How to Write Better Poety: Lazy Person's Edition

How to Write Better Poetry: Lazy Person's Edition

Step One: Find someone that is obsessed with poetry/verse and also writes/preforms it.
Step Two: Imitate their work.
Step Three: Once you get tired of this, find someone else.

Generally speaking aspiring poets like to devour the work of poets that they like or consider more developed than themselves. Academic type poets are taught explicitly to read widely and imitate the poets they admired.

I was a pretty lazy poet in academia, so I figured out that I could get by by just reading the poems of my fellow would-be poets in our Creative Writing program. It was almost as good as imitating published poets that they were already imitating, well marginally as good. Anyway, it saved me the trouble and boredom of leafing through scores of verse on my own.

Sure, with this approach, you'll never be great or anything, but you will improve...eventually. And besides, be honest, if you really don't enjoy reading someone else's poem just from the sheer joy of doing so, then you really have no business making a career out of verse. It doesn't exactly pay well, and if you don't love doing the homework, what's the point?

When I was a Southern Baptist Chlid

When I was a Southern Baptist child, I sat through many a Sunday Sermon. I remember the lights above me were quite fascinating, but so was everything. The deep red velvet carpet, and plush pews where we were crushed in securely like well dressed sardines from all sides. I still recall a few of those sermons such as Moses being crushed in a canyon(?) so he could view God's back parts or the Story of Lazarus and this two sisters crying out to Jesus: one in indignation and the other in sorrow. Hmm, at least I think they were his sisters. This was all before I was 10 years old.

There has been much talk in the UUA world about Youth of late. I've been playing catch up reading all the reports that have come out in the last few years on the subject. I'm just getting to the newly completed Mosaic Report as I type this. All this reading about youth involvement has got me thinking about my own upbringing in the Baptist Church during my childhood and later in Seventh Day Adventist Church during my teens. In my short time being a UU, I've have yet to see a regular service (not a special youth service) that incorporates children participation into the service the way my old Baptist Church did: White Oak Hills Baptist Church near Atlanta, in case you were curious.

Basically, my old church made it a point to have children listen to the sermon. Sunday School (Religious Education) for both Children and Adults was in the Morning, which ran concurrently with the early bird service. The Adults school let out earlier than the children, so the Adults could assemble in the worship hall, listen to all the fun announcements, sing a few hymns and do whatever else the adults did in the first half of the service (I was never old enough to find out, because my grandfather pulled us out of that church when I was 10 as a protest to the Minister of Music being fired).

Sunday School finished halfway through the Adult worship service and the children were welcomed back into the congregation each Sunday that way. "Greet your children" was the call from the Pastor, and we ran out from the back of the church to find out parents in the pews. It was kind of like a game. Every sermon ended with an Altar Call, which yes was the invitation to be "saved," but it was also invitation to become a full member of the church, well after the requisite baptism, which came later -- usually in the evenings.

The Seventh Day Adventist Church of my Teens was much smaller, but still operated on a similar schedule. Sabbath School (worship on Saturday; nod to the primitive church and Judaism) in the morning; 2nd half of the worship service for everyone, with an alter call. I recall the pastor compared the people in our church as sitting in the good seats on the proverbial airplane of Christianity, with the hope the other churches would one day come over and sit with us. There was a lot talk about Orion's Belt too as the possible pathway Jesus would take from heaven to return to earth too. Got to love the 1990s.

Anyway, just thought I'd share a little of my background. Basically, the two Christan faiths I was raised in subscribed to this theory of keeping the kids involved: "If we have to suffer through the sermons, so do they."

Did it work, I don't know? What do you think

Figured out Why I like UU Campus Ministry so much

So recently, I took a battery of tests to prove that I am not insane / fit for ministry. All aspiring UU ministers have to do it (I passed!). One of the test said I do things from a place of intuition:

Basically, I just know things / pick up on things, am aware that I know them, but have great difficulty explaining to people the "how" and the "why," (sometimes even the "what") behind my insights. Which makes for either really good or really bad poetry.

Anyway, way back in the day, I got out of the Army and wondered lost for a while under the shade of the un-dying - dying poplar trees in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sometime about the UU Campus Ministry struck a chord, and I've had trouble naming it other that I just felt like I belonged with them. It was a near instant bonding experience, which is a rare occurrence for me, I usually have to warm up to people or vice versa.

I think I've figure out why the UU campus ministry (UUCM) re-energized me. Yesterday, I finished Kate Tweedie Erslev "Full Circle: Fifteen Ways to Grow Lifelong UUs"

In Chapter 11, She describes the Youth (YRUU) Conferences as a kind of Magic Pool of Communion for our youth. Although, I had never been to a Youth Conference, I believe I have reaped the
benefits from those that have.

When I encountered the UUs at Chapel's Campus Ministry after my time in the Army, I was knocked off my existential feet by the sanctuary of love and acceptance they provided to each other and eventually me. Our UUCM had enough YRUU Conference veterans (not to mention NC Schools of Arts / Math and Science vets) in the group to carry that "warm energy field" over and into the weekly worships and semester retreats. Sure, it was not always at a high ebb, but it was always there in the background.

Not only is this what I was trying to inspire in Berkeley (a long game to be sure), but it's what the YRUU veterans who have aged out to college want (according to Erslev and my own experience). Maybe a UUCM can't capture of all a CONS energy (How could it?), but it can deal it out proportionately over the semester as the bonds of weekly fellowship pull the students closer together.

Sure it's not perfect and there are dangers such not setting proper boundaries, but I believe that distilling that YRUU energy as it matures into UU Campus Ministries is the foundation for reaching the students on College Campus that wondered lost like me for a while.

Interestingly enough, Berkeley has it's own natural distillation of a similar communal energy manifested in the Berkeley Student Co-ops, which is probably why Lotherian Hall (their hippie / veggie house) felt like home the moment I walked through their doors. It is not exactly the same, but it's close