Writing Poetry to Save Your Life

What I hope to accomplish in this book is to give writing prompts that will help you to get past all the outside influences that keep you from believing in yourself and in your ability to write. In order to write, you need to get rid of notions about language, poetic form, and esoteric subject matter ? all the things that the poetry police have told you are essential if you are to write. I wanted to start from a different place, a place controlled by instinct rather than by intelligence. Revision, the shaping and honing of the poem, should come later, and, in revising, care always needs to be taken to retain the vitality and electricity of the poem. Anyone can learn to craft a capable poem, but it is the poems that retain that initial vitality that we remember; these are the poems that teach us how to be human.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions). Her latest book is The Place I Call Home (NY Quarterly Books). Her webpage is www.mariagillan.com. She is the Director of the Creative Writing Program/The Binghamton Center for Writers, and a Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-State University of New York. In addition, she received the Chancellor?s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities from Binghamton University. Maria is the Founder and the Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She has published fifteen books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, Italian Women in Black Dresses, and What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (all by Guernica Editions).