blueprints

196 | toolkit: an idea, a pencil, and paper
IDENTIFy PASSIONS, DEFINE VALUES, CREATE GOALS
You may be tempted to skip this stage. Chances are, you are looking to
start a poetry program because you are passionate about the art or because
you have become convinced it will help you bring your community together
in important ways. This is obvious to you. You’ve already decided
you want to do the work, and you’re ready to dash ahead.
All the essays in this book make clear that passion and values are the
fuel for the engine of any poetry program. They keep you connected with
why you want to do the work in the first place, and they help you do it
well. You can help yourself now as you’re getting started and also down the
line if you take a little time to articulate why this work matters to you, why
you value it, and, from there, why it might matter to others. Having done so
will also help you when the time comes to persuade others to come on
board or give you money. Finally, it will give you a touchstone to return to
in moments of growth or crisis, which will inevitably arise.
Even more than this, examining your own motivations—the why of
what you are doing—can help you begin to define the what and the how in
a way that increases your chances of success.
Begin by asking yourself some basic questions—preferably in the company
of other, like-minded people who might be interested in working
with you or at least in sharing their ideas with you.
Does a passion for poetry itself make you want to do this work?
If so, ask yourself what first got you engaged with poetry in a passionate
way and what that early experience was like. What makes poetry feel
essential and important to you? How can you best communicate and share
that essence and importance with others?
At the beginning of “The Flywheel,” Bas Kwakman says, “It was the
sound of a poem that made me fall in love with poetry once and for all”—
“the sound of a poem,” he says, even though it wasn’t even the poet’s own
voice and language he was hearing but rather a translation read by a translator.
Still, it’s no accident that Kwakman’s essay begins there; as a musician, he
is deeply sensitive to sound, and in the rest of his essay he writes eloquently
about how, since that moment, he has tried to bring people into poetry
through “the sound of [poems].” Because this value is so important to Kwakman,
he works especially hard to find new ways to let audiences experience
poems in translation while hearing them in their original voices.