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ten years in the making

My to-do list for the last several weeks has consisted of an ever-shifting list of items, but always at the top are these two:
“dissertation”
“poetry”

Today marks ten years to the day that, on a half-dare to try out NaPoWriMo, I started writing poetry. (And I mean that in the sense of, like, not the stuff I used to churn out in high school, but an actual effort to be thoughtful and observational.) But it didn’t hold forever. I’ve been writing off and on for a few years now—mostly off. And I’ve been dormant in the blogosphere, I’ve shut down my social media, I haven’t bothered with attempting publication, I’m in editorial hibernation. Dissertations, and PhDs, and academic life in general, will all do that to you.

For the longest time, poetry was the counterpoint to what felt like a mostly-empty life. When I started, I was working in a dead-end office job (not a bad one, just not one that was going anywhere) and sort-of-bartending on Saturdays, volunteering on Mondays. I started grad school not long after, got my MA, and then moved to New York; on evenings and weekends, I did workshops and readings, I edited and submitted to journals, and I had a small amount of, I think, satisfaction (if not success) in the poetry world. But the PhD eventually became the foundation of a mostly-full life; suddenly, poetry didn’t seem as urgent. Or rather, there were other, more pressing things that my actual livelihood depended on that weren’t poetry, so I attended to them instead. There was a time when I wrote a poem every day, not just in April but year-round; now, I’m lucky if I get one out per month.

If you can’t tell where the direction of this blog post is going: I think I had low-grade depression for about two and a half years, which I only started to snap out of around New Year’s. To the few people deeply knowledgeable about all the pieces of my life, the connection must have seemed obvious. (Funny how close that word is to oblivious, which I was.) Now there’s light at the end of the tunnel—my funding ends this summer, so the degree will be over, one way or another—and my life looks mostly-empty again.

But! That’s a pessimistic way of looking at it. One of the revelations from the outsnapping of depression that I had was re-framing my future as bright with opportunity rather than bleak with uncertainty. Last week, I went to San Francisco just because. (It’s quite an experience to be a grad student living on a stipend just above the poverty line, but then to save up enough air miles on your credit card for a trip to the most expensive city in the country. Thanks, old flames and former roommates who have couches!) Now, instead of obsessing about how I’m going to claw my way into the ivory tower, I think about moving to new places with jobs that maybe won’t eat my soul, where are there new people to meet and exciting pastries to taste. And poetry, poetry, poetry. I missed Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s centennial by two days, but the energy of that celebration was still worked into City Lights Bookstore when I went up there, sitting and reading Kazim Ali’s Inquisition cover to cover. It was a stark reminder of just how much I’ve been missing for the last few years.

I’m not sure what I intended by writing this post, except to express that I’m still alive, to mark this milestone, and to somehow try to energize myself into slipping this life change under the radar of my own awareness. It’s NaPoWriMo again; I’ve already written a poem today, and discovered a new poet I hadn’t known before (why didn’t anyone tell me how great Linda Gregg, RIP, was). It’s cold and bright and beautiful outside. It’s unlikely anyone will read this, but I’ll know that I wrote it, and maybe that’s enough for the moment.

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essay: emotional arpeggios

I’ve started learning guitar after being a lifelong piano player, and while the calluses on my fingertips haven’t truly developed yet, I feel like I’m starting to make progress. Neutral Milk Hotel, PJ Harvey, Magnetic Fields, The Decemberists, Tom Waits—learning these makes me feel like I’m back in my queer hippie commune of a college dorm all over again. One of the biggest difficulties I’ve been having is reconceptualizing my idea of how individual musical moments should be structured. On the piano, the basic action is pressing a key, and the basic unit is the note; you start with Frère Jacques and Bach’s Minuet in D, and then you stack notes on top of each other, you create whole rivers of them.

But the guitar is a naturally harmonic instrument: the basic action is the strum (unless you’re learning classical guitar, I suppose), and the basic unit is the chord. You are working with complete objects rather than the molecular black and white keys. I’m still struggling with getting my head around that. What it has done, though, is helped me re-conceive the way I think about language and poetry a little it, because that’s the point of this series of essays, really: re-conception. Language is a naturally harmonic instrument, too, from the way our oral cavity resonates to the euphony of sounds in individual phonetic inventories, from the agreement and cooperation of our syntax to the way that certain rhetorical devices just feel right. I would argue further that the structure built into language echoes the structure of what poets try to represent with it—emotion, and the world, and how the two fit together. There is something deep and subtle going on with all three of these sublime concepts; perhaps that’s why poetry got its start in the first place. Perhaps it was an attempt to make one massive complex line up with the others.

The reason I think this is a helpful metaphor came to me when I was trying to strum a perfect C7 chord, breaking apart into its constituent notes and putting it back together. In the same way, when people ask us what poems are about, we usually give some kind of fatuous answer like “suspicion” or “depression” or (ugh) “love”. You can’t, of course, write the concept of love, in the same way that you can’t write most things that resonate in our bodies and our senses; we rely on descriptions that summon up the image or the feeling of what we want to convey. And these can absolutely be effective. But to say that Poem X is a love poem overlooks one of the other truths about that poem: it is also a poem about all the descriptions it contains. It is “about” (whatever that really means) the decrepit old woman wearing her dead husband’s jacket every day for thirty years, it is “about” the color of sunlight through the lime trees’ leaves, it is “about” the constriction of your own organs when the doctor walks toward you in the waiting room. Some poems are about just one of these moments, and some are about many of them put together. But you can’t have a C7 chord without your fingers placed just so, pressing down hard, and with all of the strings (except for one!) sounding out as part of it.

Too often, the writing process goes like this: you saw something that moved you, and you pick a name for the emotion you feel, and you start writing. But no emotion is a unitary thing, which is why the concept of arpeggios is important. For the less musically-inclined: an arpeggio is when you take a chord and break it apart into its notes, playing them swiftly but separately. Technically, all guitar chords are arpeggios, because the strings are hit in succession rather than simultaneously (as they would be on a piano chord). We still interpret them as chords though, until they are slowed down enough that we can hear all their constituent parts. The effect can be uncomfortable, but fascinating and instructive. Emotions work the same way: yes, you can say you feel love, but break it down into bodily sensations (flushed skin? heat beneath the ribs?) and moments (when he opens the book and sees the engagement ring? when the hostage takers came?) and molecular things of the world (those lime trees? the sunlight?). Arpeggiate your emotions.

The trick is to realize how recursive all of this is. The sensations and moments are themselves broken down further, into pieces that can be broken down in turn, until you get to that most basic element: words, words, words. Really, the guitar and the piano have more in common than I give them credit for, because ultimately there are still notes under the surface of it all. And every note matters. You can say, “I’m going to write a love poem based on this thing that just happened to me,” and you can delicately vivisect the experience into little bits of time/sensation, and you can arrange them in just the perfect way, but you’d better choose the words that echo what you’re trying to say. Poetry, like all language, is composed of several moving parts, each of which has an internal harmony, and which have a harmony at a higher level, in relation to each other. The rhetorical seduction of the poem must feel right, and the syntax must do what it needs to, but then those two aspects must work together as well, and they must work with the physical sounds. You’ll notice that the number of things to keep track of, making sure they operate together, increases exponentially. Nobody said writing poetry was for the faint of heart.

So how do you know when you’ve “got it”? Sometimes you just know. There are scientific studies out there (I believe; I certainly haven’t read many) demonstrating the way certain kinds of music, and even certain combinations of notes, affect our psychic space. Remember Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, with “the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift”; each chord draws us along in certain ways. Whether it’s a quirk of cerebral biology or just what we’re used to in a certain musical tradition, I don’t know, but it works. If you don’t know, the obvious solution is to get a convenient friend, sit them down, and read at them.

Of course, this is all well and good if you’re trying to write something that is aesthetically pleasing in a classic sense. But once you’ve gotten used to breaking your emotions down into their constituent pieces, you can start trying to manipulate them. Remember the distinction between the digital and the analog. The former is composed of discrete and separable matter, things that can be counted out (hence, digits) and measured; the latter cannot, and as you may have noticed, we live in an analog world. (Yes, despite all of the think pieces about our digital world—but that’s a rant for another time.) Unless you are particularly good at compartmentalizing your entire psyche and life experience, chances are that when Moment X happened, it wasn’t in isolation. Consider how a romantic moment would look when you’d been having a really shitty day, versus a really good one, or when you’re at the playground down the street versus a park in Paris where you and your partner are visiting. Consider how different it is when you’re with a spouse versus an old flame. All of our moments—and therefore, the emotions and sensations that permeate them—stand in relation to all the others, which constantly intrude and blur the edges of what we’d like to think are isolated incidents. We may forget that, but our brains don’t. The silver lining to this hopeless messiness is that it allows for texture, more than just harmony. We can disrupt the chords, introduce key changes, whatever we want, by virtue of the fact that all the disharmony is waiting just outside the borders to be invited in.

I used to use the turn of phrase “emotions in a minor key,” because it seemed to me a much more accurate description of how emotions usually go. When was the last time you felt pure, undiluted love, completely devoid of any complication, untouched by shadows? If that’s your usual way of doing things, let me tell you: few love poems lose my interest as quickly as ones without any drama, even if it’s only implied. Allow yourself to feel the broken note in the equation. We’re human; sometimes our fingers slip and we mess up the chord. Why not own it, acknowledge our humanity, and really resonate with our audience by being authentic? Hell, Shakespeare’s sonnets do it regularly (cf. Sonnet 130), and those are often held up as the gold standard of “pure” love poetry. Don’t be afraid to turn on yourself and really consider what’s going on when you have an emotional moment; break it apart and be honest about what you perceive.

One last thing about recursivity. All of this advice applies at any level of the process: you can keep zooming in, and zooming in, and tearing apart what you want to write about into tinier and tinier fragments. But you also have to zoom out again when you’re done, because your readers will arrive soon, ready to get through this poem as quickly as possible. (Don’t let them.) If your perfectly imperfect poem stands up to the test of “did the reader feel what I hoped they’d feel”, great; even if it doesn’t, as long as they’re feeling something equally complex and frangible as what you felt, your work is solid. As with any instrument, language must be picked through slowly and carefully before you can speed up into the tempo you’re looking for, and only then will you hear the connections that make a song entire. Poems are songs, in case you’ve forgotten: sometimes overtly, sometimes a little more subtly. Either way, it’s love affairs with language we’re dealing in here, the kind of love that, when it comes to pulling apart its chandelier chords and squinting at the juicy bits, is the messiest and most infinite of all.

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essay: birdwatching at night

Yesterday, a friend of mine called me out (half-seriously) for using the word obfuscate in conversation. It’s one of my favorite words to toss around, but sometimes I forget that it’s not what one might call common. To save you from opening a dictionary, just in case: to obfuscate means to obscure, to darken, to cast shadow on, to make unclear. Smoke and mirrors. The reason I find it so familiar is that poets—writers of all kinds, really—are masters of obfuscation. Or are they?

We often talk about truth as a spectrum: at one end is a thing or event whose circumstances everyone agrees upon, and at the other, complete discord. Terms like objectivity get tossed around like Frisbees. In academia, this is called the positivist paradigm: the worldview that knowledge is a pool we add to through sensory experience and verifiable data, interpreted through logic. And yet, a single ten-minute discussion about politics or religion is usually enough to demonstrate just how useless that paradigm is. For any given object of the world, some variable number of people will agree on its properties; the more abstract the object is, the more disagreement there will be. Given that language—raw language, charged with semantics—is an abstract medium, it lends itself to abstract themes, and all the considerations thereof that a poet must grapple with.

If we can talk about two famous adages about writing for a hot minute: there’s the hotly-contested “write what you know,” which mostly turns up search engine hits saying, don’t follow this advice. I’m of the opinion that going back and forth on whether you do or don’t sidesteps the more interesting, linguistic point: what does the word know actually mean? If you’re a positivist, then “write what you know” means that your writing should only contain the sensory experiences and verifiable data mentioned above. (Of course, most people bend the rules by including in those categories things they read in books or, more likely, on Wikipedia. We shouldn’t.) But chances are you’re not, and you trust the reality of your feelings, impressions, dreams, and beliefs to a degree reasonable enough that you would include these in your writing. The other adage, which stands as a strong addendum to the first one, is attributed to Anaïs Nin, among others: “we see things not as they are, but as we are.” Like Socrates, the wisest person is the one who knows exactly how wise they actually are, who understands the limits of their own knowledge. Write what you know, but more importantly, know what you know, and even more importantly than that, understand how personalized that knowledge is.

(As an aside, the obvious extension of this concept in our era of increasingly visible conversations about privilege and lived experience is, suspend your assumptions. There is a positive correlation between the distance of your inner life from somebody else’s, and the difficulty in writing justly about the other. If anything rings untrue to a reader, it’s a complete misrepresentation of that reader’s experience, and by “rings untrue,” I mean the poet is beating them over the head with a gong. But this is a topic for another essay.)

This is a lot of psychic legwork (or whatever, you know what I mean) to do before the actual business of writing, it’s true. But then there is a third famous adage from the Oracle at Delphi: γνῶθι σεαυτὸν, or gnothi seauton, “know thyself.” Take care of this business before any other, because it will give you more clarity and solidity for all the rest. Understand where you come from along every dimension, and how that relates to the dimensions of others. Stand back from the actions you take and try to process their effects on (the worlds of) others, separate from you(r own). Recognize that framing your actions is, itself, an action, which affects all the others. And then, write. The most difficult part of this process is how you allow all of this backgrounding to permeate your writing without showing it. Of course, some poets and poems take the process of self-realization as their subject, and that’s a great exercise too; in fact, while I’m at it, there’s a mini-prompt. Write a poem about the difficulty of writing a poem in the voice of someone you’ve never met, with whose experience you have little to no basis for comparison. But then immediately try to follow it up with a poem where the self is implicit rather than explicit, and see what the contrast is between the two.

Circling back to where we started, there we have implication. It’s a convenient word to sum up a number of processes that often get referred to in writing workshops with mixed opinions: (don’t) be authentic, or cryptic, or fictive, or realistic, and so forth. What do you do? Do you tell nothing but the truth, the whole truth, so help you Editor? Or do you build half-allusions and complex metaphors for incidents that nobody but you could possibly understand? In truth, poems are often a thorough mix of the implied and the supplied; the difficulty is to know how much of each to use, and when to deploy them.

I’ll tell you what I find works for me. First: if my casual deployment of obfuscate wasn’t a hint, I often rely on language to do a lot of the hard labor (and rely on the reader to open a damn dictionary if they have a problem with it). Language not only allows all the complexities of possible meaning that an object can have, but it carries undeniable music when read—a doubly versatile medium! I’ll agonize over finding the perfect word more often than I’d like to admit, because it fulfills much of what you supply to the reader, and occupies a nice chunk of grey area fading into what you imply. Then: the tone. Good poems form connective tissue between personal experiences and universal emotions, right? In my opinion, the more sharply-defined the emotion, the better. You may not hit every reader’s nerve quite as well, but those who are touched will be all the more so. It’s the difference between [insert almost any poet] writing about love, and Jack Gilbert writing about crawling around the apartment after his wife’s funeral trying to find strands of her hair. More people will “get” a general sort of fuzzy feeling, but those who resonate with Gilbert’s work might, for example, spend several minutes staring at the page, on the verge of tears. (Am I being fictive here?)

I’m working backwards a bit, because really you should polish the language last, after you’ve figured out the emotional arpeggios you want to hit. And you can only figure those out in relation to your topic, where the implied vs. the supplied becomes most significant. Something in the world will tickle your fancy enough for you to want to write about it; before you do, as we’ve already discussed, you’ll want to step back and consider yourself as an entity in that tickling moment, and everything that entails. Where people get hung up is in the details: do I use the actual name and location of the restaurant, the actual physical details of the woman, the actual drink she threw in my face? You can, but nobody’s requiring it. The only person who will know these visible things are the people who were present in the room, and the only person who will know the “truth” of the internal things in that moment—the associations of the restaurant, the feelings towards the woman, the taste of the drink—is the speaker. Changing them isn’t going to make or break the poem, and in fact changing them can be beneficial for three reasons:
– obviously, you do not want to publicly embarrass someone, unless they’re a public figure
– remember the power of language: a different name or word can greatly add to the music or signification of the thing in question (“Four Seasons” vs. “McD’s” vs. “the cafe”; “booze” vs. “her martini” vs. “her martini swimming with olives”)
– the “point” of your poem, especially if you’re reporting more than one event, may be to link things together in an explicit relation that you only recognized after the fact, which can be facilitated by foregrounding or backgrounding certain information (such as if the drink-throwing was the last straw before the divorce)

You might worry that changing these details will affect the authenticity or honesty of the poem, whatever those things are. What you should be more worried about is the honesty of your voice, first and foremost, and the recognition of where your realm of certainty starts and stops. (Hint: it has less scope than you think it does, but you can often get away with blurring the edges.) There’s truth, and then there’s truth, and then there’s truth. If you don’t have a clear sense of who you are in the grand scheme of the world’s opinion, and where you’re coming from at the moment of what you’re talking about in the poem, the damage you’ll do to your poem’s potential resonance is greater than that done by choosing the wrong form, or a lousy synonym, or an ungainly length for the piece. Structure follows content, and content follows nothing less than a delicate self-awareness, a single moment frozen and rolling along the tops of all the world’s thread like a bead of dew.

Poets often try to pass off the cryptic as the poetic, and readers often try to define anything they don’t understand as cryptic. The result is the negative feedback loop of poetry that we’ve been stuck with probably as long as we’ve had widespread public education. Readers believe that poetry is difficult to understand, so many poets believe they have to obfuscate their writing from top to bottom. There are also those who, striving against this belief, illuminate their writing from top to bottom. I advocate for a mix, leaning on the side of illumination, but retaining some of the mystique and incomprehensibility because, well, the world can be incomprehensible. What tickles my fancy are incidents that I don’t fully understand: so I sit down and try to figure out why I don’t understand, place myself in relation to that moment. Then I can make that part of the subject matter, and allow the emotional chords to carry notes of that confusion, which is all too human. And finally, the language—which I promise I try to make least confusing of all—fills in the gaps. When I started writing, I was wholeheartedly in the camp of the cryptic, but I learned over time how much dissatisfaction I was getting from barely being able to understand what I was trying to say. If you wrote the damn thing, you at least should know what you’re trying to talk about.

Words have a tremendous power that we must use responsibly; responsible use entails familiarity. Throwing poems out into the aether without due consideration of what things in the world they’re representing is a surefire way to hurt others, and yourself. (I note with dismay that yes, most people still don’t read poetry, but enough of them do for me to care about this.) But writing a poem is not a unitary process, and your knowledge will be soft here, firm there. I think about poems as things like nightingales or whippoorwills: absolutely devastating in their song, but with difficult bodies fading into the scenery, things about which I trust my feelings more than some half-memorized collection of facts, things that you’re lucky to spot and even luckier to catch, luckiest of all when you can show it to someone else and have them feel the same way you did when you first heard its heart-stringing song. (It helps that the names of these particular birds are also beautiful.) Some amount of each experience and the poem that ensues is certain, and some of it is not. We try to know which is which for ourselves, as well as for the readers; the poetry lies in how we get practiced at splitting the difference, and crafting wings out of words.

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essay: carving wood, poaching eggs

As always, this is all opinion, most of it true.

Anyone who knows me and my writing habits knows that I don’t really have a fixed process in place. For a while, I used to be really good about cranking out a new poem draft every day, and for a long while after that, I just kind of kept a vague constellation of possible lines floating through my head. These days, I’m somewhere in between: given the right conjunction of circumstances—free time, a handy pen and paper, the sudden urge to get some words out—I’ll scribble as fast as I can before the feeling evaporates. It’s haphazard, it’s inefficient, and it doesn’t harvest a lot of raw wordstuff to be crafted into poetry, but it works for me.

Every writing guide I can think of makes the following points, more or less: you should always carve out a regular time to write, every day. Sometimes what you write will be trash, with the occasional nugget of gold buried therein. The important thing is to keep it up to get yourself into the routine of writing. Be receptive to what happens around you; be ready to take notes immediately once something that could become poetry (or prose!) later catches your eye, ear, or other sensory organs. Above all, don’t despair if your notebooks and cell phone are full of seemingly useless and disjointed bits of text, because your work comes out through the process more than anything else.

And these points are all fine ones to make—except for when they don’t work. I don’t think I’m alone in frequently having the experience of trying, for several days, to note down every possible raw material, then set aside one hour (normally in the evening, when I have space to think) to turn it every which way, only to discover it’s all useless. I also don’t think I’m alone in finding it a recipe for frustration, which leads to discouragement; at that point, you truly don’t follow a regular practice, when you throw your hands in the air. I’ve come to two conclusions about why this might be:
– First, there’s something about raw experiences that are best when they are left raw, untouched. Think of 樸, or pu, the “uncarved block” in Taoism: a form of natural simplicity that is appreciated fully in its unworked-ness. Or think of dreams, which in my opinion immediately start to be come less interesting the moment one begins to interpret and explicate them. Chopping up experiences or shaving pieces from them severs the part from the whole, and the whole is often what is needed to truly understand the depth of the part.
– Second, poets are by nature fickle and capricious beings. You should be immediately suspicious of any self-named poet who isn’t. Don’t confuse the everyday with the monotonous, especially if your subject matter is how the marvelous can leap from the ordinary, as with many poets. Everyday life is when you walk six blocks every morning, varying your route and time little by little, maybe stopping in this shop instead of that one, tasting or smelling some new and exotic fruit on Monday (but not on Thursday), comparing your environment’s aura in the rain versus the sun. Monotony is setting your alarm, allotting X minutes to get yourself out the door, heading to the same table at the same cafe, and not looking up once until you’re ready to leave. Poets ought to immerse themselves fully in the former, and treat the latter like a set of red-hot pincers aimed precisely at their delicate bits.

It’s tough to have a “regular writing process” without trying to gather up the morass of Everything into both arms and dumping it on the page, and without getting locked into a banal routine. Now, not every poet writes about everyday experiences, and they generally have an easier time. Much like prose writers do, they have a very particular recipe that they’re making, which they might spice up with a curious observation, or an overheard line or two, for verisimilitude if nothing else. We’ll come back to that, but at the moment, I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you’re like me: constantly trying to write poems that feature the resonance between the detritus of daily life and some kind of universal Feeling. So first, let’s talk about that Uncarved Block for a minute: how should we use what we stumble across in the course of the day?

In her discussions of haiku, Natalie Goldberg talks about how they should create a “sense of space,” where the unsaid is just as significant as the three lines in the actual piece. We can talk about what makes a haiku another time—and I don’t think I’m entirely qualified for that—but suffice it to say, 5-7-5 and a couple nature words do not a haiku make. Some of the best haiku are the ones which take two unqualified moments devoid—or deleted—of ego, uncarved wood in the truest sense, and juxtapose them. It is in their relative placement, and the sense of separateness or closeness, that the poem’s weight lives. I would argue that this can work for moments and things that aren’t considered “natural” in the classical way, too. Try writing a haiku-like poem (haiku-like) featuring street market tables waiting to be laden with produce, and a shoeless old man sitting on the corner. Try it with the ingredient you’re missing for a stew and the pregnant woman counting her change in front of you in line at the store. Try it with a bag of dogshit lying on the sidewalk and the smell of roasting coffee. Try these without using the word “I” or its variations, without using any evaluative language, without using any words that are not descriptions purely generated from sensory data.

These are all individual image-moments from my morning today. I didn’t jot them down; they were living whole and happy in my sense-memory until I just typed that paragraph. Now they have lost a bit of their power, because they’ve been contextualized (as examples in this essay). The block of wood has been carved, even a little bit. Language is a knife that you must be very careful with, for there is no glue to put what it splits back together.

But when it comes to dividing up the spectrum from image to whole-hearted experience, it’s all relative. One poet’s throwaway phrase will be another’s full-throated apotheosis. For me, roasting coffee summons up the years of working as a barista, my shameless caffeine addiction, a space to contemplate an essay like this one—in essence, comfort. For another poet, it might be just one more scent they have to pass through on the way to the bar. My uncarved block might be your wood shaving, and vice versa. When you go collecting images and sounds and moments, don’t worry so much about whether they “work” in some as-yet unwritten poem, focus on how they matter to you. And then let them live in your head like that for a little while, at least; for me, it’s never less than 24 hours, confounding the whole daily writing process thing even further. When the time does come to put them onto paper, when you’re ready to turn them into poetry (by which I mean even a single line), trust the courage of your initial convictions and let your skill with words do the hard labor. The challenge for poets is not what you decide your raw material experiences are, but how you convince me that they are, which is much easier said than done. Even the best “universal” poems leave room for doubt, but they’re the best because one can at least appreciate where the author is coming from, even if one doesn’t agree with their sentiment.

Not everybody enjoys letting all this stuff float around their head, but just try; you might surprise yourself. My point is that you don’t have to necessarily get everything down immediately, especially if you don’t intend to go all-out from raw material to finished product in one sitting. I find it most useful to only start writing when I’m committed to representing what I’ve experienced on paper as accurately as possible. To keep running with the metaphor: don’t half-finish your wood carving. Get at least the rough shape of it figured out and sanded down. The varnish (tweaking the adjectives, changing the verb tenses, whatever) comes later anyway.

I said “even a single line” earlier, which leads me to one more point I want to make about using these raw experiences: obviously, your poem may be composed of several lines, and several stanzas. I’ll shift metaphors again: while novelists and long-form or thematic poets may toss in one of these carefully shaped moments into their batter, you may want to try building a tasting menu. Poems that take a single experience and try to extend it by padding and padding with unnecessary lines are like individual poached quail eggs floating in tureens of chicken broth. There’s no shame in having a short poem. But if you hate having too-short poems as I do, try putting the quail egg next to a stuffed fig next to a piece of bacon dipped in Valrhona chocolate. Most haiku get away with two whole reasonably-untouched moments placed some distance from each other; imagine the flavorful geometry you can get out of four, or six, or twelve. And the distinction between a bland poem and a flavorful poem is often the distinction between padding and resonance: twelve lines that form a quadrilateral out of four experiences is almost always—or at least often—better than twelve lines that try to exhaustively detail one. Remember, what constitutes an experience is up to you, but that’s the easy part. Convince me that what you’ve lined up on your menu makes sense, and is necessary.

If it’s not already clear, re-framing your daily experiences in this way makes it tough to commit to even the same length of time every day, let alone being in the same place at the same hour to do it. Some authors make a great deal out of that level of sameness, like Maya Angelou with her famous writing ritual. But “Maya Angelou did it” shouldn’t be your sole motivation for following a process, because a) you should find what works best for you, and b) Maya Angelou is more brilliant than you are. (Apologies to any equally brilliant authors who happen to have stumbled across this essay, for whom I will retract the statement.) Don’t rely on advice that you can’t follow for reasons of personality or lifestyle, nor beat yourself up over it. Similar to how the experience should come first, and the verbal frills later, what you feel compelled to write about should come first, and how you get it out of you should be secondary.

One last point: while the overall thrust of this essay is to say that it’s okay to be irregular with your writing process, be constant with the possibility of writing. I mean that you never know the moment when something will need to burst from your soul, and you must be ready. You neither want to force words out of yourself, nor let them get moldy in your parietal lobe or wherever; in the meantime, there are plenty of things you can do to exercise your muscles. Keep a diary, no matter how featureless it is, for it may help you to locate individual experiences in place, time, and mood, when those experiences are ready to pour out. Read, obviously. Tell stories about your day to your friends and family; if you can convince someone to take a walk that anyone else would describe as “really boring,” you’re on the right track. Write essays like this one so you can be more familiar with fancy words like “apotheosis” (so proud of myself for that one). Language may be a knife, but a knife is used for many things besides carving your experiences into poems, so practice those other skills as well. They will give you dexterity across the board.

Poets should be shameless, at least in their own heads, and if they can’t be shameless on paper, they must let us know why by making their shame a character (an uncarved block!) of its own. Least of all should they, meaning you, be embarrassed about finding the path of least resistance to Art. Don’t worry if you’re unsure if you’ve succeeded in the end: some callous Editor, maybe the one in your own head, will let you know. But one thing an Editor can’t stop from you doing is moving through the world, so you might as well keep on doing so the best and most productive way that you can.

by

some kind of comeback

Here’s my confessional admission for Monday: I kinda miss blogging.

I really didn’t, for a while. It seemed like an unnecessary obligation I was placing on myself for the sake of others, some theoretical audience that I could just as easily maintain contact with on social media. But it turns out that this line of thinking was doubly flawed: social media are much harder to use for extended essays, and as it turns out, I’m also really bad at maintaining those accounts.

I’ve also been busy. When I posted the temporary shutdown notice on this blog, I was having the time of my life at a writing retreat in Vermont (to another one of which I still have not since been), and a couple weeks later, started a PhD program in one city while maintaining my full-time job in another. This kind of upheaval isn’t really conducive to keeping up any kind of non-essential creative activity; yes, I’ll admit, I’ve barely been doing any writing of my own for a while, either. I haven’t been totally outside the realm of poetry, luckily… some of you may have heard about another project that I took on during all this:

assaraci

Editing Assaracus has been one of the most rewarding experiences I could hope for. I’ve learned (and continue to learn) a tremendous amount about the kinds of poetry people are writing (or at least, submitting) these days, what my own tastes are in comparison, how to balance the two, how to curate work from all across the spectrum, all kinds of InDesign tricks… As I write this, I’m taking a break from prepping the layout on Issue 24, my eighth contribution to the journal. It’s a rollicking good time; many thanks to Bryan and Seth for the opportunity.

But there’s only so much personality one can add to a journal as an editor, and the blog remains a useful tool for getting some more of my own thoughts out there, as well as compelling me to write more. A recent change of scenery and shift in circumstances have given me some flexibility in terms of time and energy to dedicate to this practice. So, at least some of that will be dedicated to this website, which I’m slowly trying to turn into my “professional” writerly web-space. If you remember the earlier incarnation(s) of this blog, you know that I had a variety of things I’d post: weekly prompts, poem drafts, book reviews, workshopped pieces, etc. I’m inclined to keep at least some of that going on (probably not drafts, though; it doesn’t seem the thing to do anymore), if you’ll have me and if you’ll want to be involved. For the time being, I’ll keep it simple, and see how it goes. If it seems like the world wants to hear from me again, and if I find enough to talk about, I’ll ramp up slowly.

Anyway. All this is to say, I thought long and hard about what was missing from my life these days, and the answer I keep coming back to across the board is self-expression in just about every way possible. I’m hoping this will be one outlet for that quality, to reawaken some of the creative ichor in my brain. Place your bets now on how long this will last. I might surprise you? :)