Stella and I share the sofa, basking in the last afternoon sun. She’s a dirty-rotten blanket stealer, splayed across the gold chenille throw I bought with wedding gift money. (It’s not cold enough to fight her for it.) As I attempt to gather my mind into a semblance of consciousness, she stares intently at the ceiling. A medium-sized spider has toured the living room this afternoon, staying out of our reach. If it continues in its current direction, it will be directly over my head in about 12 inches. And it best just continue onward.

A few nights ago I turned on the bedroom light only to find a slightly larger than medium spider situated right next to the switchplate. (I really should develop a sizing system for them, like what exists for eggs and olives.) Interesting noises escape me during this encounters. A passerby would probably think an exorcism was occurring. I turned around for a minute to tell my husband to come see. By the time he did (I was searching for a tissue), he said it had crawled into the bureau drawer. I sighed and decided to pretend it didn’t exist.

But that’s not what I intended to write about. No, I was going to tell you how I recently read two marvelous and catalytic books. About poetry. Now, don’t go rolling your eyes and retreating. Read a little further; you might learn something. The first book is one I bought last fall and immediately ignored: The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasure of Writing Poetry. It drew me because it promised to decipher the process for me. When I’ve written poetry, it’s been intuitive. I couldn’t have explained why I arranged my lines and stanzas a certain way or identified anything other than a pure rhyme. Someone recently used the word enjambment at the online writing workshop I joined. This book explained what that meant.

The authors, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, present their material in a friendly, informal way. They begin not with technicalities, but with content, exploring subjects for writing, such as the family, death, grief, the shadow in us, poetry of place, poetry as a form of witnessing. In this way the reader understands she has plenty of material available for shaping. The next section focuses on craft, which is where I learned terms and definitions. They start with basics: images, simile and metaphor, voice and style. Then they move to meter, rhyme, and form; I now understand the great variety of rhyming one can use. I know the structure of a sonnet — that in fact there are three types: Petrarchan, Shakespearean, and Spenserian. (Who would have thought?) The section also explained the forms of villanelle, pantoum, and sestina, which provide the challenge of formal structure (i.e., certain words in specific places, use of repetition, stanza arrangement). The last section of the book covered writer’s block, self-doubt, and getting published. Best of all, most chapters provide about a dozen suggestions for inspiring one’s muse.

The other book I read was Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life With Words, by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. It caught my eye as I browsed B&N with my mother-in-law; I sat down to read a few pages and was hooked. Wooldridge writes autobiographically, bringing the reader in touch with how poetry infiltrates ordinary life. The chapters are short, like journal entries, and most provide ideas for practice. The book truly focuses more on freeing oneself to write rather than on technicality. She encourages wordplay. One exercise (which I’ve done) directs the writer to look at an object nearby, to scrutinize and describe it in detail. Then one is to imagine it as a being with a message and to contemplate what that message might be. These impressions are written down as well. But it’s not a poem yet. The exercise is the generation of material. This is what I found freeing. I made notes and returned to it a day later, approaching it as I do a collage — intuitively shaping the poem without analysis. Then I left it alone and returned a few hours later, where I proceeded to read it aloud to analyze the words for how well they conveyed meaning and for rhythm. Time passed without my notice, and I was content.

From both books I created a “muse list” — a collection of exercises for practice and play. It is extensive; not much overlap exists between the books. I now have 163 prompts, cut into slips and placed in a plastic box, from which to randomly select ideas.

What I need to do, though, to increase my understanding, is start reading poems. I have a number of volumes, much of it modern poetry, which I prefer. Poetry can be accessible. The problem, I think, is that we are such a speed-oriented, driven people that we are put off by the effort. Poetry asks for meditation, for time, for expanded thinking — and to be read aloud. I will give these.