Poems. I have to write poems.

You don't write a psalm.

I don't want to write that stuff.

The poem is called No Man is an Island.

She wrote a lot of poems.

She taught me how to write a poem.

I want to leave you with a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa that speaks to transformation.

This poem was written last night.

I write poems in my free time.

Charlotte was very good at writing lists, but she refused to write any poems.

There's a poem written by a very famous English poet at the end of the 19th century.

For instance, a poet describes it in this form.

So I write poems to figure things out.

And it goes like this. It's by a guy called Yuan Chen I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat.

I think Donne wrote a poem about that.

And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before.

A few years before he died, after he had resumed writing poetry, but in secret, he confessed to a friend in a letter that I found when I was doing my research I've written a verse.

But it's interesting to me. I love to write historical verse.

Because in poetics, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears.

And I was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him.

I write musicals I make short films alongside my poems.

Tom told her that he had written that poem two years before.

And I thought, well, maybe that old doggerel by Joyce Kilmer, you know Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.

And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, Oh, that's what this is all about, and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.

And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state.

I wrote this poem for her. These are not my beliefs.

It says, Thoughts This poem is impossible.

Turns out sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry.

There's a poem by Jack Gilbert called The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.

And I didn't know what else to do. So I started to write poetry.

So, what we're going to do next is a poem that was written by Nathalia Crane.

He was sending me an original poem that he had composed after our Tuesday morning together.

He burned all his poetry at the age of 24 and then did not write another poem for at least seven years because he couldn't rectify the life of a poet with the life of a priest.

The poem is called Libation, and it's for my friend Vusi who is in the audience here somewhere.

Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem.

Her poetry is about women, and the life of women in society.

A poet once wrote that no man is an island, entire of itself.

I watched her realize that, by putting the things that she knows to be true into the work she's doing, she can create poems that only Charlotte can write about eyeballs and elevators and Dora the Explorer.

Never mind the fact that I was 14 they told me, Write about being 14.

None of the haikus were written by the same person, and in fact, no line was you know, each line is contributed by a different person at a different at a different time.

I'd like to end with a few verses of what I wrote at my father's cremation.

I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been.

Might its bitter burning have been what made me a poet?

But I kept writing bad poetry, and he didn't blow up the math building, but he went to Cuba.

And I didn't and I'd never used it in school, because I was too busy writing poems, and flunking out, and I don't know what, sitting in cafes.