understand his human condition echoes Walt Whitman, who wanted the reader to "stand by my side and look in the mirror with me." For Matthew Arnold the impulse was external, not internal. His poetry came from "actions, human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the poet." Some pull of inner necessity draws the poet to the page, whether to explore a problem, pursue a rhythm, break apart logic, express an emotion, tell a story, or simply to sing. When asked the familiar question, "Why do you write?", writers often answer, "Because I have to," (though prose writer Flannery O'Connor replied, "Because I'm good at it."). The impetus of having to, for the reasons named above, gives poetry its fire and urgency.

Because of all these diverse sources, no one ever has come up with a satisfactory definition of poetry, just as no one can define music or art. Those who want to proclaim what is or isn't poetry have thankless work cut out for themselves. No umbrella is wide enough to cover the myriad versions, subjects, and forms. If a poem interests you, better to just go along with Walt Whitman's assertion, "...what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you." Reasons for reading and for writing seem almost as numerous as atoms.

Sometimes poets write to recreate an experience.
A Blessing
(James Wright, 1927-1980)
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

What happens at the end? After a simple, sensuous description of stepping over barbed wire into the field with the Indian ponies, the poem abruptly changes. The speaker (the "I" in the poem) stops describing external action. He shifts to the inner experience of his happiness. The last two lines surprise us with their bold originality. Rapport with the natural world is a common experience, but the speaker here reacts intensely. He expresses an imaginative level of that experience, allowing us to recognize our own feelings in a new way. If he'd ended the poem at "wrist," we could not possibly have imagined the powerful idea of the spirit transforming into blossom.

A poet may write primarily out of a delight with the sounds of language:
Counting-Out Rhyme
(Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892-1950)
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.
Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.

Millay plays with words, rhymes, and repeating patterns of vowels and consonants. There is nothing to understand, only something to hear and imagine. Even though it has no message, the poem evokes reactions. It sounds like a chant. You probably remember the one-potato, two-potato counting-out rhymes from childhood, and how repetition can cast a spell. Perhaps Millay's words call up images of trees in different seasons or memories of playing in a forest. I remember the passwords to a club I was part of in the fifth grade:

Tinky toesy timbo nosey
Hooey booey booskie
Pin pin rickey
Pom pom mickey
No me oh non phooey hoo.
Who knows where such rhymes come from, except from the basic fun of making noises with words?

Sources of poems, like their subjects, approaches, and meanings, are endless. Whatever the motivation might be, the making of all art is a fundamental and instinctive impulse. More than twenty thousand years ago, at Pech Merle in France, the earliest artists painted a group of spotted horses on the damp walls of caves. Around the realistic forms are several handprints. No one who has seen them could forget these strange reminders, like signatures, of the cave painters. These are startling images of the human desire to create. Did the drawings give magic control over hunting that animal? Was the horse a religious image? Were the paintings done for entertainment on long, cold nights in the cave? Were the horses so beautiful that the painter searched for just the right spot, placing the chest of the animal over a swelling in the cave wall to get the right sense of the animal's form? Perhaps none-or all-of these possible sources were in the artist's mind. As we look at the pictures, the artist mixing paints from blood and soot and ashes seems very close. We have to resist matching our hands to the black outlines on the wall. The natural desire to make art easily spans the epochs.

Art is the real "news" source of any culture. The cave paintings are the liveliest news items from prehistory. Today, as ever, movements in art reveal more about a moment of human consciousness than the Ten O'Clock News. Art reveals a culture's values, pressures, breakdowns, new directions. Contemporary poems are comments on our time; poems from other times and places give us glimpses into other lives.

Copyright © 2001 by Frances Mayes

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