Morning Poems

Peggy Miller, an editor with The Comstock Review and a faculty member at this year's (2012) Florida Writers Association Conference, recommends daily morning poems. "Cultivate a cooperative relationship with your imagination," she advised. Creating this ritual builds writing confidence and creativity, and because these poems are meant to be thumbnail sketches, they provide fodder for more polished poems later.

So I've been at it, and have since captured 17 days of three-to-eight line poems using found words or snippets of thought at the beginning of my day. For the morning, it's enough to get the juices pumping––jamies and all. I open my notebook, enter the date on a fresh page, and set a word or two down. It's amazing. Stream of consciousness takes over, I write fast, and don't worry about structure or mechanics. That'll come later. I shut the book until the next day.

This exercise proves to me that by merely coming to the morning table––pencil and notebook in hand––and writing for a few minutes can be pretty satisfying in the short run. I know it'll be rewarding for the longer run. And part of that reward will be the cooperative relationship I've built with my imagination.