Everything You Need To Write A Poem (And How It Can Save A Life): Daniel Tysdal (Transcript)

One of the lessons that teaching has taught me is that not only are we all linked by these experiences that knock us off balance, but we’re also linked by the fact that we could all explore these experiences in poetry and gain from our poetic explorations. The first half of the title of my talk is “Everything you need to write a poem” because the goal of my talk is to show you that you already have everything you need to write a poem.

The experiences of love and loss, of joy and pain, and the tools. To put a twist on one of the world’s most famous poems, “You’re a poet and I’m about to show it.” How do I know you’re a poet? I know this because I know you use language the way poets do. To express sensory experience, to make comparisons, and to sound good. This is what we poets do when we create with imagery, metaphor, and music.

I want to give you a deeper grasp of these tools so that you can employ them more self-consciously, the way a poet does. To stir our senses, move our emotions, and lead us to share in your world and see our own in a new way. Since poetry is such a hands-on process, I will introduce you to the tools through the process, both my own and yours. In order to do this, I first need to introduce my friend.

Remembering Blair

This is Blair. This picture was taken on my parents’ farm where Blair and I performed songs for family and friends. I first met Blair in 1992 when we started high school together. And we formed a strong and enduring friendship around the creative life. Together, we performed in plays and improv games, we wrote and made movies, and we learned covers and composed original songs.

This, to give you a sense of the weird stuff we made, is a picture of me, in makeup, as the villain of the not-yet-released Plastic Face 4: Plastic Face’s Revenge. We wrote, shot, and edited the short horror film in two days. We actually hadn’t made Plastic Face 1 through 3; we just thought it’d be awesome to skip straight to the later sequel.

In January of 2009, Blair took his own life. Beyond the life and art, Blair and I had shared something else, a struggle with mental illness. A struggle that brought us closer together but also had the power to push us apart. I think about him and miss him every day; which means I write about him, and to him, and because of him often.

To go along with the eulogy poems and novel I’ve written for Blair, I’ve written a two-line poem as a part of this talk. I will walk you through my process as a way of introducing you to the process and, I hope, power of poetry. The power to help us remember, grieve, and celebrate.

Before doing so, though, I want you to join me in this writing process and take a moment to remember someone you have lost. This might be someone who passed away recently or long ago. This might be someone you’ve lost touch with or broken from. Take a moment to remember.

Now, throughout the remainder of my talk, I invite you to write down your lines or compose in your mind as we share this process of writing, remembrance, and revelation together.

The Power of Imagery

So, one of the first things I think of when I think of Blair is his laugh. The punch of the sudden burst followed by a rapid rippling, often with a wheeze or two, as he had to toss back his grinning face or curl it forward. There was a real materiality to it. You could feel his laugh in your body, both the physical vibration and the joy, as you inevitably started laughing too. This description of my friend’s laughter brings us to our first tool, imagery, and our first step: compose an image with a word, phrase, or line.

Imagery is language that represents sensory experience and in turn stimulates the senses of the reader. This is one of the core powers of poetry: to preserve and share this sensory experience. There are many types of imagery: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch; and more internal sensations, such as hunger or movement in the joints.

Let’s take a moment to explore imagery together with the writing exercise promoted by the comics artist Lynda Barry. I will ask a few questions to prompt you, and I invite you to write down your lines or compose in your mind. When you remember the person you lost, what sights and sounds come to mind? What smell do you associate with them? What food or drink did they most love to taste? What was the feel of their touch?

In composing your image, one of the most fertile approaches is to ask yourself a simple question: what about this individual do you miss the most? I miss Blair’s laughter; the sweetness of the decadent lattes we treated ourselves to at the cafe where we wrote; the burn of cigars on poker night; and the chords we struck when we rehearsed and recorded.

You may also consider giving form to the unexpected sensations you miss. The odd sight, weird smell, or strange sound. For an example of the unexpected touch, I can return to the day Blair and I filmed Plastic Face 4. During a fight scene, he hit me so hard right here with a plastic gun that I nearly passed out. And this goose egg was so big that I basically looked like a unicorn. Of course, we had to keep the shot in the movie so viewers would understand why my character had suddenly grown a throbbing third eye.

Alternately, you may write about more serious ideas and emotions through the absence of sensory experience. I say this because what I am most ashamed of in relation to my friend, what brings me the most pain, is characterized by this absence. The silence of his phone. The silence of his phone after he last called me and I didn’t call him back.

I will take this lack of sound as my opening image: “Your silent phone when I did not return your last call.” When I asked you to remember the person you lost, what sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch returned to you the strongest? If you haven’t already, I encourage you again to write it down in a word, phrase, or line.

Other Powers of Poetry

Other powers of poetry are the capacity to reveal truth, give form to the unseen, and stir wonder. One of the main ways poets accomplish this is through comparison; whether through a simile, a comparison that uses “like” or “as,” or a metaphor, a more direct comparison that doesn’t use “like” or “as.”

In his poem “Fork,” Charles Simic receives the fork as “the strange thing that must have crept right out of hell, a bird’s foot hung around a cannibal’s neck.” Langston Hughes in his poem “Harlem” uses simile to meditate upon his opening question. “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it fester like a sore and then run?”

Metaphor and Simile

Thylias Moss employs metaphor to powerfully and painfully describe the transition from youth to adulthood as “the arrival of knowledge that eyes are birds with clipped wings.” For your poem, you can make your comparison to your image. Your image is or is like blank.

And to fill this blank, you may draw on anything from nature’s animals, plants, and environments to humankind’s creations, communities, and environs. Though you may wish to focus on material that relates to the person you lost, whether occupations, hobbies, passions, or dreams. The act of actually creating your simile or metaphor, though, is really this simple. Compare. Connect.

For example, the microphone is a blank page; the room lifts like a balloon; the mind is a dam that stills the raging river of the world; or the mind is a raging river that bursts every dam the world builds to stop it.

Crafting Similes and Metaphors

A good simile or metaphor will possess some combination of surprise and aptness, of trueness and newness. However, the key to beginning is not worrying about the quality of the end result. Just write and let your imagination move freely.

Let’s take a moment to explore this together. Return to the image you wrote for the person you lost and expand it with a simile or a metaphor. I will again ask a few questions to prompt you, and I want you to write down or reflect on your answers without judging what arises. Which animal is your image similar to? Which season is it most like?

If your image were a sport or a game, which would it be? When undertaking this exercise alone, choose a simile or metaphor from the list you brainstormed and expand the comparison by answering the questions “why” or “how”: Why is this image like this season? How is this image like this game?

For example, I could compare Blair’s silent phone to winter. This connection to the cold lack of growth expresses my internal feeling. The next step is to tease out the similarity with greater specificity. I could explore how his silent phone is like a blizzard, glacier, or frozen lake, or I could compare his silent phone to poker, our favorite game to play together, and expand this further by writing, “Your silent phone is a game of poker in which the cards are glued to the table and I cannot pick them up.”

Or I could combine winter and poker, return to my original image and revise it simply like so, “Your silent phone is a poker game played in a blizzard.” Once again – if you haven’t already – I encourage you to expand your image with a simile or metaphor. Your image is or is like blank.

The Music of Poetry

Our final power of poetry is its capacity to rouse pleasure and stir emotions with its music. The most obvious way poets do this, of course, is through rhyme. Here’s a prime example from Jay Electronica’s “Exhibit C”: “You either build or destroy, where you come from? The Magnolia projects in the 3rd Ward slum. Hum, it’s quite amazing that you rhyme how you do, and that you shine like you grew up in a shrine in Peru.”

The power here arises not only from that marvelous bounty of rhymes but also from their placement. For example, beginning a line “hum” with what had been the end rhyme “from” and “slum,” or the wonderful internal rhyme “you grew” tucked between “you do” and “Peru.”

Even in poetry that doesn’t rhyme, poets still often work to make their words sing. Two means of accomplishing this are alliteration and assonance. Alliteration is characterized by the repetition of consonant sounds, as in “termite tract trees” or “birds in berry bunches.” Assonance, by contrast, is characterized by the repetition of vowel sounds, as in “the breeze is fleet and brief” or “a day of rain.”

Take, for example, William Wordsworth’s “Reflections upon Nature a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” In nature, he hears “oftentimes the still sad music of humanity nor harsh nor grading, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.” Note the musical centering he builds with the repetition of “s” sounds, “Oftentimes the still sad music.” And note, too, how he employs assonance to create a sonic connection between lines via “sad” and “ample,” and “grading” and “chasten.”

We can return to our own two lines then and revise them to heighten the music through alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. Alternately, you may work to diminish the music if it better suits your desired effect. Here once again is my developing poem: “Your silent phone is a poker game played in a blizzard.” And here are my lines revised to heighten the music: “Your telephone’s silence is poker played with invisible cards in a blizzard.”

Note how I added the striking alliterative “s” by changing “silent phone” to “telephone’s silence” and heighten the alliteration of “poker played” by cutting the word “game.” I also added assonance through “invisible” and “blizzard,” and with the same addition, more effectively communicated my helplessness. Not only are the cards concealed by the snowy storm but they’re also impossible to see.

This, then, is my two-line poem for Blair. I’ll give it a title, “Last Call,” and I invite you to do the same with your poem when you finish it.

Closing Thoughts

In sharing my process and inviting you to write, I hope I’ve demonstrated, as the first half of my title promised, that you already possess everything you need to write a poem. The experiences to explore and the tools of imagery, metaphor, and music to do so.

I also hope you see the truth of the second half of my title. How poetry can save a life. What I mean is that even though I can never save my friend’s life in the way I feel I should have, I can at least write a poem that preserves his life and saves me from slipping into the abyss of my failure.

And importantly, I can keep writing and aiming to save. I can build these two lines into a longer poem, and in this poem I can transform the frozen phone into a fiery megaphone, a blazing thing that calls out, in the memory of my good friend, to all those who need it; creating a real icebreaker, a true think-pair-share.

And in this icebreaker, I can ask you to close your eyes and think about it. The ice inside you. Think about that massive block of ice, that unskateable surface or unscalable glacier made of what is missing or of anxiety and dread or of the voice that distorts and demeans.

And pair up with the maker inside yourself, the one who listens, crafts, questions, and explores. And share with your inner maker the work of encountering the ice, the work of chipping it away, or the work of scaling the glacier or navigating the expanse of the frozen lake.

And when you inevitably fall into those frigid waters, know that as your out-of-balance body churns under the surface, your lungs aflame with held breath; that it will be the hands of this maker that break through the ice and take hold of you and pull you back through.

Related Posts

• Transcript of Abraham Verghese’s Harvard Commencement Speech 2025
• Transcript of JD Vance’s Commencement Speech at the U.S. Naval Academy – 5/23/25
• Transcript of This Is What the Future of Media Looks Like: Hamish Mckenzie
• Transcript of Elizabeth Banks’ Commencement Speech At the University of Pennsylvania
• Transcript of Jon M.Chu’s Speech At USC Commencement 2025