Coming, as I do, from a long line of people who worked on and around canals, inland waterways have always held a fascination for me. My interest has been refreshed by reading The Narrow Boat, LTC Rolt’s classic tale of wandering the canals of England in the months before the second world war. The book did more than anything to save those very canals and popularise leisure boating on them.

Rolt’s book was an attempt to capture the dying world of the working canal boats and, by extension, an entire rural way of life that was passing away, buried under ever growing urban sprawl. He celebrated the pubs, villages and people found along the towpath, hidden corners of a gentler world. It’s a vision that finds an echo in Ian McMillan’s Canal Life, where narrowboats are “tied up in the places the map never showed us”.

These very attractions are seen as things to be resisted by Roy Fisher in his poem Provision. Driving through a towpath village, Fisher is lured by the comforts of canal, church, cottage and even a small haulage company, remnant of the waterway’s busier past. However, a city dweller at heart, he finds that they “won’t do”, a firm rejection of the canal’s quiet beckoning.

As a Brummie, Fisher would be familiar with the urban canals of his native city, which might go some way towards explaining his immunity to the charms of their rural counterparts. Perhaps the most notable appearance of city waterways in poetry occurs in the first section of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the blasted landscape of the Grail legend is transported to the rather less chivalrous world of London canalside, on “a winter evening round behind the gashouse”. It is a characteristically Eliotic image of a fallen civilisation.

Eliot’s contemporary Siegfried Sassoon had more reason than most to take a dim view of civilisation and all its works, given his combat experiences, but in a poem called Miracles he turns the humble canal into a bearer of hope, a hope of freedom and peace in the wake of the first world war. Unlike Eliot’s “dull” vision, Sassoon’s canal bursts into a riot of colourful life.

In the real world, canal water’s defining quality is not so much colour as stillness, which makes it a prime surface for reflecting the night sky. This Zen-like quality is captured concisely in Carl Sandburg’s Moonset. The idea of the canal as a place of meditative illumination is explored more fully in Patrick Kavanagh’s great sonnet, Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin. For Kavanagh, a countryman in the city and so a kind of reverse Fisher, it’s a reminder that at their best, canals are a little bit of the rural world infiltrating the urban desert.

In recent years, poetry and canals have moved even closer, with the appointment in 2013 of Jo Bell as Canal Laureate. This is a joint initiative between the Canal and River Trust and Arts Council England, designed to bring people and the arts to the canals of England. Bell’s canal poems form an affectionate yet unsentimental chronicle of 21st-century life in, on and around the waterways that are in the care of the trust.

So this month’s challenge is for us to add to the poetry of the inland waterways. Maybe canals evoke images of lazy days drifting along at a pace that allows you to takes in the scenery as it slowly passes. It might be that you’re more interested in waterways as working modes of transport, forerunners of the railway and the motorway. You may even know them as hidden corners of the urban landscape. Whatever your canal experiences may be, now is your chance to open the lock gates of inspiration and let your poems flow through.

• This article was amended on 9 November 2015. An earlier version suggested that Ian McMillan’s Canal Life featured “longboats” – the “largest boat carried aboard a commercial vessel”, according to Collins – instead of narrowboats built for cruising canals.