Poetry Saves the Day * Meet Alison Luterman

25 years ago I was introduced to a world of poets who would change everything I thought I knew about poetry – which wasn’t much. I didn’t have a traditional education – grew up in hippy alternative schools in Los Angeles – didn’t read the classics, not even in college.  The poetry I did see was way over my head though; oblique, impossible to understand. It made me feel stupid. The less I understood a poem, the more important it seemed to be. When I moved to Berkeley in 1982 I took a wonderful creative writing class from Cecile Moochneck, and I got turned on to poets like Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass + Mary Oliver. That was just the beginning. Turns out there’s a whole world out there of amazing writers – narrative poets – story telling poets whose poems speak so clearly to the predicament of our lives; the way we mean to love and what we end up doing instead. Poems have become, for me, a way to embrace my life in all its complexity. They’re like tea leaves, or mantras, and they’re full of instruction. I love what my friend, the writer Deena Metzger said when she spoke of poetry as “beauty + ugliness side by side.” If you’ve been in my Wild Writing classes you know that I use poetry to jump start our writing because poets have an opportunity to say the most important things in just a few words. As writers, we can learn so much from this economy of language and what it means to choose a word and run with it. A poet whose work I’ve used a lot in class, and really respect is...