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Poetry Workshop

Jim Wayne Miller 
Try to think of your first draft as a creek 
in flood time, roaring out of banks. 
There's been a nightstorm on your mind's headwaters 
so the poem comes trash-filled, tumbling, 
full of chicken coops, barbed wire, 
tin shed roofs scraping down over rocks. 
It's tearing along through trees on either bank, 
dropping fertilizer sacks and two-by-fours in branches. 
It's swirling and standing out in bottomland. 
Now you work with it until it drops 
every tin can and bottle and runs clear 
again between its banks. Of course, you'll want 
to leave a few surprises, so the reader, 
out in your poem like a troutfisherman in waders, 
rounds a bend and comes on a piano 
lodged high in the forks of a sycamore. 


from "Vein of Words" Seven Buffaloes Press; Big Timber, Montana
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