In a poem called "What you should know to be a poet," Gary Snyder [in Regarding Wave] says that, basically, poets have to know everything, but he starts with this catalogue:

all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

As a young writer I agreed with Snyder that poets had to know everything, but I didn't quite understand how one conveyed that knowledge in poems. I loved the wisdom of Shakespeare on the subjects of love and aging and beauty in his sonnets, but when I tried to write that way, I simply sounded pompous or corny. And his images never made me see pictures. They were abstractions which gave me ideas, but when I tried with similar images of the moon or sun or stars or trees, sketched as they are in Shakespeare, I simply was trite, banal, more clichéd even than I was in ordinary talk.

What I needed, then, was some system for presenting this material in poems. And it was a combination of poets and poetry which assaulted me during my first two years of college, teaching me about images, surrealism, big metaphors, incantation. And it was reading poems and imitating them which finally led to my own prosody and craft.

A poem that inspired me deeply and continues to move me is Lorca's "Somnambule Ballad." Of course I read this in translation. In fact it was because a student friend of mine, Michael Rossman, was passionately and diligently translating Lorca's gypsy poems that I was introduced to this work. The poem offered me so much that was exciting. And more, so much that was new to me at the time. I don't think repetition or incantation were part of my tradition. And the poetry I had read and most enjoyed was not ecstatic poetry, so the use of the intensely lyrical repetition, "Green, how much I want you green. / Green wind. Green branches." thrilled me. And the use of repetition as an organizing device, as well as a means of conveying passionate feeling, excited my desire to try the same.

Because I am a visually oriented person, poems that used vivid imagistic description appealed enormously to me. But I had not, at that time, read a great deal of poetry that did this. Heavy in our curriculum were poems of narrative, or lyric poems which barely touched the visual world, or did so as Shakespeare's sonnets did, with the mind rather than the painterly eye. I am sure the use of color as an organizing device was one of the aspects of this poem which implanted in me so firmly and which gave me permission to continue to use color for the rest of my life, not as decoration, but as a device for organizing a poem.

In the "Somnambule Ballad," Lorca uses the folk tradition of the gypsy world along with twentieth-century surrealist images, and they come together surprisingly well. The simplification of images, and symbolic speech, which is in all folk poetry and painting ("Your white shirt bears/ three hundred dark roses," or "eyes of cold silver," or "I want to change/ my horse for your house,/ my saddle for your mirror,/ my knife for your blanket."), meshes well with the surreal images such as calling the girl "green flesh, hair of green," or referring to "the fish of darkness/ that opens the road of dawn," or referring to the stars as "a thousand crystal tambourines" which were "piercing the dawn."

Taking this poem into my heart entirely, and accepting the gift of its structures, I wrote a whole group of college poems in which I tried to make the world respond to my visions of color. The most successful of these was a poem using blue. In it, my love of the music of Debussy, of early Chinese poems which I had just begun to read, of this Lorca poem, all combined with my own desperately unhappy adolescent life. My longing for love I could not seem to find. My desire for lovers who did not desire me. And a wish for a world of the past, more structured, more orderly, and perhaps more royal or elegant. The poem was a dramatic monologue in which I spoke as the "blue jester" whose lady is royal and throws him out at dawn because he isn't good enough for the world to know that he's her lover. Speaking in the voice of the man rejected by the woman, I think I felt freer than if I had tried to speak in my own desperate adolescent girl's voice then. But I knew well the theme of lost love, as every 20-year-old does, and the lost love of the "Somnambule Ballad" glittering through its images, repeated by its refrain, embodied by the color green, inspired me to use those devices to talk about my own life through the story of the blue jester.

About five years later I was again to use color to organize another of my best poems. Probably each year of my life since I discovered this Lorca poem, I have written at least one poem in which color has been the primary organizing structure. Often I have tried different techniques, but always the color domination has worked best when I am attempting a theme of lost love, as was presented in my early model. A poem that I must have discovered at about the same time in my undergraduate life that I began to read Lorca was / is Wallace Stevens' "Domination of Black." This poem uses the image of blackness to present a dramatic feeling about death or closure. Perhaps in my mind this reinforced the power of color being associated with pain or with loss or grief. For I think it is almost always true that the most successful color poems I write are explorations of those themes.

In the following poem, I was again attempting to talk about lost love.

In this poem, the obvious narration of lost love is implemented through the image of the pink dress. To me, the idea that women are symbolized by pink has always been hateful. Perhaps because pink is a pastel color, an off shade, a dilution of the primary and powerful color red. Red, of course, is the color of blood and is often used to represent anger. In my poem, the pink dress becomes that dilution of person that a woman is to a man in our culture. Since red would be the color of blood, there is something of the stain of blood, death, and pain about this dream which is the diluted color of blood. And the diluted color of anger.

In "The Pink Dress" I wanted the idea of the color to represent again the emotions I was experiencing, this time not through a verbal pun, but through the symbols of the color itself. In fact, the whole poem works with symbol. The dress itself is a symbol for woman as she is seen by most men, a decorative object, and as she chooses to present herself through her clothes. She is no more than the dress. So both the dress itself and its color, pink, are working as symbols throughout the poem.

Symbol and image are two of the major tools of figurative language. They are a vivid and real part of anyone's life and can be used most powerfully, I think, when they come naturally out of the matrix of one's life. I knew this, theoretically, when I was young and first starting to write, but I did not know how to apply what I knew until I began to discover how to talk personally about my own life in ways that were not obscure or embarrassingly intimate. It was the wonderful examples of poets who also had a painterly, visual vision of the world, like Garcia Lorca and Wallace Stevens, who led me away from cliché, banal language, and trite phrases, permitting me to talk somewhat originally about the clichéd, banal, and trite subject of lost love and the pain of rejection which was to become a major theme in my work. Perhaps "The Pink Dress" can be used by students as a model for writing poems that use organizational devices that they might not have thought of previously, in particular, color.