Where do you find your inspiration?

This weekend I took part in a wonderful poetry retreat with my good friend and fellow poet, Kat Good-Schiff. We'd been planning this for months--two days of focusing on and nurturing our poetic processes in and around the Boston Metro area. We visited many places in hopes of coaxing couplets out of the dark recesses of our brains but the place that proved to be a goldmine for us, in terms of both inspiration and just plain beauty was the Ware Glass Flower Exhibit at the Harvard Natural History Museum.

Caught in a bygone age of Victorian taxonomy, these specimens are anything but boring or stuffy. The life-sized flowers and their magnified stamens, pistils, ovaries, flowers and fruit are so delicate yet strongly sensual and evoke all sorts of responses in nearly every person who passes by their glass casings. I left with two near-complete poems (and a whole lot of ideas).

Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself: The Glass Flowers. While you're there, read Mark Doty's amazing homage to the exhibit. You can find it in his collection My Alexandria.

Where do you find your inspiration? Leave a comment!