How to Write Absence Poetry

You may start with the things you miss about a former life:

Step 1: If you were recently in a place where there were a lot of lizards poking their heads about, scurrying, mating in public, and generally making it known that it's their apartment complex and you are just temporary visitor. Then one of the things you might truly be able to say about your new digs once you move is that they were lizardless and bereft of life. You are therein taking the reader along on your interior monologue and showing him something that he certainly would otherwise not be aware of. You miss the lizards and their silly antics. The way they hid from the cold and came out to bask in sunlight. You never actually saw them eat anything. Not even those nasty love bugs that got smashed on the windshield in their hundreds.

Step 2: You may proceed to contemplate absence of things, reason, people or objects:

Once the storms have passed you can speak of cloudless day. This can also be evocative of trouble free day or it can be an indicator of an endless summer turning into a drought. Cloudlessness can also evoke feelings of intense clarity. The aspect of a bone white moon on a cloudless night. A night so clear you could see stars reflected in the dark, still waters. And again you have two directions here. You could follow the path of that poet who observed a woman who "walked in beauty like the night" or on such a clear night you could be even more certain that what you had felt, and thought and done were wrong. All wrong.

Step 3: Absence can as another bard wrote "make the heart grow fonder," or it can be an indication of a painful loss. One of the most powerful pieces of writing I have ever come across of was about a husband and wife who were separated by a brutal communist dictatorship. He was taken away to a gulag while she was left behind to languish in some crude town. So complete was the corruption and control by the communists that there was scarcely any communication was allowed. She cried bitterly when she came upon a felled tree tied to together with others from a work camp to the north. Inscribed on the tree was a love letter from her husband. As she touched the carved words it was though she could feel his rough hands again.

Step 4: Let the feelings flow. Poetry is often about seeing something and having feelings about it and committing those feelings to paper.

Step 5: In the words of the pundits "Less is not more. Less is less." So let's have more "less", more or less.

Consider words like heartless, moonless, thoughtless, windless,emotionless and try to pen a line of verse out of that "nothing."

On a windless night
a heartless moon arose
and he, thoughtless,
whistled tunelessly and thought of lost love.

Seems kind of clunky. Using "less" that way. Almost makes you think that less "less" would be a good thing. Let's try it a different way:

He did not eat less.
He did not sleep less.
He did dream less.
He did not feel less.
He did not hurt less.

Now the repetition seems to be building. It seems to be going somewhere. If we ramp up the emotional intensity we can ramp up the reader's interest. They may even want to read more to find out what's going on.

Another thing to notice is that the last line "He did not hurt less" may be one line too many. Poetry can be about what you leave out. Let them wonder where you are going.

• Praying that Your Heart wil Freeze
• Dusk Like a Dying Mirror
• Burning Angels