Some call it the Muse, that force from within and without that takes control of the pen. Some call it a "writing bug" that injects the mind with an addictive habit.

I don't. I call it a tool with open-ended uses. Poetry can amuse me, lose me, annoy me, bore me, or be absorbing, enjoyable, the music of the words retained for years. When I read poetry, it can spark new connections in the mind, keep me alert to the shape language can map on top of reality. All this is true of reading poetry but what does writing it do for me?

As I write, I change my pace and relax. In the silent centre of a tornado, I see what I can see. In my time-out I can explore one narrow nook of thought. I can put myself in someone else's life and try to see through their eyes. Sometimes writing fulfills my didactic needs to direct people's attention to something I've perceived and get confirmations or denials to check and balance my perceptions. Or I can express my opinions through poetry without becoming a gnat in fast give and take social situations when my opinion doesn't fit in.

At other times, writing can be used a forum for focusing on what parts of a picture are most key and telling. I aim to communicate by Grice's rules of quantity, quality, clarity and relevancy but poetry gives me time to really concentrate on them. These maxims are most noticeable when I write haiku. When I write haiku, I get exercise in not being biased and in using language that reflects with the least distortion possible. Through writing I begin to train myself to actively (consciously) process what's external to me - play of light, quality of sounds, spatial relationships and to pin down subtle indicators of emotional mood. It gives satisfaction when I express in a way that permits the audience to hears and induced them to feel something of what I intended to convey.

Through writing I can keep my language machine oiled by opening myself to connections between sound and sense, inter-plays between phrase and word meanings. Through playing writing I can open fresh pathways of thought by playing with combinations of concepts and phrases to reach new possible perspectives.

I use poetry as part of my intellectual development to clarify my understandings by moving from vague perceptions and decisions on how things are to testing my automatic phrases and citing cumulative details. I teach myself to distinguish between facts and extensional interpretations.

Poetry is a closed track where, as in a waking dream, I can safely let my less-conscious connections build a reflection of the world it's making. At this time I can scientifically manipulate my thoughts as objects, analyze them in black and white, look for jumps in logic, seek resolutions for outstanding issues. Once bothersome thoughts are allowed to be thought through and looked at, they tend to fall out of my head as if resolved and I can move on. These poetry by-products have then served their primary purpose. With further refinement the slanted cathartic, piecework, or disjointed writings could be made into something positive and useful..

As any cultural artifact, poetry is a means to try to secure immortality, similar to breaking a world record, raising children, erecting a great structure. It's trying to secure an piece of myself at this juncture of experience and time, as time and understandings change. Poetry is an attempt to capture, understand and therefore "own" the beauty of musical words that come into my head, or, the timbre of the moment. Poems I've written become touchstones of where I've been and how I believed the world to be, or projected that others believed in a way that poems of others memorized can never be.